Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: In Contemporary American English

Kant felt that his Critique of Pure Reason by its depth and span of treatment was inaccessible to many of his readers, and therefore misunderstood. Therefore, he wrote his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, a kind of introductory primer. Both the Critique and the Prolegomena assert that we cannot know the things in themselves, but only the things as they appear to us. Did Kant achieve his goal of writing a primer? To some extent, yes. For serious students of epistemology, however, one must go beyond the primer and actually read the Critique. Although Kant attempted to simplify and popularize the ideas he had expressed in the Critique, it appears that he just wrote a shorter version of it—it isn’t simple or easy to grasp because Kant’s style of writing is elevated and he didn’t change it for the Prolegomena.