General Information

Contact Information

Professor:: Abe Stone (abestone@ucsc.edu)
Office:: Cowell Annex A-106
Phone (office):: 459-5723
Website:: https://people.ucsc.edu/~abestone/courses
Zoom link for lectures:: here
Office hours (in person):: Mon. 3–4pm
Zoom office hours:: Mon. 3–4pm; Thurs. 11:30am–12:30pm (or by appointment)
Teaching Assistant:
Karl Fisse: (kfisse@ucsc.edu)

We will read (large parts of) the fundamental text of Kant’s philosophy, The Critique of Pure Reason.

Modality: I will lecture in person in our assigned classroom, but I intend also to live-stream every lecture over Zoom. However, there are three classes I need to cancel due to Passover, however, and to make up for this there will be three lectures on Thursday evenings, 4/18, 4/25, and 5/2, via Zoom only, at the usual class time (5:20–6:55pm). I will also make a recording of every lecture available on YouTube.

Recorded lectures

Course Requirements

Two take home midterms exams, due Tuesday, April 30 and Thursday, May 16 (a choice of essay questions) (each worth 20% of the grade); take home ﬁnal (also a choice of essay questions), due Tuesday, June 11 (60% of the grade). Students who receive an A- or higher on the ﬁrst two exams may choose to write a ﬁnal paper (approximately 8–10 pages) in place of the ﬁnal, on a topic to be discussed in advance with me.

Assignments are due as an attachment via the “Assignments” tool on Canvas. The assignments will be available online and there will be links to them from the online version of this syllabus as well as from my main course page.

Please do not plagiarize. If you do and I catch you, you will receive no credit for the assignment and may fail the course, and you will also be subject to “disciplinary sanctions” from the University. (In contrast: if you hand in an assignment paper consisting mostly of quotes from or paraphrases of other sources you have consulted, properly cited, you will not get a good grade, but you will not fail, either.) If you have any questions about what plagiarism is or how to avoid it, you can ask me, or consult the resources listed on the Library website. For possible consequences of plagiarism, see the Academic Misconduct Policy.

AI policy: I encourage the use of AI assistance with proper caution (i.e., keeping in mind that current AI is often wrong). You may use AI assistance basically in any way that would not constitute cheating if you used a human for the same thing. Similarly, you should cite the AI in cases where you would cite a human. If in doubt, feel free to ask me for clariﬁcation.

Note that all three exams are due by 11:55pm on the due date.

You can ﬁnd answers to some commonly asked questions about my assignments and grading in my FAQ.

Attendance at lecture is strongly encouraged, but it is not a course requirement and I will not be taking attendance.

Texts

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: , tr. Norman Kemp Smith (Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edition, 2007) (ISBN: 978-0230013384).

The above text can be ordered and/or purchased as an e-book at the UCSC Bookstore (Akademos), and are also on reserve at McHenry

If you want to use a different translation you are welcome to, but you should be aware that it may be confusing because translations can differ greatly. Of course, if you know German, you should read in the original.

We will be reading exclusively the text of the second (“B”) edition. Page numbers in both the ﬁrst and second (“A”) editions are marked in the margin of Smith’s translation. In most cases where the two editions differ, it should be relatively easy to ﬁgure out what the text of the B edition says: Smith mostly either prints the B-edition text with A-edition difference in footnotes, or, where there are big differences, prints the two texts separately.