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Paul Guyer on Immanuel Kant

Episode 1

The Forty-Five-Cent Kant

Featuring Paul Guyer

Audio episode · 12 min

Paul Guyer on A Kant Primer

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.

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Paul Guyer's Kant lets you hire a man if you pay him fairly. Garth Greenwell's Adam Verver pays the Prince perfectly and still does him a profound wrong.

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Nature Gives the Rule

John Kaag's Thoreau lifts Kant's definition of genius and gives it to a Concord woodchopper. Paul Guyer's Kant has one condition Thoreau refuses: be understood.

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What Was Kant's Copernican Revolution?

Kant's Copernican revolution: objects conform to the mind, which supplies space and time — securing science on a foundation Guyer himself doubts.

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What Is Kant's Categorical Imperative?

Kant's categorical imperative tests the policy behind your act: can you will it as universal law? Guyer shows where Kant's own arguments fall short.

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Why Is Freedom the Keystone of Kant's Philosophy?

Guyer reads Kant's three Critiques as one arch with freedom as its keystone: a theory of knowledge built to make room for a will nature cannot explain.

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The Will That Gives the Law

Kant and Nietzsche agree the human will gives itself the law — and split on whether that law binds everyone or only its maker.

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