Why kant why?

Hey there :-D

Yeah, Kant's a pain; very dense stuff. I recall Locke as being tough, too (it's been a while since I read 'em).

Hi, Boss, welcome to the monkey house . . .

The Critique of Pure Reason is awefully damned abitious of you. It is bound to be difficult, given the necessary bases for discussion.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is a piece of crap, in my never humble opinion. A good way to start with ol' Freddy is to begin at the beginning: The Birth of Tragedy. He was a philologist, properly speaking, which means he studied the origins and meanings of words, and the origins of meanings. Kaufmann's The Portable Nietzsche is worth having, if you have a real interest. Nietzsche, unfortunately, tended to write aphoristically, which makes his work as susceptible to wierdo interpretaton as the the Bible. Kaufman does a good, balanced job. I would also highly recommend to you Ecce Homo and Beyond Good and Evil.

Good luck, Boss--your reading list makes you look like a glutton for punishment.

(P.S.: Zarathustra was his attempt at writing something popular, in a literary style. I personally feel it was a miserable failure.)

Re: Why kant why?
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is incredibly difficult; people are still trying to figure it out more than 200 years after Kant wrote it. On the other hand, it is arguably the seminal philosophical text since Aristotle, so if you're serious about philosophy you must, eventually, attempt to tackle it.

Kant is easier if you have a grounding in Hume, since it was reading Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that "woke Kant from his philosophic slumbers." Also, you should have some familiarity with Descartes and Berkeley.

On the other hand, I find Nietzsche to be comparatively easy. Granted, Thus Spake Zarathustra is rather mystical (I have a higher opinion of it than does Setanta, but it's still fairly opaque); you'll get a much better sense of his philosophy in his Geneology of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil.

thanks for the tips guys, I know Critique of Pure Reason is very significant so I will have to tackel it, and I probably should have read some of nietszche's other works before zarathustra.


- and can someone define a priori for me :O

A useful site for definitions of philosophical terms.

Are you reading them in the original German, or in translation?

I read the Critique of Pure Reason in intro (yes, in English). It was rather convoluted, but not incredibly difficult. It was easier than my stats at any rate.

A priori means knowledge without experience

truth
By all means, read and digest all of Nietzsche BEFORE Thus Spake Zarathustra.

I like the Critique of Pure Reason, but it mirrored some things I'd been thinking about previously, so it was a little easier for that reason. It was also much more interesting than most of the crap I was reading for my other intro classes.