On Kant

 Kant: A Revolution in Thinking

by Marcus Willaschek, translated from the German by Peter Lewis(Belknap)

Nonfiction

This engaging new introduction to the philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that what made Kant revolutionary was his contention that to understand anything—science, justice, freedom, God—we first have to understand ourselves. Willaschek, one of the world’s leading authorities on Kant and the editor of the standard German edition of the philosopher’s works, writes, “Kant placed the human at the center of his thought like no other philosopher before him.” Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind. His theory presents a serious problem for any kind of religion or philosophy that claims to tell us about ultimate truths and eternal essences, such as God. Is it possible to live a meaningful existence in the absence of God and other absolute truths? This would become the central question for modern Western thought, and it was Kant who first posed it in all its complexity.