A few years ago I tried to make it through The Critique of Pure Reason, but had to stop because - as many people famously do - I found Kant's writing too abstruse.

In saying that, I'm not dismissing the Transcendental Deduction, I'm just saying that I wish Kant was a better writer.

No one's under an obligation to engage with an argument, and given the choice of whether or not to engage with a poorly written, clichéd, machine-generated one, most people wouldn't be interested enough to bother. Complaining about laziness here is pretty ironic, actually.

▲

chungusamongus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Kant is a better writer than the vast majority of writers. The problem is, the ideas he is trying to articulate are incredibly abstract. Hegel is like this too

▲

skeledrew 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> a better writer

That's highly subjective. I reckon his audience and admirers found him an excellent writer.

▲

wk_end 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Nah, Kant's considered a notoriously poor writer among philosophers. Obviously opinions may differ, but Derek Parfit [0], for instance, wrote:

“It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?'”

(Kind of relevant to this thread actually! Hah!)

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant himself acknowledges that "a talent for lucid exposition" he "cannot regard [himself] as possessing".

FWIW I suppose I am in Kant's audience, as a (long-since graduated) philosophy student.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit

	▲	chungusamongus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fwiw I am much more impressed with the sophistication of someone's argument than i am their writing style. Kant has contributed much more than parfit depsite the abstract nature of his writing and it's not even close.