The Impossible Kind of Knowledge

Two sentences about bachelors, a shipload of Europeans staring at the wrong color of swans, and the question Immanuel Kant built the Critique of Pure Reason to answer. Paul Guyer walks the line between judgments that merely unpack a definition and judgments that tell you something new, then shows why David Hume's problem of induction makes one kind of knowledge look impossible: the informative truth that can never be wrong. Kant staked metaphysics, science, freedom, and God on its existence. And when the sharpest philosophers of the twentieth century, Guyer's teachers among them, declared the distinction an illusion, did they bring the system down? Guyer has a surprise for them.