How do I prepare myself to read Critique of Pure Reason?

Anything other than Kant's own works (metaphysics and Prolegomena basically) is more than you need, assuming you don't intend to become a Kant scholar. You should not mindlessly seek everything there is to be sought in a work but rather savor what really touches you.

With this said, Kant's critique can be heretically oversimplified as salvaging Reason from Hume's extreme skepticism, so reading Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding would be enough to know the kind of thing Kant is tackling, and then get you off from there.

I wrote this in another thread: Read "A history of philosophy series by Copleston volume 1 to 6" so that you understand the basic context of philosophy as a quick run down if you don't already. Since you just want to learn about Kant this should suffice as a general background, it also has a good summary of Kants works so you get a birds eye view of what it's all about. Then buy "A Kant Dictionary" by Howard Caygill and go through the original text and refer to the Kant Dictionary as a reference if you get lost. It's very wild text and feels a bit like a funhouse so you will want these training wheels imo. This should be enough. If you want to learn more just read more original texts by Aristotle, Leibniz, Wolff, etc. This post has some more stuff

Just read it. You're not going to understand 100% of it and will wish to have given up about 50 times before finish it. Don't. Just keep reading it. Take as long as you need.

I really don't understand why people keep suggesting any philosophers but Kant to understand Kant. Any reference to previous philosophers are contained in that book, he name-drops Hume, Locke and Berkely for example. Just read the book. If you still end up confused you can always do some cursory googling to fill in the gaps. Anyone saying you need to prepare for it is being stupid.

I have not read it but as a general rule, one can try to read it "by itself", without having read Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, etc, because even having read all of those, one will probably not get it right, at least not all of it, in a first read, so worst case scenario the person will have to do some research of his own but will be much more prepared and prone to understanding it better in a second reading

what are some other self-cointained philisophers? I've read Descartes is reasonably self-contained. What about Schoppy?

I'd unironically say Hegel, but reading the CPR before will cull the time it takes to "get" "it" by half.

Start with the Greeks faggot

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This and in reality they are more correct than any of the modern philosophers.

Elaborate on what you mean by reading philosophy historically?

Only sub 120 IQs think IQ is important.

Here's what you need to know to read Kant:
1. Aristotle's essence-existence, potency-actuality distinctions, list of categories, and rules of a syllogism
2. Plato's theory of ideas
3. the Rationalism-Empiricism debate
4. Aquinas' five proofs for God's existence
5. the a priori-a posteriori knowledge distinction
6. the simple-complex idea distinction, either as thought of by Locke or by Hume
7. Spinoza's pantheism
8. Berkeley's subjective idealism
9. Hume's problem of causality
10. what a proof is in mathematics
It doesn't matter what you read. You could read Leibniz's Monadology alongside Berkeley's Dialogue Between Hylas and Philonous, or Descartes' Meditations of First Philosophy along with Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. You could even just read several articles on the SEP and IEP on the Rationalism-Empiricism debate and Aristotle's metaphysics. The point is just to understand what came around before Kant, and what he was responding to, which was the debate on whether or not reason or senses are more reliable sources for true knowledge, and what, if anything, can we know through them.
One thing I've already told many people is that Kant's writing style is much more descriptive, ultra-precise, than that of any of the previously listed philosophers. Another thing to bear in mind is that many of the terms Kant uses, like immanent, transcendent, mediate, and immediate, had never been used exactly the way he used them. Therefore, even though a person who'd already read Aristotle, Descartes, and Hume might find lots of familiar topics and vocabulary, they might still not feel too comfortable navigating through the CPR on first read due to both the writing style and the hitherto unencountered vocabulary.
The best suggestion is to go through the CPR very slowly, and to take copious notes on a separate notebook.
It took me a month to get through it, much longer than any philosophical work I'd read prior to this. While reading it, I often found myself going through certain sentences over and over, and even re-reading entire sections until they finally "clicked", but in the end, I feel like it was worth it. I learnt plenty about the human consciousness, thoughts, and the limits of reason.
Patience is the key to understanding Kant.

It's really not that good. His entire thought rests on the idea of a priori synthetic knowledge which is fucking retarded.

also before you read Critique practice with his book "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics" which was literally written by Kant himself as the training wheels intro version of Critique

>How do I prepare myself to read Critique of Pure Reason?
sexual abstinence, nofap

>Immanuel Kant, born Emmanuel Solomon Kantorowicz on April 22, 1724, to Viennese Rabbi, Reuben Kantorowicz, and Malcah Greenberger, was an influential Jewish philosopher

His criticisms of Descartes' cogito ergo sum, Spinoza's pantheism, and three of Aquinas' ways is perfectly valid even if one were to not accept the analytic-synthetic distinction, or to believe in a priori categories.

Kant is one of the best philosophers to read for clarity, you just have to give him time. Everything necessary to understand what he is saying is in the text.

It's still important to understand the a priori synthetic position though

Plato, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Hobbes

Well, it could be possible to patch together the historical context to Kant's Critiques just by paying close attention to the people he mentions and the concepts he uses, but I believe it is good to have at least a rough idea of some of what Rationalists like Descartes and Spinoza had attempted to do by the means of pure reason and a priori knowledge, than it is to just go straight in and have Kant tell you about reason, cognition, analytic and synthetic judgements without having any idea as to why he might be dealing with issues as abstract as these, besides doing it for the sake of coming off as a pretentious obscurantist.

Bullshit. I read Kant's three Critiques and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 20pgs a day in the afternoon, right after my masturbation sessions. Masturbation can, in some people's cases, help them concentrate better than not masturbating would. I can tell you everything about the Paralogisms of Pure Reason or the stages building up to self-consciousness, and I wouldn't I missed out on anything just for leaking some cum.

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>I wouldn't I
I wouldn't say I

I agree, I should have prefaced by saying that. I only mean that it's possible to fully understand what Kant is saying without having a great understanding of his predecessors. His work will seem incredibly boring without it however.