A Companion to Kant is the most recent (2010) and by far the best anthology on Kant’s works.  In it, Graham Bird brings together a remarkable set of essays by prominent scholars in Kant studies (from Henry Allison and Paul Guyer to Andrews Reath and Katrin Flikschuh), and he supplies helpful and systematic introduction to the volume as a whole, and to its three major parts (thematically corresponding, roughly, to Kant’s three Critiques).  

In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to all contributions:  this Companion to Kant contains 33 essays that span over 530 pages.  Also, many (if not most) essays do not merely provide a state of the art overviews of Kant’s arguments and of the literature on them, but rather themselves offer significant contributions to Kant scholarship.  And so in what follows, I will rather highlight some of the important features of the collection as a whole.

First, the anthology makes it apparent that Kant’s views underwent a significant change and development from the 1740-s and 1750-s till the end of his philosophical career.  Naturally, since Kant’s academic life was quite lengthy (especially for his age), this is to be expected.  However, history of philosophy does not always go beyond reconstructing the ‘considered views’ of its major figures.  By contrast, Bird’s companion to Kant contains numerous insightful entries that highlight Kant’s continuous growth as a philosopher.  Part I in particular (Pre-Critical Issues) provides an in-depth analysis of Kant’s Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1744-47) and his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Skies 1755-56) (the essays on Kant’s early dynamics and cosmology are written by Martin Schönfeld).  It also discusses Kant’s “laboratory of ideas” in 1770 (Alison Laywine) — among others things, in this essay we find some insightful remarks concerning the sources that are available for studying Kant’s pre-Critical philosophy (Nachlaß) and some interesting biographical remarks on Kant’s writing style.  Finally, Part I contains important essays on Kant’s relation to Leibniz (by Predrag Cicovacki) and to the British Empiricists (by Wayne Waxman).

Second, the Blackwell Companion to Kant contains a set of lucid, up to date essays on topics such as Kant’s transcendental idealism, Kant’s view on freedom, Kant’s normative ethics, etc.  These essays discuss the well-known issues in Kant’s corpus, and they do this in a remarkable way.  On the one hand, the task of essays such as these is to provide an overview of Kant’s arguments concerning some major issues, but the challenge of providing an overview becomes apparent when we reflect on the diversity of interpretations of Kant on all of these topics.  Most contributions, however, meet this challenge and combine an explication of Kant’s arguments (in light of the secondary literature on the topics) along with original input on the matters at hand.  Thus, they avoid one-sidedness of an interpretation of Kant, but they also avoid being mere literature reviews.

For instance, Henry Allison in his “Kant’s Transcendental Idealism” presents a clear discussion of the well-known two-world / two-aspects controversy.  Naturally, he provides an overall argument in favor of the latter, but in the course of his argument he gives a comprehensive account of the discussion of this issue, and numerous references to Kant’s philosophical contemporaries and predecessors that illuminate the key aspects of Kant’s ontology and epistemology (when it comes to the notion of representation).  Graham Bird himself contributes an essay “Kant’s Analytic Apparatus” that equally well lays out a map of Kant’s terminology and arguments in the first Critique.  Much like Allison’s essay, Bird’s work cannot be reduced to mere literature review on the matter, but contains a genuinely new contribution to our understanding of Kant’s conceptual web (analytic vs. synthetic, a priori vs. a posteriori, empirical/transcendental vs. immanent/ transcendent, etc.) and its nuances.

