Approaches to Kant

Steve Shaviro's The Pinocchio Theory is always worth checking out; Shaviro is a masterful writer and is capable of applying high theory to pop culture in surprising and penetrating ways. His recent posting, "On the Pleasures of Reading Kant," shows that Kant's prose style, which causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth among undergraduate students and analytic philosophers, is essential to his philosophical project. Kant's prose, though admittedly dense, slowly builds up, through a dry and precise architectonic, a remarkably fertile -- and also strikingly humane -- humanistic and pragmatic metaphysics.

Shaviro wrote this only a few days after Sir Peter Strawson, whose work The Bounds of Sense made Kant "accessible" to analytic philosophers precisely by showing how to avoid Kant's rhetorical and conceptual tangles, died.