KANT, Immanuel.

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Critik der reinen Vernunft. First edition of Kant's first major critical treatise, arguably his single most important work, and one of the most influential books ever published. Kant himself regarded the work as comparable with Copernicus's realization that the earth moves around the sun.The Critik addresses a key concern of the Enlightenment - that mechanistic scientific reason threatened to undermine the possibility of human freedom, and so, traditional approaches to morality and religionTo 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.The 1770s, when Kant was writing the Critique, are known as the silent decade: the work took up so much of his thought, time, and energy, that he published little beyond lecture advertisements."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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