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Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

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  • 3 hours to read
  • 7 chapters
  • Reading level: College-level

"Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics" by Immanuel Kant is a philosophical work published in 1783. Written as a more accessible summary of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant investigates whether metaphysics can exist as a legitimate science. He examines how pure mathematics and natural science achieve certainty through synthetic a priori knowledge, tracing the origins and limits of human reason. The work responds to critics while defending the critical importance of establishing metaphysics on firm foundations.

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  • Knowledge, Theory of · Early works to 1800
  • Metaphysics · Early works to 1800

Read the opening

First Part of the Transcendental Problem

HOW IS PURE MATHEMATICS POSSIBLE?

§ 6.

Here is a great and established branch of knowledge, encompassing even now a wonderfully large domain and promising an unlimited extension in the future. Yet it carries with it thoroughly apodeictical certainty, i.e., absolute necessity, which therefore rests upon no empirical grounds. Consequently it is a pure product of reason, and moreover is thoroughly synthetical. [Here the question arises:]

"How then is it possible for human reason to produce a cognition of this nature entirely a priori?"

Does not this faculty [which produces mathematics], as it neither is nor can be based upon experience, presuppose some ground of cognition a priori, which lies deeply hidden, but which might reveal itself by these its effects, if their first beginnings were but diligently ferreted out?

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Contents

  1. Front Matter
  2. Introduction
  3. First Part of the Transcendental Problem
  4. Second Part of the Transcendental Problem
  5. Third Part of the Main Transcendental Problem
  6. Third Part of the Main Transcendental Problem
  7. Conclusion
  8. Appendix

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About this edition

This free edition of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant comes from Project Gutenberg eBook #52821, released 2016-08-16. It is in the public domain in the United States, so you can read it here in full at no cost, on any phone, tablet or computer. Genre: Philosophy & Ethics.

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