Robert Paul Wolff

Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

This book analyses and explains the central passage of Kant's philosophy, the "Transcendental Analytic" of the Critique of Pure Reason. It proceeds in the manner of a textual commentary, discussing and explaining each section of the Analytic in turn. The purpose, however, is not merely to comment chapter by chapter on what Kant has written, but rather to reorganise and interpret his argument so that it is seen as coherent and connected.

To this end preliminary versions of the Analytic are actually presented, in formal step-by-step manner, four times in the course of the book. Finally, when the last elements of Kant's theory are revealed, a fifth and final version of the argument is presented. This consists of a proof whose premise is the Cartesian proposition, "I think," and whose conclusion is the Causal Maxim. In other words Kant provided a complete proof for the principle of causality, assuming only the minimal premise that man is conscious. In his presentation Mr. Wolff offers a refutation of the clam by some commentators that Kant's argument was merely hypothetical or regressive that is, starting with the conclusion and working backwards to the premise.

Although the main function of the book is to present this argument it also contains a considerable body of analyses, explanations, and speculations about difficult texts in the Analytic as a whole.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Society for Philosophy & Culture
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. März 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781301826001
• Artikelnr.: 72341343

Autorenporträt

Robert Paul Wolff received a doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1957. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Massachusetts, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He has published twenty-one books on the history of modern philosophy, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, economics, and Afro-American Studies. Among his best-known books are Kant's Theory of Mental Activity and In Defense of Anarchism, which has just been translated into Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian. In 1992, he was invited to join the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies to assist in the establishment of a doctoral program, which he has coordinated since it was established in 1996. Wolff is now the director of the new university- wide Program for Undergraduate Mentoring and Achievement which provides mentoring and instructional services to traditionally underrepresented students in their first year at UMass. In 2005 Wolff published Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a meditation on the experience of joining an Afro-American Studies Department and what it taught him about America. In 1990, Wolff founded University Scholarships for South African Students, a charitable organization that offers financial aid to poor Black students studying at South Africa's historically Black universities and technikons.