In Kant in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Kant's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Kant's work; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Kant within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.
Both Professor Höffe and the translator deserve kudos for this work. Most other introductions to Kant that I have seen are either too superficial, or they retain too much of Kant's heavy writing style (which tends to translate poorly into English), in order to be really useful. By contrast, Professor Höffe's work summarizes everything important in Kant's philosophy in a way that is both insightful and easy to read.
The organization of Professor Höffe's book is very helpful to a proper understanding of Kant's philosophy. This book discusses Kant's life work organized according to the three famous questions that Kant posed, i.e., what can I know? what ought I to do? what may I hope?. This organization retains Kant's original didactic purpose, and helps the reader understand how the conclusions of Kant's moral philosophy are directly connected with his critical analysis of reason itself.
The contributions of Kantian thought to modern mathematics, mathematical logic, and the foundations of mathematics are now widely acknowledged by scholars. As the essays in this volume show, the general development of modern scientific thought--including the physical sciences, the life sciences, and mathematics--can be viewed as an evolution from Kant through Poincaré to Einstein and the logical positivists and beyond. Focusing on nineteenth-century science, the essays--by historians of philosophy, science, and mathematics--trace the multiple intellectual transformations that have led from Kant's original scientific situation to the scientific problems of the twentieth century.
