First Lines: On Not Knowing the Answers to Questions Raised by Knowing

Who wrote this?

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

Immanuel Kant, of course. Except Kant wrote in German . . . and was no more perspicuous for doing so. He meant, of course, that some of the knowledge we actually have generates additional questions which are both insistent and unanswerable.

Here, for example, is a question for Kant’s claim, a question that is itself insistent: How did Kant know such a thing? As far as I can tell, the question is unanswerable.

Note: The above quotation is the first line in the Preface to the First Edition of Kant’s frequently impenetrable book Critique of Pure Reason, in the translation by Norman Kemp Smith.

Thought for the Day—January 3, 2010

“After 20 years, I’m still getting paid to learn how to read, write, teach, and do philosophy.”

—RDG

Thought for the Day—December 13, 2009

I don’t know when. I don’t know how. But I do know why. —RDG