Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction: Jill Vance Buroker. Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, x + 326pp., $75 h.c. 0-52-85315-X, $25 pbk. 0-521-61825-8

Jill Vance Buroker tackles the gargantuan task of presenting the entire content of the Critique of Pure Reason in the relatively short space of a textbook with much grace and economy. No specific interpretive thesis binds her exposition, which presupposes familiarity neither with the history of philosophy nor with the extensive Kant literature nor with German. Rarely a page goes by without a precisely formulated and accessible argument, while various inconsistencies infecting Kantian terminology are left at the door. Finally, Buroker does not advocate any radically new picture of Kant and is frequently (though not always) content to select one from a competing set of interpretations solely by stating her preference for a more coherent reading (usually Falkenstein on intuition, Allison on methodological and epistemological issues, and Melnick on substance and causality). All this, however, does not make for a quick and easy read by any means. Buroker chooses a more challenging approach instead: to amass a comprehensive inventory of Kantian doctrines and to explore the issues emerging from a neatly trimmed presentation of these on their own terms, without simply assimilating them to general echoes in other current fields of research.