Thought and Reality (Translated) (Annotated) - Rebuilding critical philosophy against metaphysics and empiricism #1014885

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction
• Editor's notes
• Notes to the text

Some books argue; this one dismantles. Thought and Reality sets out to rebuild critical philosophy from the ground up on a single, unyielding principle, and then follows that principle into territory few philosophers have been willing to enter. Nietzsche owned a copy and read it closely; Tolstoy, William James and Rudolf Steiner each took something from it. Anyone drawn to first-principles thinking will recognise the temperament at once.

African Spir takes up Kant's question — how is knowledge possible at all — and answers it with an economy Kant never attempted: one original concept a priori, from which causality, substance, the validity of induction and our knowledge of an external world are all derived in turn. Along the way he takes on John Stuart Mill's empiricism, Hume's scepticism, Herbart's monads, Hegel's contradictions and Schopenhauer's will, in prose that is forensic, impatient and frequently merciless. The closing book turns the whole apparatus on metaphysics itself, asking what can honestly be said about the unconditioned once every escape route has been closed.

This edition gives you a literary translation made for readers today: natural and alive in English, faithful to Spir's substance, to his voice, to his tone and to his images — the dryness, the sudden vivid analogies, the quarrelsomeness that makes him so bracing to argue with.

An opening critical introduction, placed before the author's text, maps the architecture of Spir's argument and the problems it takes up, so you can enter the book with your bearings.

If you like philosophy that shows its work and refuses easy comfort, add this volume to your library.