Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik

What it is

This is a 1920 edition of Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics), written by Immanuel Kant. This edition was prepared by Karl Vorländer, who compared the text carefully against the original and academy editions and included a bibliography and index.

Why it matters

Kant wrote the Prolegomena to explain and defend the ideas in his Critique of Pure Reason in a shorter, more accessible form. This scholarly German edition shows how later editors worked to preserve and clarify Kant's original text for new generations of readers.

Look closer

• Why might Kant have written a shorter companion text to explain his larger, more difficult work?
• What does the editor's careful comparison of different editions tell us about how texts are preserved over time?
• How might reading Kant's original German differ from reading a translation?