Third, Blackwell  Companion to Kant offers a set of insightful essays on Kant’s intellectual successors.  Part V consists of four essays, and they range from Hegel’s reading of Kant (Sally Sedgwick) and the ‘neglected alternative’ (Graham Bird) to Kant’s legacy within the continental phenomenological tradition (Paul Gorner) as well as within the ‘analytic’ (Anglo-American) thought (James O’Shea).  The last two essays, I think, deserve a special mention since they help us understand through what lenses Kant can (and is) read today.  For instance, Paul Gorner goes over the “phenomenological interpretations” of Kant by Husserl and by Heidegger.  Gorner traces Husserl’s attention to “transcendental subjectivity” (that he says he inherits from Kant more so than from Descartes) to Kant’s interest in the question of How is knowledge possible? and his answer to this question in terms of structures of transcendental consciousness (503).  On the other hand, Heidegger was equally inspired by Kant, albeit his interpretation of Kant’s first Critique was radically different from Husserl’s:  for Heidegger, the Critique of Pure Reason is “not epistemology but ontology,” and its fundamental insight lies not in its attention to the subject but rather in its “interpretation of being in terms of time” (507).  (Heidegger, though, makes two concessions:  first, Kant’s attention to temporality is only a foreshadowing of Heidegger’s own work, in which time is the “key to being” (506), and second — more globally — Heidegger acknowledges that his reading of Kant does “some violence to Kant’s text” but that this is inevitable in a genuine “thinking dialogue” rather than in a mere “historical philology” (500).  On this note, it is worth mentioning that Kant himself seems to be taking a similar approach to history of philosophy:  in his essay “Kant’s Debt to Leibniz” Pregrag Cicovacki points out that Kant “did not insist on historical accuracy and read his predecessors (e.g., Plato, Leibniz) with the eye to discerning the “ultimate conclusions” that could be drawn from them, regardless of whether they themselves drew these conclusions or not” (80).)

On the other hand, James O’Shea provides a historical narrative of Anglo-American philosophy in its appropriation of Kant and Kantian themes:  this essay is especially helpful for understanding why Kant occupies the place that he does in our academic tradition.  Following the discussion of the reception of Kant by Frege and Russell, O’Shea goes in some detail over Strawson’s contribution to reviving a sympathetic interest in Kant (from 1959 on).  He shows in what way “Strawson’s conceptions of descriptive metaphysics and of transcendental arguments helped revitalize not only Kant scholarship but also Kantian approaches to epistemology and metaphysics within the analytic tradition in general” (522) and he relates Kantian themes (especially as they were understood by Strawson) to Putnam, Quine, Davidson, Dummett, Sellars, McDowell and Brandom.

Finally, Bird’s Companion contains several essays that thematically expand our knowledge and understanding of Kant.  For instance, Kant’s normative practical philosophy has usually been interpreted as “pure” (and only pure) moral theory, which excludes everything “empirical and that belongs to anthropology” (Groundwork 4:389).  There is a good reason for this, of course, since Kant never tires to explain that his subject matter is “pure moral philosophy” (ibid.).  But for more than two decades, Kant also lectured on “practical anthropology”, which he considered to be a “counterpart of a metaphysics of morals” (Metaphysics of Morals, 6:217), and Kant’s lectures on anthropology can shed some light on topics such as our (human) moral makeup, our moral development, and proper moral education.  Robert Louden (the author of Kant’s Impure Ethics (2002)) contributes an essay on Kant’s anthropology (“Applying Kant’s Ethics:  The Role of Anthropology”) and in it, he provides an enriched account of Kant’s ethical (cf. narrower moral) thought that shows that Kant’s views are much more subtle than his normative theory alone might suggest.  Louden not only provides a clear terminological exposition of ‘pragmatic anthropology’ and ‘moral anthropology’, but he also relates Kant’s discussion of anthropology to his normative theory (from the early Groundwork to the very late “Doctrine of Virtue”) and to Kant’s essays on history (Perpetual Peace and Ideas towards a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Point of View).  Whereas it is unclear whether works such as Louden’s will ultimately allow us to answer Hegel’s charge of “empty formalism” (350), attention to Kant’s “impure ethics” certainly affords us a richer, more flashed-out account of Kant’s formal morality at work.

The 2010 Companion to Kant is bound to become indispensible for those who teach and for those who study Kant’s philosophy (on both graduate and undergraduate levels).  Its contributions remain lucid without watering Kant down; they are comprehensive without staying merely on the surface of the issues they discuss; they contain original work on Kant without skewing the interpretations of Kant toward one-sidedness; and jointly they thematically expand our knowledge and out understanding of Kant’s corpus and of Kant’s place within the intellectual tradition of Western philosophy.

© 2010 Tatiana Patrone

Tatiana Patrone, Ph.D., Ithaca College, NY