Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has had, and continues to have, an enormous impact on modern philosophy. In this short, stimulating introduction, Michael Pendlebury explains Kant’s major claims in the Critique, how they hang together, and how Kant supports them, clarifying the way in which his reasoning unfolds over the course of this groundbreaking work. Making Sense of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason concentrates on key parts of the Critique that are essential to a basic understanding of Kant’s project and provides a sympathetic account of Kant’s reasoning about perception, space, time, judgment, substance, causation, objectivity, synthetic a priori knowledge, and the illusions of transcendent metaphysics. The guiding assumptions of the book are that Kant is a humanist; that his reasoning in the Critique is driven by an interest in human knowledge and the cognitive capacities that underlie it; and that he is not a skeptic, but accepts that human beings have objective knowledge and seeks to explain how this is possible. Pendlebury provides an integrated and accessible account of Kant’s explanation that will help those who are new to the Critique make sense of it.

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Realist Film Theory and Bicycle Thieves offers a concise introduction to realist film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 Italian neo realist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves. Hilary Neroni explores the original realist film theorists from the 1940s: André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Cesare Zavattini, among others. But rather than seeing realist film theory as simply a theory of the past to be moved beyond, the book argues that the prevalence of realism in many different forms within practice and theory suggests the importance of updating this original realist film theory with an understanding of realism that would sustain its viability. Throughout the book, Neroni analyzes neorealist film movements—such as Italian Neorealism, Parallel Cinema of India, and the Iranian New Wave—that challenge mainstream realism with a more radical form that exposes the social order instead of hiding it. Her in-depth investigation of Bicycle Thieves provides a realist methodology that reveals the radicality of its combination of realist techniques, a melodramatic story, and humanist values.