The Cambridge Companion to Kant

The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural science are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and thus that human beings are also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant’s writings available, and the first major overview of his work to be published in more than a dozen years. An internationally recognised team of Kant scholars explore Kant’s conceptual revolution in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion.

• Clear and accurate translations of the best modern German editions of Kant’s work • The Cambridge edition will include all of Kant’s published writings and a generous selection of his unpublished writings

Introduction: the starry heavens and the moral law Paul Guyer; 1. Kant’s intellectual development: 1746–1781 Frederick C. Beiser; 2. The Transcendental Aesthetic Charles Parsons; 3. Functions of thought and the synthesis of intuitions J. Michael Young; 4. The transcendental deduction of the categories Paul Guyer; 5. Causal laws and the foundations of natural science Michael Friedman; 6. Empirical, rational and transcendental psychology: psychology as science and as philosophy Gary Hatfield; 7. Reason and practice of science Thomas E. Wartenberg; 8. The critique of metaphysics: Kant and traditional ontology Karl Ameriks; 9. Vindicating reason Onora O’Neill; 10. Autonomy, obligation and virtue: an overview of Kant’s moral philosophy J. B. Schneewind; 11. Politics, freedom and order: Kant’s political philosophy Wolfgang Kersting; 12. Taste, sublimity and genius: the aesthetics of nature and art Eva Schaper; 13. Rational theology, moral faith and religion Allen W. Wood; 14. The first twenty years of critique: the Spinoza connection George di Gionvanni.