Abstract

This speedy and elegant paperback edition of a monograph, first published in 1960, will be welcomed by Kantian student and scholar alike. Kant’s moral philosophy is usually expounded from his shorter and pedagogically independent Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. The second Critique has been commented on rarely, although it both develops morality from the immediate principles of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the context of the eighteenth century theories which Kant evaluated, and completes his negative metaphysic with an acknowledged constructive complement, which deserves to be viewed in the complex detail of his deliberately architectonic thought. Professor Beck’s thorough exposition of both historical and philosophical detail provides an indispensable companion to such an overall view.