Critique of Practical Reason

The late Dr. Heinrich (Heinz) W. Cassirer was the elder son of the famous German philosopher and polymath, Ernst Cassirer. The family took refuge in Britain following the Nazi accession to power in 1933, being Jewish and therefore in obvious, ultimate danger. Professor Cassirer came to Oxford, but not long afterwards he moved to Sweden and then to the U.S.A. His son, Heinz, remained in Britain, becoming a protege of the distinguished British Kantian scholar, Professor H. J. Paton, then professor of logic and metaphysics in the University of Glasgow. At Paton’s suggestion, Heinz Cassirer wrote a commentary on Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, which Methuen published in the late thirties; he also assisted Professor Paton with the last stages of the preparation of the latter’s commentary on the first half of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which he brought out in the autumn of 1936 under the title of Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience. In 1937 Paton moved to Oxford as White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, and Cassirer followed him there to teach as a refugee scholar, concentrating on Kant’s philosophy. In 1946 he secured a permanent appointment in the Department of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow under the late Professor W. G. Maclagan, remaining there until his retirement. In 1954 he published, in the Muirhead Library of Philosophy series, a study on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason under the Kant’s First Critique. But he was already working on the relation of Kant’s theory of knowledge to his ethics, and the first draft of the translation of the Critique of Practical Reason, which now appears posthumously, was completed in 1945.