Professor: Abe Stone
abestone@ucsc.edu
Office: Cowell Annex A-106
Phone (office): 459-5723
AIM: abestone3
Office hours: Tues. 2:15-3:15, Thurs. 12:45-1:45pm.
Teaching Assistant:
Christoph Durt (cdurt@ucsc.edu)
Participation in discussion sections (good participation will be possible grounds for raising course grade, especially if it is on a borderline).
Two take home exams, due Thurs., Apr. 26 and Thurs., May 17 (a choice of essay questions) (each worth 20% of the grade); take-home final exam (also a choice of essay questions), due Tues., June 12 (60% of the grade). Students who receive an A- or higher on the first two exams 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.
Instructions for the exams are available on-line; there are links to
them from this syllabus as well as from my main
course page
and from the eCommons site for
the course. I will discuss the exams in class when the
due date draws near (but feel free to ask about them at any time).
Exams are to be handed in, as attachments, via the “Assignments”
tool on eCommons. Please submit in
MSWord format (.doc or .docx are both fine), or in a
format easily convertible to MSWord (e.g., plain text or RTF). The
eCommons site is set to accept late submissions, though late papers
(without an approved extension) may not receive full credit. It is
not set to allow resubmissions: once you press the “submit”
button, it will not let you change your response. If, however, you
mistakenly submit something and want to change it, please contact me
and I will make an exception.
Note that all three exams are due by midnight on the due date.
For answers to some common questions about my assignments, please see this FAQ.
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.)