Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can lay claim to being the most important single work of modern philosophy, a work whose methodology, if not necessarily always its conclusions, has had a profound influence on almost all subsequent philosophical discourse. In this work Kant addresses, in a groundbreaking elucidation of the nature of reason, the age-old question of philosophy: “How do we know what we know?” and the limits of what it is that we can know with certainty. Immanuel Kant (1724 to 1804) lived his long life against the background of the Enlightenment and shared in that movement’s growing confidence in the ability of human reason, in the sciences, mathematics and, Kant was to argue, in philosophy too, to explain matters that had previously been the preserve of purely speculative thought and of metaphysics. The Critique of Pure Reason is exactly that, a critique of what ‘pure’ reason, that is to say reason independent of empirical evidence, could claim as truth, particular