IMMANUEL KANTS CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON TRANSLATED BY NORMAN KEMP
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EDINBURGH MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTINS STREET, LONDON
1929 COPYRIGHT PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. K. CLAKK, LIMITED,
EDINBURGH TRANSLATORS PREFACE THE present translation was begun in
1913, when I was com pleting my Commentary to Kants Critique of
Pure Reason Owing, however, to various causes, I was unable at that
time to do more than prepare a rough translation of about a third
of the whole and it was not until 1927 that I found leisure to
revise and continue it. In this task I have greatly profited by the
work of my two predecessors, J. M. D. Meiklejohn and Max Muller.
Meiklejohns work, a translation of the second edition of the
Critique was published in 1855. Max Miillers translation, which is
based on the first edition of the Critique, with the second edition
passages in appendices, was published in 1 88 1. Meiklejohn has a
happy gift which only those who attempt to follow in his steps can,
I think, fully appreciate of making Kant speak in language that
reasonably approxi mates to English idiom. Max Miillers main merit,
as he has very justly claimed, is his greater accuracy in render
ing passages in which a specially exact appreciation of the
niceties of German idiom happens to be important for the sense.
Both Meiklejohn and Max Miiller laboured, however, under the
disadvantage of not having made any very thorough study of the
Critical Philosophy and the shortcomings in their translations can
usually be traced to this cause. In the past fifty years, also,
much has been done in the study and interpretation of the text. In
particular, my task hasbeen facilitated by the quite invaluable
edition of the Critique edited by Dr. Raymund Schmidt. Indeed, the
ap pearance of this edition in 1926 was the immediate occasion of
my resuming the work of translation. Dr. Schmidts restora vi KANTS
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON tion of the original texts of the first and
second editions of the Critique, and especially of Kants own
punctuation so very helpful in many difficult and doubtful passages
and his cita tion of alternative readings, have largely relieved me
of the time-consuming task of collating texts, and of assembling
the emendations suggested by Kantian scholars in their editions of
the Critique or in their writings upon it. The text which I have
followed is that of the second edition i 787 and I have in all
cases indicated any departure from it. I have also given a
translation of all first edition passages which in the second
edition have been either altered or omitted. Wherever possible,
this original first edition text is given in the lower part of the
page. In the two sections, however, which Kant completely recast in
the second edition The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
and The Paralogisms of Pure Reason this cannot conveniently be done
and I have therefore given the two versions in immediate
succession, in the main text. For this somewhat unusual procedure
there is a twofold justification first, that the Critique is
already, in itself, a composite work, the different parts of which
record the successive stages in the development of Kants views and
secondly, that the first edition versions are, as a matter of fact,
indispensable for an adequate under standing of the versions which
were substituted for them. The pagings ofboth the first and the
second edition are given throughout, on the margins the first
edition being referred to as A, the second edition as B. Kants
German, even when judged by German standards, makes difficult
reading. The difficulties are not due merely to the abstruseness of
the doctrines which Kant is endeavouring to expound, or to his
frequent alternation between conflicting points of view. Many of
the difficulties are due simply to his manner of writing...
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