Kant's Prolegomena (1)

From the worldly despair of Marcuse we now turn to the transcendental dazzle of Immanuel Kant. Kant, probably the greatest of the German idealist philisophers, sought to tackle the skeptical challenge laid down by Hume and others and establish what sorts of things we could definitely know versus which were forever beyond us--i.e. transcendental. His work extends from metaphysics to science to ethics to aesthetics... and beyond.

Kant is surely most famous for his Critique of Pure Reason (aka his "first critique"; he wrote three); but since this Critique runs to about 700 notoriously dense pages, we instead will tackle the Prolegomena, a much shorter work which Kant penned as a sort of introduction and précis of his ideas in his masterpiece.

A PDF of the Prolegomena is available here. Try to use this version or keep it handy so we all have the same page numbers during discussion.

For starters, let's read from the Preface up to Note 1 of "The Main Transcendental Question First Part", or p. 5-38 in the linked edition. Good luck!