Goodbye, Kant! What still remains of the Critique of Pure Reason

The book discusses one of the leading texts of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which marks a turning-point in the subject and yet continues to elicit controversy not only about whether the claims that Kant makes about the nature of human experience and knowledge are true, but also about what they are supposed to mean. The principal objective of the book is to see how far Kant’s claims, when take literally, can be reconciled with what the theory of knowledge in the two hundred years since Kant’s death has come to regard as the key notions for the reconstruction of science or, at least, as data whose interpretation has to be handled with greater caution than was foreseeable at the end of the eighteenth century. Although Ferraris’ conclusions are frequently negative about the arguments that Kant proposed, he is attentive not only to historical context but also to the ideals that the Critique sets itself. It is for this reason that the title of the book refers to Wolfgang Becker’s recent film, Goodbye Lenin! about the predicament of East Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall: on the one hand, there is the near-complete failure of a system to live up to the expectations of those who lived under it; on the other, there is an understandable – indeed, touching – nostalgia for purity of the hopes that those very expectations set on foot. Introductory books on the Critique in English tend either to relay the obscure vocabulary Kant has handed down to much of modern philosophy, or to abstract from the particularities of Kant’s dialectical position and, so, to present the main moves of his doctrine of transcendental idealism as if they were unaffected by the context in which they were first made. Insofar as Ferraris’ book does not aim to be a passive recounting of the typically Kantian strategies, but a constructive engagement with them, the approach is unawed but aware that the stumps have not been drawn on this particular game.