Books

First edition of Kant's first major critical treatise, arguably his single most important work and one of the most influential books ever published. Kant himself judged the work as comparable with the Copernican heliocentric revolution. The Critik took more than a decade to write and took up so much of Kant's thought, time, and energy that he published virtually nothing beyond lecture advertisements; the 1770s are known as his silent decade. The Critik addresses a key concern of the Enlightenment: that mechanistic scientific reason threatened to undermine the possibility of human freedom and, by extension, traditional approaches to morality and religion. To resolve that problem, Kant develops the thesis of transcendental idealism - the argument that the structures of human thought shape our comprehension of the world around us. This allows him to demonstrate that scientific knowledge, morality, and religion are all founded on the same basis of human autonomy. "No other thinker has been able to hold with such firmness the balance between speculative and empirical ideas. His penetrating analysis of the elements involved in synthesis, and the subjective process by which these elements are realized in the individual consciousness, demonstrated the operation of 'pure reason'; and the simplicity and cogency of his arguments achieved immediate fame" (PMM). Adickes 46; Norman 1197; Printing and the Mind of Man 226; Warda 59. Octavo (199 x 120 mm). Contemporary paste paper boards, brown paper spine label lettered in gilt, 19th-century red paper spine label lettered in manuscript, edges red. Woodcut title vignette, decorative woodcut head- and tailpieces, and initials. Light bumping and wear, lacking rear free endpaper, minor browning and foxing to content margins, contents otherwise well-preserved: a very good copy.

Critik der reinen Vernunft, also known as Critique of Pure Reason, is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Written by Immanuel Kant, this work addresses the problem of how we can understand and grasp the nature of human knowledge.