Reviews for Kant : a biography

Library Journal
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This book bills itself as "the first full-length biography of Kant in over fifty years," but it is more than that. Other biographies are available, after all, including neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer's classic Kant's Life and Thought. But these dated biographies were written without access to the most recent scholarship, and even the Cassirer book is more of an "intellectual biography," devoting more time to an analysis of the major works than to the minutiae of Kant's life. The present work excels in both regards: the explication of Kant's thought (for example, in the seminal Critique of Pure Reason) is exemplary, and the details of Kant's life, time, and influences is rendered so thoroughly that the reader will finish the book knowing Kant and his thinking intimately. (This is not to say that Kant's thought is not difficult: it is.) Keuhn (philosophy, Philipps Univ., Marburg, Germany) has produced a work of the highest quality. For all academic collections and larger public libraries.DLeon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Philosophers have devoted extensive attention to the ideas of Immanuel Kant for nearly 200 years, but biographers have largely ignored his life. Kuehn remedies that neglect with this first full biography in 50 years. By recognizing the biases in seminal sketches left by Kant's contemporaries and by drawing on the latest scholarship, Kuehn gives readers the most accurate and complete portrait yet. It deserves particular praise for two achievements. First, it sheds much-needed light on the philosopher's early manhood, when he resolved to write his landmark Critique of Pure Reason. Second, it traces the process through which Kant matured into a global thinker on morality and citizenship. Kuehn illuminates a brilliant mind at work interpreting the tempestuous political and cultural events in his country and the world. Though mercifully free of jargon, the philosophical analyses embedded in the narrative will prove a struggle for many casual readers. However, in his arguments for a just social order, Kant will continue to attract serious students in many disciplines--and so will his best biographer to date. --Bryce Christensen


Publishers Weekly
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For opposite reasons, Kant's life (1724-1804) and ideas are equally difficult to expound engagingly: the ideas, because of their philosophical complexity; the life, because of its uneventful simplicity. Acknowledging as much in his prologue to this earnest biographical effort, Kuehn (of Philipps University in Germany) largely succeeds at this daunting, two-fold task. Nonspecialist readers in philosophy will be intrigued by the lesser-known works of Kant summarized here, such as Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, on the mystical theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, or, more relevant to our own copyright-obsessed times, "On the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books." Seasoned students of Kant will appreciate Kuehn's attention to the genesis of Kant's enormously influential critical philosophy in specific events and epiphanies of his life. Most notably, he explains how a foundational tenet of Kantian thoughtÄthat sensation and intellect are discontinuous (propounded in defiance of the then commonly received philosophy of Christian Wolff)Äoriginates in a little-known Latin dissertation that Kant publicly defended in 1770, 11 years before the Critique of Pure Reason appeared. Or again, the categorical imperative, which defines Kantian ethics, owes in part, Kuehn suggests, to the influence on Kant of his long-time English friend, Joseph Green, who first lived the kind of principled life for which Kant then laid the theory. Kuehn's descriptions of Kant's richly inclusive social life, witty conversation and elegant dress will delight all who have wrongly identified the sage of K?nigsberg with dour dispassion. The biography, however, suffers from repetition, digression and excessive attention to characters of only passing general interest. Still, as the first biography of the great philosopher in more than 50 years, this is a welcome addition to the literature. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

For the dedicated and persistent, this ?first full-length biography of . . . philosopher Immanuel Kant in over 50 years,? attempts to humanize the man long pictured as having no life outside the mind. Kuehn (Philosophy/Phillips Univ.) mines the relatively sparse and sometimes untrustworthy biographical material as best he can. We learn that Kant was a whiz at billiards as a young man (earning some of his living expenses at the table), that he was welcomed into the salons of high society in his hometown of Königsberg both for his learning and his conversational ability, that he was a bit of a clothes horse, and in other ways a social animal, enjoying the company of his friends, dining, and discoursing in restaurants and pubs for many hours a day. However gregarious Kant may have been, it is inescapable that it was his cerebral and not his gustatory adventures that made him the celebrated figure that he remains. So the biographical details are matched, if not overwhelmed, by discussions of the intellectual, religious, and political influences that surrounded Kant as he lived out his long life in Königsberg. These included the Pietistic beliefs of his parents as well as the rich and provocative writings of Enlightenment figures such as Rousseau and David Hume, but also German scientists, theologians, and thinkers (many of whom had been Kant?s students). As he rose from lowly lecturer to senior professor at the University of Königsberg, Kant honed his ideas about the opposition of reason to sense, ruminating through what Kuehn calls ?The Silent Years? and finally beginning to publish extensively only in his late 50s. There are lengthy excerpts from arguments made for and against Kant?s ideas by friends and rivals during this productive period. Finally, Kant began a long mental and physical deterioration leading to his death two days before his 80th birthday. A gathering and evaluation of some important data?but it's not for the casual reader.

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