This book is the first detailed study of Kant's method of 'transcendental reflection' and its use in the Critique of Pure Reason to identify our basic human cognitive capacities, and to justify ...Kant's transcendental proofs of the necessary a priori conditions for the possibility of self-conscious human experience. Kenneth Westphal, in a closely argued internal critique of Kant's analysis, shows that if we take Kant's project seriously in its own terms, the result is not transcendental idealism but (unqualified) realism regarding physical objects. Westphal attends to neglected topics - Kant's analyses of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, the 'lifelessness of matter', fallibilism, the semantics of cognitive reference, four externalist aspects of Kant's views, and the importance of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations for the Critique of Pure Reason - that illuminate Kant's enterprise in new and valuable ways. His book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant's theoretical philosophy.
Kant's Observations of 1764 and Remarks of 1764–5 (a set of fragments written in the margins of his copy of the Observations) document a crucial turning point in his life and thought. Both reveal the ...growing importance for him of ethics, anthropology and politics, but with an important difference. The Observations attempts to observe human nature directly. The Remarks, by contrast, reveals a revolution in Kant's thinking, largely inspired by Rousseau, who 'turned him around' by disclosing to Kant the idea of a 'state of freedom' (modelled on the state of nature) as a touchstone for his thinking. This and related thoughts anticipate such famous later doctrines as the categorical imperative. This collection of essays by leading Kant scholars illuminates the many and varied topics within these two rich works, including the emerging relations between theory and practice, ethics and anthropology, men and women, philosophy, history and the 'rights of man'.
Kant's Critique of Judgment has often been interpreted by scholars as comprising separate treatments of three uneasily connected topics: beauty, biology, and empirical knowledge. Rachel Zuckert's ...book interprets the Critique as a unified argument concerning all three domains. She argues that on Kant's view, human beings demonstrate a distinctive cognitive ability in appreciating beauty and understanding organic life: an ability to anticipate a whole that we do not completely understand according to preconceived categories. This ability is necessary, moreover, for human beings to gain knowledge of nature in its empirical character as it is, not as we might assume it to be. Her wide-ranging and original study will be valuable for readers in all areas of Kant's philosophy.
Angelica Nuzzo offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Kant's theory of
sensibility in his three Critiques. By introducing the notion of transcendental
embodiment, Nuzzo proposes a new understanding ...of Kant's views on science, nature,
morality, and art. She shows that the issue of human embodiment is coherently
addressed and key to comprehending vexing issues in Kant's work as a whole. In this
penetrating book, Nuzzo enters new terrain and takes on questions Kant struggled
with: How does a body that feels pleasure and pain, desire, anger, and fear
understand and experience reason and strive toward knowledge? What grounds the
body's experience of art and beauty? What kind of feeling is the feeling of being
alive? As she comes to grips with answers, Nuzzo goes beyond Kant to revise our view
of embodiment and the essential conditions that make human experience
possible.
The theologians of the late German Enlightenment saw in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a new rational defence of their Christian faith. In fact, Kant's critical theory of meaning and moral law ...totally subverted the spirit of that faith. This challenging new study examines the contribution made by the Critique of Pure Reason to this change of meaning. George di Giovanni stresses the revolutionary character of Kant's critical thought but also reveals how this thought was being held hostage to unwarranted metaphysical assumptions that caused much confusion and rendered the First Critique vulnerable to being reabsorbed into modes of thought typical of Enlightenment popular philosophy. Amongst the striking features of this book are nuanced interpretations of Jacobi and Reinhold, a lucid exposition of Fichte's early thought, and a rare, detailed account of Enlightenment popular philosophy.
Reconstructing Rawls has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. Rawls’s so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a ...newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly toward cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. Robert Taylor believes that it is time to redeem A Theory of Justice’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed.
This is the first comprehensive account of Kant's cosmopolitanism, highlighting its moral, political, legal, economic, cultural and psychological aspects. Contrasting Kant's views with those of his ...German contemporaries and relating them to current debates, Pauline Kleingeld sheds new light on texts that have been hitherto neglected or underestimated. In clear and carefully argued discussions, she shows that Kant's philosophical cosmopolitanism underwent a radical transformation in the mid 1790s and that the resulting theory is philosophically stronger than is usually thought. Using the work of figures such as Fichte, Cloots, Forster, Hegewisch, Wieland and Novalis, Kleingeld analyses Kant's arguments regarding the relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, the importance of states, the ideal of an international federation, cultural pluralism, race, global economic justice and the psychological feasibility of the cosmopolitan ideal. In doing so, she reveals a broad spectrum of positions in cosmopolitan theory that are relevant to current discussions of cosmopolitanism.
In this book, Allen Wood investigates Kant's conception of ethical theory, using it to develop a viable approach to the rights and moral duties of human beings. By remaining closer to Kant's own view ...of the aims of ethics, Wood's understanding of Kantian ethics differs from the received 'constructivist' interpretation, especially on such matters as the ground and function of ethical principles, the nature of ethical reasoning and autonomy as the ground of ethics. Wood does not hesitate to criticize and modify Kant's conclusions when they seem inconsistent with his basic principles or fail to make the best use of the resources Kantian principles make available. Of special interest are the book's treatment of such topics as freedom of the will, the state's role in securing economic justice, sexual morality, the justification of punishment, and the prohibition on lying.
Published in 1797, the Doctrine of Right is Kant's most significant contribution to legal and political philosophy. As the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, it deals with the legal rights ...which persons have or can acquire, and aims at providing the grounding for lasting international peace through the idea of the juridical state (Rechtsstaat). This commentary analyzes Kant's system of individual rights, starting from the original innate right to external freedom, and ending with the right to own property and to have contractual and family claims. Clear and to the point, it guides readers through the most difficult passages of the Doctrine, explaining Kant's terminology, method and ideas in the light of his intellectual environment. One of the very few commentaries on the Doctrine of Right available in English, this book will be essential for anyone with a strong interest in Kant's moral and political philosophy.
This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant's political thought. Isaac ...Nakhimovsky shows how Fichte reformulated Rousseau's constitutional politics and radicalized the economic implications of Kant's social contract theory with his defense of the right to work. Nakhimovsky argues that Fichte's sequel to Rousseau and Kant's writings on perpetual peace represents a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the pacification of the West. Fichte claimed that Europe could not transform itself into a peaceful federation of constitutional republics unless economic life could be disentangled from the competitive dynamics of relations between states, and he asserted that this disentanglement required transitioning to a planned and largely self-sufficient national economy, made possible by a radical monetary policy. Fichte's ideas have resurfaced with nearly every crisis of globalization from the Napoleonic wars to the present, and his book remains a uniquely systematic and complete discussion of what John Maynard Keynes later termed "national self-sufficiency." Fichte's provocative contribution to the social contract tradition reminds us, Nakhimovsky concludes, that the combination of a liberal theory of the state with an open economy and international system is a much more contingent and precarious outcome than many recent theorists have tended to assume.
