Maggs Bros.

A very fine copy of this important commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by the distinguished Scottish philosopher Herbert James Paton (1887-1969).

‘Paton is best known for his scholarly work on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, especially his penetrating two-volume study (that extends only to the end of the analytic) of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, entitled Kant’s Metaphysics of Experience, published in 1936. One characteristic of this work is its close fidelity to the original text - it discusses in painstaking detail virtually every passage in the first half of the Critique. This has the advantage of genuinely representing Kant’s thought and shedding light on the Kantian text in terms that Kant himself might have found intelligible, in his own language so to speak. However, it has the disadvantage that it exposes Paton’s commentary to the criticism that it lacks sufficient critical distance, and to the complaint that to expound Kant’s views in Kantian or near-Kantian terms fails to explain them. Another characteristic of Paton’s commentary is its attempt to move away from the standard interpretations of the time including those of Edward Caird, Harold Arthur Prichard, and Norman Kemp Smith. These commentators view Kant as significantly confused, unclear and inconsistent, whereas Paton sees him as intelligible, clear and consistent in general. Kemp Smith, influenced by the ideas of German commentators such as Erich Adickes and Hans Vaihinger, sees the Critique in a way as a patchwork of segments that were written at significantly different periods and lack internal consistency. In contrast, Paton challenges the patchwork thesis and claims that the Critique has a coherent and unitary structure. Some might argue that it is one thing to claim that Kant is clear and consistent, and another to show how this is so. Paton, according to critics, has a tendency to do the former but fails to accomplish the latter. It must be added that Paton rightly never claims that the Critique makes for easy reading - at one point he likens picking one’s way through the Transcendental Deduction to crossing a vast desert’ (Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Philosophers).