Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

Kant's most famous book, that I'd been wanting to read for a long time. This is my first time reading a work by Kant, and I was surprised to find that it was (or at least what I have read so far was) much easier to understand than I'd expected, although I think that prior knowledge of his metaphysical philosophy is still required. 

  

The book is, however, by no means an easy read. Kant writes with less structure compared to Wittgenstein, and tends to say a lot to get a single idea across, unlike Nietzsche, the two philosophers whose works I have written about in earlier posts, making the book unnecessarily confusing. For example, he mentions that "we cannot have any external intuition of time" in §2 of Transcendental Aesthetic, and only explains why that was the case in § 7. 

Some say that he does this on purpose to make his readers think and to discourage stupid people from reading the book, so as to avoid being misunderstood. I myself am still towards the beginning of Transcendental Analytic (about a fifth into the book), and am reading another book (on which I will make another post soon) every few pages to give my eyes and brains rest. I must say that if I hadn't heard that Kant made the book so unclear on purpose, I would not have bothered reading his own works at all, as it is his ideas rather than his writing that are interesting. 

The ideas explored in the book, on the other hand, excite me as much as Wittgenstein's did when I was reading about him, and would definitely recommend everyone to take a look at them at some point. What I love about Kant, Descartes, Wittgenstein, along with other philosophers, is that they realise that we are limited, and although metaphysics is a subject with no practical use, awareness of one's restriction (and identification of it where possible) is a valuable lesson.

TL;DR Don't read the book because it explains things badly and his philosophy, which you really should check out, is explained in all corners of the Internet, as well  as in innumerable books in all the languages you can name.