KANT, Immanuel.

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Critik der reinen Vernunft. First edition of one of the most influential philosophy books ever published, this an uncut copy. Kant himself, perhaps a touch immodestly, judged the work as comparable with the Copernican heliocentric revolution.The Critik took more than a decade to write and took up so much of Kant's thought, time, and energy that he published virtually nothing beyond lecture advertisements; the 1770s are known as his silent decade. It addresses a key concern of the Enlightenment: that mechanistic scientific reason threatened to undermine the possibility of human freedom and, by extension, traditional approaches to morality and religion. To resolve that problem, Kant develops the thesis of transcendental idealism - the argument that the structures of human thought shape our comprehension of the world around us. This allows him to demonstrate that scientific knowledge, morality, and religion are all founded on the same basis of human autonomy."No other thinker has been able to hold with such firmness the balance between speculative and empirical ideas. His penetrating analysis of the elements involved in synthesis, and the subjective process by which these elements are realized in the individual consciousness, demonstrated the operation of 'pure reason'; and the simplicity and cogency of his arguments achieved immediate fame" (PMM).

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