Paul Guyer (ed.) - The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy

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The Cambridge Companion to Kant was published in 1992. Since that time, interest in Kant has remained strong and Kant scholarship has continued to flourish. When the late and dearly missed Terry Moore, at that time Executive Editor of the Humanities at Cambridge University Press, first proposed this volume, he may have had in mind that the authors of the 1992 text would update their essays and that I would update the bibliography. But it seemed to me that it would be more interesting to produce a very different volume that would supplement rather than supplant the earlier book. I have been fortunate to be able to recruit new essays from some of the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Kant , although in many cases they have written on topics different from those they addressed in that volume. And I have been equally fortunate in signing up a healthy number of new contributors, including both senior members of the community of Kant scholars and several of the brightest new lights in the field.

This new volume is larger than the earlier book primarily because it includes more extensive coverage of Kants moral and political philosophy. The aims of this Companion are also somewhat different than those of the first. To write the history of the position of Kant in modern philosophy, that is, of both his response to previous philosophy and his impact on the subsequent history of philosophy, would be tantamount to writing a comprehensive history of modern philosophy, and at this point in time may well be beyond the capacity of any single person. But I thought that this volume could make at least a start on such a project, and accordingly asked that each essay address both the historical context and the historical impact of the particular topic in Kant that it concerns. Contributors have responded to this charge in different ways, but all have done so in interesting ways. I therefore hope that this volume will not only introduce readers to the extraordinary breadth as well as depth of Kants thought, but also make a start on the project of assessing the extraordinary breadth and depth of Kants influence on the entire course of modern philosophy.

In addition to Terry Moore, who has left the whole series of Cambridge Companions to the philosophers as one among the many lasting monuments to his lifes work at Cambridge University Press, two of the contributors to the earlier Companion , Eva Schaper and J. Michael Young, have also passed away since 1992. They are all remembered here with affection and gratitude. I am also grateful to Beatrice Rehl for her unstinting support in spite of the circumstances in which she inherited this project.