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When Popper was very young, and read Kant's first Critique for the first time, he found it much too difficult, was 'struck and puzzled by the queer arrangement of the Antinomies", and could simply not "understand what Kant ... might mean by saying that reason can contradict itself" (Autob., 12). Despite these difficulties, however, he could see that the book was about real problems. Although he later complained about Kant's obscure style, which "contributed considerably to a further lowering of the low standard of clarity in German theoretical writing" (OS, 2, 38), he saw immediately, from his first readings, that Kant was different from the verbaust philosophers, who abandon "real problems for the sake of verbal ones' (Autob., 12). He saw through the opacity of Kant's language that Kant's problem was not a pseudo-problem (CR, 93), not a linguistic puzzle (94), but an interesting and inescapable problem (93), or a "problem which could not be dismissed" (94). Kant's obscurity, then, was not for Popper of that kind he attributes to incompetence, or to the attempt to impress people by words (Replies, 977).

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-7704-5_2

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