Books by Leslie Stevenson

Leslie Stevenson taught Philosophy at St.Andrews University in Scotland from 1968-2000, and is now Honorary Reader (retired). He is co-author of Twelve Theories of Human Nature (6th edition), Oxford University Press 2012, and The Many Faces of Science (2nd edition), Westview Press 2000, and author of Open to New Light: An introduction to Quaker spirituality in historical and philosophical context, Imprint Academic, 2012. He is a keen amateur bassoon-player. This is his first attempt at fiction, and though some of his stories contain philosophical or theological themes, they are meant to be enjoyable just as stories.

This book is not aimed at exhuming Kant, but resurrecting him. It is inspired by the Critique of Pure Reason , yet is not about it: perhaps over-ambitiously, it tries to delineate not Kant's metaphysics of experience but the truth of the matter. The author shows rather than says where he agrees and disagrees with the first Critique , in so far as he understood that profound but obscure, over-systematic yet carelessly written, inspiring andinfuriating, magnificent but flawed masterpiece. The book attempts a highly systematic presentation, in which the very form of the work reflects the content of the arguments. Kant is often derided for the extent to which he allows his penchant for architectonic structure to distort his insights, but it is argued that hehad the right instinct in assuming that there must be some systematic way in which the necessary conditions for experience fit together. The contemporary trend in analytical philosophy seems to be towards ever more specialized, jargon-infested work, and there is a need to draw things together into a wider view that can be more generally appreciated.