Kant and the Early Moderns [Paperback]

For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant's writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so influential that it has often been difficult to see these predecessors on any terms but Kant's own. InKant and the Early Moderns, Daniel Garber and B?atrice Longuenesse bring together some of the world's leading historians of philosophy to consider Kant in relation to these earlier thinkers.

These original essays are grouped in pairs. A first essay discusses Kant's direct engagement with the philosophical thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, or Hume, while a second essay focuses more on the original ideas of these earlier philosophers, with reflections on Kant's reading from the point of view of a more direct interest in the earlier thinker in question. What emerges is a rich and complex picture of the debates that shaped the transcendental turn from early modern epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind to Kant's critical philosophy.

The contributors, in addition to the editors, are Jean-Marie Beyssade, Lisa Downing, Dina Emundts, Don Garrett, Paul Guyer, Anja Jauernig, Wayne Waxman, and Kenneth P. Winkler.

Daniel Garberis professor of philosophy at Princeton University and the author ofDescartes EmbodiedandDescartes' Metaphysical Physics.B?atrice Longuenesseis professor of philosophy at New York University. Her books includeKant on the Human StandpointandKant and the Capacity to Judge(Princeton). This small collection of essays is distinguished by the caliber of its contributors and by the exceptional promise of the discussion that it only begins . . . This is an exceptionally productive exercise that allows readers not only to see these early modern figures in their own light, but also to appreciate what is truly novel about Kant's interpretlƒ/