A companion or guide to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Question

Which companion, or guide, would you recommend to someone trying to read and understand the original work, The Critique of Pure Reason? Why?

I'm inclined towards these two, The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and A Kant Dictionary, after reading through all the comments there.

[Where I stand, presently]

• have read most of Socratic dialogues, and enjoyed those quite a lot
• have a reasonable understanding of Hume and Kierkegaard
• able to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with adequate understanding -- using online help here and there
• completed some online courses, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and Introduction to Philosophy
• completed an online course, Introduction to Logic -- could't retain all of those formal structure of expressions; but still able to understand by looking back to those again and again
• have, partially, read Aristotle's Analytics; wasn't having a very tough time while reading that, but still remember, didn't find that a light read too

Answer 1

Norman Kemp Smith's Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is absolutely brilliant. Find this commentary on Project Gutenberg; and here is the PDF version.

Answer 2

I recommend you write to Professor John R. Searle of UC Berkeley and request his summary of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

There are two distinctions in this Preface that are fundamental for everything that follows. One is the distinction between things in themselves and appearances and the second is the distinction between those parts of the contents of the mind that he calls "sensible intuitions" by which he means perception, and those parts which he calls "concepts" by which he means the apparatus necessary for thinking. The distinction in short, is between perceptual intuition and understanding. There is also a passage which is ominous and decisive. It is on page 22 and there he refers to "objects, or what is the same thing,... the experience in which alone, as given objects, they can be known". That is to say, that like Hume, he equates objects and experience. [That is the fundamental disaster from which everything follows.]

Answer 3

Complementary to those books, I found a series of lecture on Kant's CPR on YouTube by Robert Paul Wolff, and another series of lecture by Dan Robinson. Both are very helpful, indeed.

Answer 4

Peter Strawson, a wise and lucid writer, devoted much of his distinguished career to Kant, including "The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason"