LA FILOSOFIA DI KANT: esposta ed esaminata. Edizione prima veneta.

8vo, pp. 116; woodcut vignette on title; some light staining to last couple of leaves, but otherwise clean; crudely bound in recent maroon wrappers. Very uncommon first Venetian printing of a surprisingly uncommon book, first published in Modena the previous year. One of the last works of the philosopher, translator, and sometime tutor of Manzoni, Francesco Soave (1743-1806). In Italian philosophical circles, Soave had made his name with his translations of Locke in the 1770s, and his empiricist instincts are very much present in his treatment of Kant's philosophy. The dedication, to Francesco Melzi d'Eril, sets out Soave's stall, calling Kant's philosophy one 'that tends to destroy all the ideas and the maxims that had been most firmly established, both in the practical and in the speculative sciences'. Soave, noting that Kant had been largely ignored in France and Italy until the publication of Villers' Philosophie de Kant ou Principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendale in 1801, relies heavily on this latter work, while noting the Latin translation that appeared in Leipzig in 1796-7. The first part of the book attempts to set out the fundamentals of Kant's critical philosophy; the second part examines the theories, in turn, of pure sensibility, pure intellect, pure reason, and practical reason, before presenting a critical analysis of the relative merits of experimental and transcendental philosophy. It is unclear that Soave has fully understood Kant: he argues that 'Kant's transcendental philosophy leans, as we have seen, to the view that all the perceptible world is an illusion, that all the representations which we have of objects are pure phenomena, pure appearances, that all the concepts that we form of them are the pure work of our intellect'. The critical philosophy is, for Soave, not much different from Berkeleian idealism; he concludes that 'Kant's transcendental philosophy can only have place in the land of dreams and chimeras'. Outside Continental Europe, OCLC records one copy, at Cambridge, with copies of the 1803 Modena edition at Columbia and UCLA.