Why does it seem like the more we think, the less we know? Why does the search for new horizons of the mind always bring us back to the ruins of the past? Is there really nothing new under the sun? In “Growing Past Kant,” Jim Trader provides original and insightful answers to these questions. Through analyzing foundational work done in fields as diverse as philosophy, biology, physics, psychology, and economics, this scholarly tour de force reveals a very specific mental process that underlies how we understand our world. Tracing its development in Western philosophy, this process of reduction and synthesis is lucidly and concisely examined. The nature of this intellectual tool, its uses, its results, what to do when it cannot help us, and some of the truths that lie outside its purview, are all described in thought-provoking detail. This book gives us proof that there are indeed new things under the sun, new territories unexplored yet perfectly hospitable to the mind. It provides us with a compass by which we can steer to find these things, and the means to build new intellectual abodes for ourselves once we do.