How is Nature Possible?

Reviews / Votes

In this insightful, lucid, and open-minded account, Daniel Robinson puts Kant's project into its intellectual and scientific context, engagingly bringing out the ambitious aims Kant set for himself and how he sought to achieve them. This is a highly instructive and valuable introduction to the First Critique. Author Daniel Robinson received the 2011 Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Association. The award 'recognizes the most scholarly contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge' and carries an honorarium of $10,000. Previous recipients include Jerome Bruner and Daniel Kahneman. How is Nature Possible? Kant's Project in the First Critique is a well-researched, introductory-level commentary on one of the more difficult books in the history of philosophy. * Metapsychology * In his distinguished career, [Robinson] has contributed to the history of ideas, science and modern philosophy, has undertaken extensive research in experimental psychology and has been an avid supporter of Thomas Reid's philosophy...This peculiar combination of interests informs this book's aim to read the Critique as accounting for the possibility of scientific knowledge and safeguarding it against the destructive tendencies of scepticism and the over-confident proofs of the rationalists... He goes a long way toward justifying Kant's metaphysics of science as a viable and coherent project against Kant's predecessors, especially Descartes, Locke and Hume, and against some of his recent critics, be they Quine, Strawson or Stroud... The book will be most useful to new, but also experienced students of Kant * The Review of Metaphysics *