Product Description: This book focuses on Kant's principal formal concepts: the relation of mind to sensory experience, the question of freedom and the law and, above all, the reevaluation of metaphysics.
I should have heeded the negative reviews... Kul-Want presents a "continental" reading of Kant as a proto-deconstructionist. In doing so he employs a great deal of unexplained terminology that serves to obscure the ideas of an already difficult thinker, thus making the book unsuitable for beginners.
Here, subjects are "dispossessed from the event of nothing happening" (p. 67). Reason is "absent", is "sacrificed", is "mourned", is an "object of grief", or "makes a gift of itself." (pp. 67, 68, 104). Freedom is "perpetually sacrificed in order to give rise to the moral law of representation as failure." (p. 102). The reader is told that for Kant, "there is no longer a concept of presence, so absence loses its connotation of negation (absence of presence), as metaphysics had formerly supposed" (p. 51).
That's all well and good, but it would only make sense to a reader who had somehow miraculously managed to master the works of Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze without first reading Kant. An introduction should not presuppose any specialized knowledge. It should focus on presenting a few key concepts, i.e. the noumenal vs. the phenomenal, the distinction between analytic, synthetic and synthetic a priori judgments, etc. and some historical context.
The treatment of the Second Critique crosses the line into misrepresentation. A cartoon Kant is made to declaim, "I firmly believe [... that] there are no certain guidelines for moral behavior." (p. 90.) This is demonstrated by a misreading of the moral examples in the final section of the Second Critique (Kul-Want presents them as moral dilemmas; Kant presents them as examples improperly motivated actions). The moral law is said to be "always already failing to stabilize into a set of prescriptions for correct behavior (p. 95). A student would get a very inaccurate idea of Kant's moral philosophy from this section.
There is a real need for a book to introduce Kant's philosophy to beginners. I agree with the reviewer who hopes that Introducing series will re-do this one.
Useless and misleading. Go for *Kant: A Very Short Introduction* instead I got this book long ago before I really knew much about Kant, and I thought it was somewhat helpful though it left a lot of mysteries and loose ends. Now that I have studied Kant and read hundreds of pages of his texts, I can safely say that this book is, at best, murky and unhelpful, and at worst (which is quite often), extremely misleading. Except for the Categorical Imperative, this book does not motivate or explain the revolutionary character of any of Kant's ideas. For example, it tells you that Kant believed that the mind has innate categories in terms of which it interprets the world, but no attempt is made to explain what Kant means by these transcendental categories (e.g., that they are rules for combining representations) or the significance of this break with tradition. The other major problem with this book is that though Kant is a systematic philosopher if ever there was one, with all of his positions being intimately connected, this book treats Kantian ideas in isolation, saying almost nothing about how they relate to one another.
These faults are not due to the limitations of the format of a brief overview. Roger Scruton shows exactly how to summarize a complex and difficult philosopher in his *Kant: A Very Short Introduction*, which I strongly suggest instead of this book (Note: I like other books in the "Introducing..." series, so it's not that I'm against the comic book approach). Sure, there are no drawings in Scruton's book; instead you get words that actually tell you what you need to know.
didn't meet expectations. unless i completely missed the point, i assumed the "introducing...." series had as a target audience the layman w/a desire to gain insight into more challenging, esoteric topics. this book did not deliver for me, and i'm usually able to wrap my mind around more difficult concepts with a little facility. don't expect any facility here in this book. i'm college-educated myself, and i've often found that 90%(?) of mastering a discipline is simply conquering the language; the rest is applying the logic. don't expect the author's use of the language to be any less enigmatic than kant himself.
Terrible I was hoping for a book that could explain in simple terms some of Kant thoughts. This book is not that.
Introducing Pedantry Badly done. If you want to be impressed by Mr. Want's intelligence, then this is the book for you. If you want to read a book that will introduce you to Kant's philosophy, then save your money. I took a philosophy course in college which gave me the rudiments of Kant but after reading this book I feel I know less now than I did before. It's a shame too, Kant lays down the groundwork for philosophy that has influenced many great thinkers since his time. I'm afraid after reading this book many readers will not bother to look any further into a philosopher that Mr. Want has rendered benign. Icon books should seriously consider re-doing this topic. Reading Kant's original works is not any more difficult than the text written by Mr. Want. Very disappointing............
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