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    Critique of Practical Reason (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)
    Critique of Practical Reason (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)
    Critique of Practical Reason (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)
    Ebook79 pages57 minutes

    Critique of Practical Reason (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)

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    Critique of Practical Reason (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)
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    SparkNotes Philosophy Guides are one-stop guides to the great works of philosophy–masterpieces that stand at the foundations of Western thought. Inside each Philosophy Guide you’ll find insightful overviews of great philosophical works of the Western world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSparkNotes
    Release dateAug 12, 2014
    ISBN9781411473041
    Critique of Practical Reason (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)

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      Critique of Practical Reason (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide) - SparkNotes

      Cover of SparkNotes Guide to Critique of Practical Reason by SparkNotes Editors

      Critique of Practical Reason

      Immanuel Kant

      © 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

      This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

      Sparknotes is a registered trademark of SparkNotes LLC

      Spark Publishing

      A Division of Barnes & Noble

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7304-1

      Please submit changes or report errors to www.sparknotes.com/.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Contents

      Context

      Summary

      Important Terms

      Themes, Ideas, Arguments

      Preface and Introduction

      Analytic: Chapter One

      Analytic: Chapter Two

      Analytic: Chapter Three

      Dialectic: Chapter One

      Dialectic: Chapter Two

      Doctrine of Method-Conclusion

      Important Quotes

      Key Facts

      Study Questions

      Review & Resources

      Context

      Personal Background

      Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804. He was the son of a poor saddle-maker, but because of his evident intelligence he was sent to university. After receiving a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Konigsberg, he became first a private tutor for families in the area, and then a lecturer at the University of Konigsberg, at which he was to spend the rest of his life teaching. He lectured on a variety of topics including cosmology and anthropology, as well as philosophy.

      Kant's major works of philosophy were all written fairly late in his life. The first of these was the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, when Kant was fifty-seven. The Critique of Pure Reason is also known as Kant's first Critique, since it was followed in 1788 by a second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason and in 1790 by a third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. Each of these books has had a tremendous impact on philosophy concerning its subject manner, which is metaphysics and epistemology for the first Critique, ethics for the second, and aesthetics for the third.

      Kant lived an exceptionally quiet, uneventful, regular life, never marrying or traveling far from Konigsberg. His sedentary, routine life has often been the source of derision from his critics. Allegedly, the housewives of Konigsberg set their clocks every day of his professional life by his daily walk-except for one day when, in his engrossment with Jean Jacque Rousseau's novel Emile, he forgot the walk. On the other hand, Kant's heavy academic workload, moderate income, and weak health may go some ways towards explaining his uneventful life, and perhaps it is simply true that for him his intellectual adventures were adventures enough. We do know that he was quite sociable and also that he took great interest in the latest sciences, which should go some ways toward dispelling the image of Kant as bloodless and interested only in his own abstractions.

      It has been suggested that Kant was affected by his upbringing as a Pietist, a Lutheran revivalist sect that emphasized moral self-examination over dogma and ritual. One possible sign of this upbringing lies in his understanding of moral worth, which depends on the inner reason the person has for an action rather than on the effects or appearance of the action. Another sign of his upbringing lies in his understanding of religion; although Kant rejects most of the traditional Christian system with its anthropomorphic God and its accompanying rituals, he still regards himself as having saved all worthwhile features of religion.

      The religion Kant justifies in the Critique of Practical Reason provides a God who guarantees that moral dutifulness will lead to good, but nothing else. He includes nothing about Christ, nothing about God's will, nothing about the efficacy of prayer. None of this is ruled out, but neither is it promised.

      Historical Context

      Kant can be regarded as both a participant in the eighteenth century Enlightenment and as a critic of it. He certainly agreed with the French Encyclopedists in celebrating rationality, and in regarding the achievement of his age as that of gradually bringing reason to bear against the forces of superstition, in both the area of science and the realm of religion. (For more about his attitude, see his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment.) At the same time, however, Kant's philosophy attacks several groups that may be seen as carrying reason too far: metaphysicists who presume to understand God and immortality, scientists who presume their results to describe the intrinsic nature of reality, skeptics who presume to show belief in God, freedom, and immortality to be irrational.

      Besides his belief in the importance of rationality, Kant also shared the Enlightenment view that all humans are capable of reason and hence that all are endowed with moral worth. For this reason, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution; although saddened by its excesses, Kant regarded the revolution as moving toward a form of government that

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