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General Information

Contact Info

Professor: Abe Stone
abestone@ucsc.edu Office: Cowell Annex A-106
Phone (office): 459-5723
AIM: abestone3
Office hours: Mon., 3-5pm.

Course Requirements

Take-home midterm exam (a choice of essay questions), due Mon., May 11; take-home final exam (ditto), due Tues., June 9. Students who receive an A- or higher on the midterm may choose to write a final paper (approximately 8-10 pages) in place of the final, on a topic to be discussed in advance with the instructor. (Each worth 50% of the grade.) Exams and papers are due by e-mail to the instructor (in PDF, MSWord, LATEX, plain text, HTML, or RTF).

Texts

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (ISBN: 1403911959).

The above text should be available at the Literary Guillotine. Some commentaries and secondary works will be available on reserve at McHenry (see below).


For reasons I will discuss, we will be reading almost exclusively the text of the first (``A'') edition. Page numbers in both the first and second (``B'') editions are marked in the margin of Smith's translation. In a few cases you will have to pay careful attention to piece together what belongs to the A text (for example, there are places where the B text adds a few paragraphs to the middle of a section--those additional B-edition paragraphs are not part of the assigned reading).


I will put on reserve the following secondary texts, which you may or may not find useful: Walsh, Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics; Gardner, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason; Strawson, The Bounds of Sense; Bennett, Kant's Analytic and Kant's Dialectic; Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism; Guyer, ed., Cambridge Companion to Kant Longuenesse, Kant And The Capacity To Judge : Sensibility And Discursivity In The Transcendental Analytic Of The Critique Of Pure Reason. (The first two on this list have been highly recommended to me as beginning-level texts, but I haven't read them myself as of now; your mileage may vary. The others are somewhat more involved. Strawson and Bennett are basically anti-Kant--they claim to think that he's a great philosopher, but attack and ridicule most of what he actually says--whereas Allison is basically pro-Kant. The Cambridge Companion is a collection of essays by various authors. Longuenesse is a more difficult author, but one whom I personally have found useful. There is plenty of other literature on Kant, of course.)


next up previous
Next: Readings Up: Phil. 106, Spring 09 Previous: Phil. 106, Spring 09
Abe Stone 2009-05-19