system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it really a bad idea to read the Critique of Pure Reason with no background in philosophy?

I mean I majored in computer science, so I do have some training in logic and being able to think of abstract concepts. 

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I've read the first two sections of Critique of Pure Reason, "I. Of the difference between Pure and Empirical Knowledge" and "II. The Human Intellect, even in an Unphilosophical State, is in Possession of Certain Cognitions “à priori” and I seem to understand what the text saying so far.  

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Does this mean I should be able to read the entire thing? If not, then what would I need to do to get good enough to read Kant? Thanks.
gpt
Notwithstanding his reputation for difficulty, Kant is a very clear writer. He's not perfect: like all of us, there are aspects of his own thought that he takes for granted and so fails to explain well, but he's among the best of us at carefully sorting through his thoughts in a step-by-step fashion, explaining each point along the way, defining each term explicitly, and so on.

The main difficulty with Kant is that it takes much greater sustained attention to follow this rigorous procedure than people are used to exerting. People tend to think that functional literacy is more-or-less a binary condition, and they have it. Though, actually, most people's reading leaves them breezing over much of a text they think they're absorbing and taking note of only a fairly small proportion of it. Precisely because of his rigorous manner, the gaps that our poor reading habits introduce make Kant challenging -- this rigor means that these gaps will tend to omit things we need to have grasped before we move on. To use an analogy, reading Kant is more like following a proof in mathematics than like breezing through the Sunday newspaper.

This applies both in the short term: you need to hold a whole sentence of Kant in your memory to make sense of it, you need to hold a whole paragraph of Kant in your memory to make sense of it. And structurally: Kant will give a definition once, and then expect you to immediately understand the relevant term every other time it appears, and there will be sentences with a half dozen technical terms like this, whose meaning will be obscure if you haven't internalized these definitions. And it's true in the long term: you won't really understand the role of what Kant does in, say, the first section of the text, until you've read 300 more pages after it ends.

But the main challenge is the challenge reading Kant places on one's basic cognitive aptitudes, rather than a challenge on one's background knowledge. If one has strong basic cognitive aptitudes, one can tackle Kant without much background knowledge in philosophy. The difficulty is that one tends not to have the relevant cognitive aptitudes without first spending some time in philosophy to build them up.

Certainly some stuff will be missed without background knowledge. You may be able to follow Kant but, without background knowledge, fail to understand much of his significance -- you don't get what he is responding to, what he's trying to do, and so on. But for the most part you can make some reasonable progress just with strong cognitive aptitudes, if somehow you have them.