Book Description

A new translation of Immanuel Kant’s 1788 Critique of Practical Reason in modern American English with the original German in the back. This is Volume VIII in The Complete Works of Immanuel Kant from Livraria Press. Kant’s 1788 Critique of Practical Reason is the second of his major triad of critical philosophic critiques. It builds upon his Pure Reason and the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in delineating his theory of moral justification. The Critique of Pure Reason answers the question, "What can I know?", while Practical Reason answers "what should I do?". Practical Reason primarily concerns the relationship of Reason to morality. It is the “Imperative” in the “Categorical Imperative. Morality is not a feeling or perception, but a reality to submit to. Kant's Practical Reason is a critical text to understand the view of Reason as Teleological, a uniquely German view, in contrast to the English Empiricist view (Hume, Locke, and Descartes) view is that “Reason is the slave of the passions” and can tell us nothing about morality and ethics. The teleological view, which is found clearly and explicitly in Kant and all German Idealists after him, is both normative and descriptive, or in other words, Imperative. The entire Frankfurt school of thought operates off of a version of this metaphysical view, all the way to Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetics which is rooted in a Teleological view of reason.