The Forty-Five-Cent Kant

A wire rack of paperbacks in Penn Station, a teenager with forty-five cents in his pocket, and a train ride home that decided everything. Paul Guyer has spent fifty years teaching Immanuel Kant, and he made the standard English editions most of us read. This opening episode is the story of how that life happened to him, almost by accident, and then the first statement of the claim the whole series rests on: that Kant's enormous machinery of reason exists to guard one fragile thing. Come meet the reader first. The Critique of Pure Reason will keep.