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Critique of Pure Reason

1781 · by Immanuel Kant

How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? The limits of knowledge.

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Introduction

Kant published the Critique in Riga in 1781 after about ten years of near silence; a heavily revised second edition followed in 1787, and the two are cited as A and B. The main part, the “Doctrine of Elements”, has two sections: the Transcendental Aesthetic on space and time as forms of intuition, and the Transcendental Logic, which deduces the categories and in its “Dialectic” shows how reason entangles itself in illusions, for example in the antinomies about the beginning of the world. The preface to the second edition compares Kant’s approach to Copernicus’s change of standpoint. Early reviews misunderstood the book, and Kant answered with the shorter “Prolegomena” (1783).

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