Immanuel Kant's
Critique
trans. by Norman Kemp Smith

History of this electronic edition of Kant's Critique

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Norman Kemp Smith's translation
About the electronic edition of Kemp Smith's translation of the Critique
[ The original HKBU-edition and the present CUHK-edition ]
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Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Norman Kemp Smith's translation
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is no doubt one of the greatest books of Western philosophy. The book is epoch-making both as the foundation stone of Kant's "critical philosophy" and as a watershed dividing the dogmatic and critical mode of thinking in the history of Western philosophy. Kant published this work in two editions in his own life time, appeared in 1781 and in 1787 respectively, usually referred to as Edition A and Edition B)
The translation of the Critique from the German original into English has also a long history. Schopenhauer nearly became the first translator if he followed through his original intention. To this day the English speaking world has seen three translations of the Critique. The first translation was published by J.M.D. Meiklejohn in 1855. The second translation appeared in 1881 through the labour of Max Müller. These two translations, making use of the second and the first original edition respectively, were very soon superseded by the third translation provided by Norman Kemp Smith in 1929.

To satisfy the English readership's urge for a translation that covers both of Kant's original versions Kemp Smith based his translation not on either of the editions alone, but on a parallel edition (with A/B paginations) provided by Raymund Schmidt (1925/26). Kemp Smith exceled his two predecessors in being himself a dedicated Kant scholar. His Kant scholarship, though very much challenged today, is testified by his A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' which appeared as early as 1918.

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About the electronic edition of Kemp Smith's translation of the Critique
The HKBU edition :
The electronic version of Kemp Smith's text was originally prepared by Stephen Palmquist of the Hong Kong Baptist University. The text was placed in the Oxford Text Archive in 1985 for private dissemination.

Steve told me that the text was scanned in and repeatedly proofread over years of personal use. In preparing the electronic text, page numbers of the English text (but not the original A/B pagination) were reproduced. Line structures (including all end-of-line hyphens) were also preserved (by using the <pre> and </pre> markup tags). With these two features, the electronic text prepared by Palmquist conforms by and large with the page layout of the paper version of the Kemp Smith text as was published by the MacMillan Book Company.

Steve also used the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP) to generate a concordance and a word index for the Kemp Smith translation. The WWW version of the Kemp Smith text together with the concordance and index output files (not online searchable) made their first appearance in October 1995, in the Hong Kong Baptist University where Steve is working.

The CUHK edition:
Soon after the appearance of Kemp Smith's translation of the Critique at the HKBU, initiative was taken at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to further process the text. The first step was to set up an online searchable index and have it appended to the HKBU edition of the Kemp Smith text, enhancing thus the overall value of the electronic edition of the Critique.

Basic features of the online search engine:

  1. Boolean operation supported
  2. Text unit(s), line number(s) (with reference to file containing the text unit), and the line(s) of text containing search argument(s) returned for each matching string
  3. Clicking on the index output brings the user to the very line of the respective text unit

After the construction of the online search engine, it gradually turns out that, for the search engine to be effective, some major modifications have to be made on the text database files themselves. In this regard, we again have to thank Steve for giving his consent for such a move. Steve even sent us some of the original working copies of his database to facilitate the setup of this present CUHK edition. For timing and manpower reasons, the restructuring of the text database files has to be carried out in stages, starting with more urgent and structural related matters. Other more labour intensive work has to be done sometime in the future, probably during summer vacation!

Modifications made in the CUHK edition:

  1. The Critique is divided into 21 (instead of 8 as in the HKBU edition) text units, each entailing a more or less unique theme of philosophical significance. Shorter text units also quicken text retrieval.
  2. While still maintaining the page layout and line structure of the English text, all end-of-line hyphens (except hard hyphens) are removed. The dehyphenated words are put either at the end of the preceding line or at the beginning of the following line (depending on calculation with a Perl script). Removal of end-of-line hyphens was necessary for more accurate search results.
  3. The online search engine has been debugged and revised to work on this new (CUHK) edition.
  4. An internal page/line concordance was created so that, in the search output, page numbers of the MacMillan text together with line numbers (with reference to the respective pages) are returned. In this way, our online search engine becomes an indispensible tool for all serious students of Kant using the MacMillan text of the Critique.

Modifications planned for the future:

  1. The Original A/B pagination will be restored.
  2. All original footnotes will be separated from the main text to improve text flow.
  3. All alternative readings (Lesearten), emendations etc. left out in the HKBU edition will be reinstated.
  4. The online search engine will be overhauled to keep in line with whatever changes made.

Try our search engine now
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This Kant's Critique of Pure Reason archive has been visited times since March 1, 1996
The current Hong Kong time is

Page set up by Tze-wan Kwan and Chong-fuk Lau, Programme for Humanities Computing and Methodology, Research Institute for the Humanities, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Page is still under construction. Comments, opinions or bug reports either of the text itself or of the search engine are very much welcome!
Page created on: October 22, 1995
Last updated on: March 1, 1996

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