Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant · 1781 CE
Excerpt
“Kant argues that theoretical reason cannot settle questions about God, the world in itself, or the soul, and that these limits are provable rather than merely conceded. (paraphrase of the Critique's programme)”
Why the atlas keeps it
The first Critique bounds theoretical reason: the synthetic a priori is real, and it reaches only the phenomenal. The second edition of 1787 reorganises the book around the transcendental deduction. The famous closing passage about the starry heavens and the moral law belongs to the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), not this one. The excerpt below paraphrases the programme rather than quoting a translation.
Terms this text reaches for
Ranked by the codex search index against the summary above, not hand-picked.
Practical reason
philosophyReasoning about what to do, as distinct from reasoning about what is the case.
Moral luck
ethicsCircumstances outside your control that determine how moral you are judged to be.
International law
governanceRules binding on states rather than on systems, with no forum above them.
Goodhart's law
alignmentWhen a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
Scaling law
technicalPredictable power-law relationships between model size, compute and loss.
Moral status
ethicsThe property of counting as a party that can be owed something and can be wronged.