Professor: Abe Stone
abestone@ucsc.edu
Office: Cowell Annex A-106
Phone (office): 459-5723
AIM: abestone3
Office hours: Tues. and Thurs., 2:15-3:15pm.
Take-home midterm exam (a choice of essay questions), due Thurs., May 12; take-home final exam (ditto), due Tues., June 7. 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, with cc to
Gabe
(the grader), in
PDF or some format easily convertible to PDF (e.g. MSWord -- either
.doc or .docx is fine -- LATEX, plain text, or RTF).
Attendance at lecture is strongly encouraged, but it is not a
course requirement and I will not be taking attendance.
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).
If you want to use a different translation you are welcome to, but you
should be aware that it may be confusing because translations can
differ greatly. Of course, if you know German, you should read in the
original.
This year we will be reading exclusively the text of the
second (``B'') edition. Page numbers in both the first and second
(``A'') editions are marked in the margin of Smith's translation. In
most cases where the two editions differ, it should be relatively easy
to figure out what the text of the B edition says: Smith mostly either
prints the B-edition text with A-edition difference in footnotes, or,
where there are big differences, prints the two texts separately.
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.)