Audiobook · read by volunteers
Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
Read by ML Cohen, Stewart Wills, Carl Manchester, JemmaBlythe, Hugh McGuire, Gesine, James Tiley, Robert Scott, Kirsten Ferreri, Lisa Chau · 48 chapters · 26 h 09
About the book
What can we know before experience, and what are the limits of human reason? In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant sets out to answer these questions by examining the mind itself. He argues that our knowledge is shaped by the structures through which we perceive the world, space and time among them, and that reason goes wrong when it tries to reach beyond experience. Few books have had as much influence on modern philosophy, and few have a reputation for being so demanding. Forty-eight sections and more than twenty-six hours, read by ten volunteers, in the classic English translation of John Miller Dow Meiklejohn, give a patient listener the chance to follow Kant’s argument step by step. Take your time, and let each part settle before moving on.
Introduction
Immanuel Kant, who lived from 1724 to 1804, spent almost his entire life in the Prussian city of Königsberg, where he taught at the university. The Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781, with a second edition in 1787, has been called the most influential and important philosophical text of the modern age.
Kant saw the book as an attempt to bridge the gap between rationalism, which holds that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience, and empiricism, which holds that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge. He also wished to counter the radical empiricism of David Hume, for whom our beliefs are purely the result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences. Using the methods of science, Kant demonstrates that the mind plays an active role in shaping experience.
The book is famous for its difficulty. Its sentences are long, its terminology is technical, and its argument is built in stages, from the Transcendental Aesthetic, which deals with space and time, to later sections on logic, the categories and the limits of metaphysics. Many readers find that hearing it read aloud helps them keep to the thread.
This LibriVox recording uses the English translation by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn, who lived from 1836 to 1902. It has forty-eight chapters, beginning with the prefaces of 1781 and 1787, and lasts about twenty-six hours. Ten volunteers share the reading, including ML Cohen, Stewart Wills and Carl Manchester. Do not be discouraged by its reputation, since a patient listener will find that Kant often explains himself with great care.
Public domain
Immanuel Kant died in 1804: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text