The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy - Hardcover

Ferrarin, Alfredo

9780226243153: The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022624315X ISBN 13: 9780226243153

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

The Critique of Pure Reason―Kant’s First Critique―is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant’s oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced, The Powers of Pure Reason explores forgotten parts of the First Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant’s works.

Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique―the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique’s greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself.

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About the Author:

Alfredo Ferrarin is professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa. He is the author or editor of several books, including Hegel and Aristotle.

Review:

“Ferrarin’s stimulating book undertakes a comprehensive investigation of Kant’s conception of reason and the various roles it plays within his distinctive notion of philosophy. Drawing on the final chapters of the Doctrine of Method as well as a wide range of texts from throughout Kant’s corpus with unusual textual sensitivity, it perceptively and imaginatively draws out the complex relations between reason (as an organism and as an architect), systematicity, and a priori synthesis, noting both the consistencies and tensions that emerge.” (Eric Watkins, University of California, San Diego)

“In this highly original and thoughtful book, Ferrarin succeeds in revitalizing in a very convincing way an approach to Kant’s philosophy in all its different aspects, which he rightly takes to be practiced already by Kant’s immediate successors, the German idealists. This approach is characterized by the compelling belief in the validity of the hermeneutical maxim that before one can have an adequate understanding of the disparate parts, one has to have a clear grasp of the guiding problem the philosophical project wants to answer. Ferrarin—in an almost Hegelian spirit—identifies questions pertaining to the authority of reason as the central clue to both Kant’s metaphysical and moral views, and he gives a fascinating and extremely well-informed account of how the quest for reason’s powers organizes all of Kant’s philosophical work.” (Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt University of Berlin)

“Ferrarin has written a remarkable study of Kant’s philosophy as a unified whole. It is challenging, daring, complex, erudite, detailed, and carefully argued, opening up new vistas on the meaning of Kant’s critical enterprise. It is a major contribution to the scholarship.” (Richard Velkley, author of Freedom and the End of Reason)

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