What's more, even during Kant's lifetime, his published works were scattered across forty years and many different journals and publishers, whereas the Akademie edition presents Kant's recorded thought in one handy series. This gives today's scholars a big advantage over Kant's contemporaries in understanding Kant's philosophy, even if some of the sets of students' notes on Kant's lectures were circulating during and after Kant's lifetime and even if a select few individuals were in correspondence with Kant. Most of the first sixteen volumes were published before 1914, volumes 17 through 22 between 19, and volumes 23 through 29 between 1955 and the present, with part of volume 26 still due (the first part was made available in 2009).

The remainder of the collection includes Kant's personal notes and his drafts of various works, his correspondence, and his students' notes on his lectures. The works that were published during Kant's lifetime were included in this collection, held in volumes 1-9, but these works take up less than one third of the total collection.

Starting in 1900, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (as it is called today, but which had other names in the past) began its massive project of collecting in one series all of Kant's recorded thought. Who is in a better position to understand Kant's philosophy: his 18 th Century contemporaries or today's scholars? As we move further from Kant's day and age, we have the noteworthy advantage over Kant's contemporaries of having more of Kant's thought available to us. We can approach the question of the value of this volume by addressing another interesting question first.

It is an invaluable resource for understanding the specific early modern philosophical context in which Kant worked and, in turn, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and his philosophy more broadly. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason : Background Source Materials is a collection of mostly first-time translations of works by nine of Kant's influential philosophical contemporaries in Germany, edited and translated by Eric Watkins.

Critique of pure reason cambridge