Rating: 
Summary: Not the industry standard
Review: Those who are, or who are planning to be, students of Kant should know that professionals regard the Meiklejohn translation of the Critique of Pure Reason as substandard. Translations must compromise, but this one compromises too much. In places it shows serious misunderstandings of Kant's intent. The "classic" standard is Norman Kemp Smith's translation, and the new standard is the Cambridge Edition translation by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Even undergraduates should be given excepts from these latter texts.
Rating: 
Summary: The Pinnacle. A Do or Die for any Philosopher .
Review: You can evidently tell from the title of my review that I liked the book. The Critique of Pure reason is a pretty important work screaming to be read by any curious person. The reason I like the book is because it is one of, if not the 1st book, to address the concept of human cognition. In this context, Kant discusses the possible, the necessary, time, and a few other very significant details of our human, corporeal existence. Yes the book is long and tedious but shows Kant's genius in developing a framework of human cognition (previously called 'the understanding' by some classical writers). If Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' doesn't begin to demonstrate, objectively, how the clever cognitve apparatus known as the brain weaves its fantastical web, then you were reading it upside down.Among the many ideas put forward in this opus what stood out as the main thesis to me was the distinction between a real idea and a transcendental one; hence Kant's transcendental idealism. Humans have ideas of course, we have experiences, this is how we live in this world, by our ideas and experiences. Other thinkers, like Locke, would have our ideas be the results of our experiences. Not quite sayeth Kant. Some ideas are completely exclusive of experience. These are the tranascendental ideas, ideas that transcend experience. They're really not worth much, they might be, you can't (no pun intended) tell. Although transcendental ideas can arise independently of experience, they can only be verified by experience. Such an idea, the distinction between ideas proper and transcendental ones is the key idea here. The ultimate verification of either type of idea by some experience is why Kant is known as the father of the scientific method. Verifying ideas by experience is another term for what we now call experimentation. Not that Kant invented experimentation, but that he codified it (well really others did too, like Francis Bacon, but Kant gets the laurel). Ideas help us to interpret the world, transcendental ones are apt to lead us off on paths we don't really want to go down, and for good reason. Cognitively, we might deduce far into the future and conclude that events meet somehwere up there on the horizon. Or we could reverse this process, looking back into the past, like we do with the 'big bang' concept. From where we are in the present, looking far into the future or far into the past, what we appear to see may look like a unity. Well maybe and maybe not. The meeting of events way off up or back there are simply impossible to confirm by experience. In such a case we are left to rely on circumstantial evidence, as with the big bang. For example, there is no overwhelming evidence that what astronomers call the universe actually represents the universe as it is. There are bits of evidence, like ubiquitous microwave background radiation and predominant red-shifting, but the idea of what the universe is in actuality is a transcendental idea; there is simply no empirical way to confirm the existence of such a thing as the universe. Within such cognitive phenomena Kant is our sage. What is really true or false in this world? If you still think the idea of objective reality is feasible then this treatise by the father of the scientific method must not be missed. Don't be fooled by the ethical implorings of Kant's 'The Critique of Practical Reason.' That's an entirely different book. 'The Critique of Pure Reason' is an atheist's dream. After Kant thoroughly exposes the idea of the absolute being as transcendental pish-posh, he does attempt to backpedal some by imploring the faithful to remain vigilant, but too late; he has already pounded the stake into the withering heart of a deity who Nietzsche [my paraphrase] would later lament the passing of. One can never hope to aspire to even a modicum of philosophical being, indeed it's hard to imagine even beginning to think critically, til they've read this work. Buy it, suffer through it (then read Schopenhauer), and maybe, just maybe, you'll have a chance.
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