KANT, Emmanuel; James Sigismund BECK The Principles of Critical Philosophy London: Sold by J. Johnson, W. Richardson; Edinburgh: P. Hill, Manners and Miller; Hamburg: B. G. Hoffman, 1797 £3000 8vo., recently rebound in half black cloth over marbled paper-covered boards; two contrasting green cloth labels lettered and lined in gilt to spine; new textured endpapers; lower edges untrimmed; pp. [vii], viii-lxxx, [iii], 4-454, [ii]; with a few small diagrams printed in text; the binding fine; internal pages lightly and evenly browned, some creases to pages and occasional small dampstains to edges; text a little rubbed in places, with occasional spots and some early manuscript corrections throughout, in an unknown hand; library stamp of the Public Library of Cincinnati to verso of title (with confirmation from the library that this title is no longer listed in the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library catalogue), along with some pencil shelving notes; repeated to page XXI and 454; else a very good example of a very rare work. First English edition of a work which had previously appeared in German the previous year. James [Jakob] Sigismund Beck (1761–1840) was born in Poland, and was the son of a priest who practiced in their home village of Liessau. It was when he enrolled at the University of Königsberg that he first became a student of Immanuel Kant and later devoted his academic career to studying his teacher’s writings. He became professor at the University of Halle, and at Kant’s insistence, he began to publish what would later become a three-volume set of ‘Explanatory Abstracts’ of Kant’s major writings. Erläuternder Auszug aus den kritischen Schriften des Herrn Prof. Kant, auf Anrathen desselben appeared between 1793 and 1796, and is still used today as a compendium of Kantian doctrine. The present volume therefore represents the first English edition of Beck’s insightful criticism, and as such is a very early translation of Kant’s philosophy into the English language. Kant’s three famous ‘critiques’; Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are each based around the central concept of human autonomy, in which “human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In Beck’s exposition, he argues that Kant’s philosophy is primarily geared towards idealism - that knowledge of objects cannot exist outside the realm of human consciousness, and that the idea of God is a symbolic representation of the voice of conscience guiding from within. Beck’s seminal contribution is his ‘Doctrine of Standpoint’ which advocates for “a ‘reversal’ of the method of the Critique of Pure Reason and the elimination of the ‘thing-in-itself’ from Kant’s theoretical philosophy” (Forster). In fact, it was the work of Beck, along with his contemporaries such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, which later led to the emergence of German Idealism. An important early introduction to Kantian thought. ESTC T123243.