Video Resources on Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics

I first encountered Immanuel Kant's thought in this particular text when I was an undergraduate philosophy major, taking a Modern Philosophy class. I'll be honest with you: I did not understand most of that text back then. I expect the reasons I had trouble with it are similar to reasons I’ve found my own students find reading and understanding Kant difficult. He uses what feels like a complicated code as his philosophical vocabulary. And he is working out and articulating quite a complicated system, to say the least.

Last summer, I worked through both the Prolegomena and the Critique of Pure Reason with a very bright young tutorial student, and that got me thinking that it was about time I produced a series of core concept videos on the shorter, simpler, and (according to Kant at least) more straightforward text.

I started shooting the videos in September, and just finished up the series earlier in January. There are forty-one total in the set, covering every part and each key idea in the work. They might well prove to be a useful resource for anyone who decides they’d like to study that text.

If you’d like to get yourself a copy of the text I used for this series, here’s an Amazon affiliate link to the Prolegomena. And now, on to links to the videos, sorted according to sections of the work.

Preface

• Problems With Metaphysics As A Science

• David Hume's Spur To Kant's Thinking

• The Prolegomena And The First Critique

Preamble on the peculiarities of all metaphysical knowledge

• Differentiating Metaphysics As A Science

• Analytic and Synthetic Judgements

• Mathematical Judgements As Synthetic

• Metaphysical Judgements As Synthetic

• How Synthetic A Priori Cognitions Are Possible

• Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Metaphysics

Part one of the main transcendental problem. How is pure mathematics possible?

• A Priori Intuitions

• Intuitions, Space, and Time

• Sensibility, Representation, and Geometry

• How Illusions Arise

• Avoiding Non Critical Idealism

Part two of the main transcendental problem. How is pure natural science possible?

• Nature and Pure Natural Science

• Judgements of Perception and Experience

• Pure Concepts Of The Understanding

• Principles of Possible Experience

• Removing Hume's Doubt About Causality

• Phenomena and Noumena

• Pure and Empirical Laws of Nature

• The System of the Categories

Part three of the main transcendental problem. How is metaphysics in general possible?

• The Peculiarity of Metaphysics

• Syllogisms and Pure Ideas of Reason

• Experience and Ideas of Reason

• The Psychological Ideas

• Cosmological Ideas and Antinomies

• The Mathematical Antinomies

• The Dynamical Antinomies

• The Theological Idea

• Transcendental Ideas and Systematic Unity

Conclusion. On the determination of the bounds of pure reason

• Skepticism, Dogmatism, and Critique

• Bounds and Limits of Reason

• Completion, Satisfaction, and Noumena

• Deism, Theism, and Anthropomorphism

• How Does Reason Set Boundaries?

• Natural Ends of Reason's Transcendent Concepts

Solution of the general question of the Prolegomena. How is metaphysics possible as a science?

• Critique and Metaphysics As Science

• Probability, Common Sense, and Metaphysics

Appendix

• Clarifications About Idealism

• Metaphysics and the Other Sciences

So, there you have it - the entire series of videos, all linked to in one place. Now of course, there’s no requirement that you study Kant’s Prolegomena. You can productively study philosophy without ever choosing to meander down its paths. But if you do decide that you’d like to read that work, perhaps these videos might be of some help and use to you.