Critik der reinen Vernunft.

£47,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An exceptional example of the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , the first and most important of his three major works of critical philosophy, in which Kant first presented his system of transcendental idealism that would completely define the trajectory of western philosophy thereafter. ‘Kant’s great achievement was to conclude finally the lines on which philosophical speculation had proceeded in the eighteenth century, and to open up a new and more comprehensive system of dealing with the problems of philosophy. … 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 realised in the individual consciousness, demonstrated the operation of ‘pure reason’; and the simplicity and cogency of his arguments achieved immediate fame’ (PMM). Warda, 59; Printing and the Mind of Man, 226.

• Year: 1781

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