| These books are a disgrace to publishing. Immanuel Kant’s revolutionary first Critique is one of the world’s greatest philosophical works, but also one of the most difficult. A. J. Ayer understood it fully only once, when suffering from sunstroke, so what hope is there for the rest of us? In Norman Kemp Smith’s words, the work is ‘an enquiry into the conditions, scope and limits of our knowledge’. Above all, perhaps, it is an account of the built-in mental blinkers that constrain us to see the world in terms of certain conceptual categories (principally those of space and time), and prevent us from knowing what lies beyond their purview. Because Kemp Smith died in 1958, his work is still in copyright. Because his translation and commentary are classics, every serious student of Kant without German must use them, and Palgrave Macmillan are sitting on a monopoly. This brings with it certain responsibilities, shamefully neglected or mishandled in these reissues. The first responsibility was to commission genuine introductions, not the almost laughably inappropriate (and, in the case of the Critique, woefully edited) ones we find here, which tell us more about Kemp Smith than about Kant. These are learned essays on secondary philosophical scholarship, a topic that should at most have been relegated to short, late, skippable subsections. As Kant himself, in his Preface, says about bad books, ‘The reader is not allowed to arrive sufficiently quickly at a conspectus of the whole.’ The ‘introductions’ assume considerable prior knowledge of the works they purport to introduce, and will only bore and confuse the newcomer to Kant. Howard Caygill’s introduction is defective even in its own terms, barely mentioning Kant’s key predecessor, David Hume, and ignoring his leading successor, Arthur Schopenhauer. The original editions are typographically rebarbative, having been set in the 1920s in a dated and off-putting style. After 75 and more years, they should have been reset to a more modern, user-friendly design. At the very least, the minimal trouble should have been taken of finding sharp copies to reproduce. The type in the overpriced Commentary is horribly blurred: either we are not being offered a first-generation copy, or the camera-work is culpably negligent. The original impression is greatly superior. Moreover, Sebastian Gardner’s introduction is set in a typeface and to a measure that hideously fails to match the main text (nor are his notes at the foot of the page, as the other notes are). The numbering of the preliminary pages has changed, but a back-reference on p. 39 of the Critique is unaltered. The Commentary’s cover refers to a non-existent jacket, and its translator’s dedication is in the wrong place, making it look like the introducer’s. The one sentence written by the publisher (p. xxiv) is clumsily opaque. Neither blurb contains a single word about what Kant said. These are perfect case-studies for a course on how not to reissue classic works as textbooks. Students, who have no choice, have been poorly served. |