A best seller in Italy, Maurizio Ferraris's Goodbye, Kant delivers a nontechnical, entertaining, and occasionally irreverent overview of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He borrows his title from Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin , the 2003 film about East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which depicts both relief at the passing of the Soviet era and affection for the ideals it embodied. Ferraris approaches Kant in similar spirits, demonstrating how the structure that Kant elaborates for the understanding of human knowledge can generate nostalgia for lost...