‘The human being’, Kant contends, ‘is the only creature that must be educated’. Thus, for Kant, the concept of education plays a central role in the answer to one of the fundamental questions of ...philosophy: What is the human being? Education is the means by which the rational powers definitive of our humanity are actualised and cultivated. It is thus the process in which individuals ‘become human’ and, at the same time, the process in which humanity strives to improve—indeed perfect—itself so that it should become possible for us to live in conformity with the requirements of morality in a cosmopolitan realisation of the kingdom of ends. This paper examines the extent to which the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into educational practices forces us to rethink Kant's position. It is argued that the answer depends on whether systems embodying AI are viewed merely as tools to enhance educational practices or as fully fledged thinking subjects, capable of independent thought and agency. While the former view leaves Kant's basic position intact, the latter compels us to entertain certain important revisions, forcing us to grant that education is not exclusively a relation between human beings, as Kant maintains, and that some nonhuman entities might themselves educate and be educated. Moreover, AI might force us to rethink Kant's fundamental question ‘What is the human being?’ itself. I conclude, however, that notwithstanding the challenges AI poses, Kant's perspective retains its relevance even if it might benefit from supplementation and revision in light of post‐ and transhumanist perspectives.
The article suggests a conceptualization of the interrelationship between attention, affect, and aesthetic experience. It supplements classical aesthetic theory by integrating knowledge from ...neurophysiology, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the article proposes a distinction between a variety of types of affect that are discussed with a view to their potential contribution to elaborating the concept of aesthetic experience in the Kantian tradition and to reflecting different qualities of attention.
While the influence of Kant’s practical philosophy on contemporary political theory has been profound, it has its source in Kant’s autonomy-based moral philosophy rather than in his freedom-based ...philosophy of Right. Kant scholars have increasingly turned their attention to Kant’s Rechtslehre, but they have largely ignored its potential contribution to discussions of democracy. However, Kant’s approach to political philosophy can supply unique insights to the latter. His notion that freedom and the public legal order are coconstitutive can be developed into a freedom argument for constitutional democracy. This freedom argument goes beyond freedom as moral autonomy and a libertarian idea of freedom as noninterference to a notion of freedom as a form of standing constituted by the public legal order. The trouble with other attempts to connect freedom and democracy is that they have operated with a moral ideal that is independent of a public legal order.
Although Kant is clearly committed to some version of the Guise of the Good thesis (GG), he only explicitly endorses a very weak version of it; namely, that under the direction of reason, we only ...pursue what we conceive to be good. This version of thesis seems to allow that human beings might act in defiance of reason's directives, and that if they did so, they would not necessarily be engaging in actions that they conceive to be good in any way. In fact, Kant's discussions of pathological motivation and his understanding of imperatives seem to preclude any stronger reading. Despite this evidence, many interpreters, relying on Kant's discussion of self-conceit and the 'incorporation thesis', assume that Kant's commitment to GG extends to all actions; on this interpretation, even immoral actions are pursued under the guise of the good. I argue that the reasoning typically provided in favor of this interpretation is neither compatible with Kant's hedonism regarding non-moral motives nor with his commitment to the epistemic priority of our awareness of moral law over our awareness of freedom. However, the textual evidence that Kant accepted a more extensive version of GG is indeed compelling. I propose that Kant holds the stronger version of GG on distinctively moral grounds; the nature of our awareness of the moral law implies that evil is pursued under the guise of the good.
Immanuel Kant, after formulating the inaugural dissertation - "De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis" - of the philosophy course from 1770, is no longer tributary to others, he ...is no longer either a rationalist or an empiricist, but surpasses both, reaching the pinnacle of a synthetic concepts that are only his. He promotes a dualistic conception and believes that there is a phenomenal world and a purely intelligible (noumenal) world. The latter is unknowable to the human intellect, which can only know the phenomenon. In this world, man can rise through morality, whose key concept is the concept of freedom. To define the concept of law, Kant first makes the distinction between what belongs to morality and what belongs to law; the distinction between what relates to exteriority and what is an internal principle that can also extend to exteriority, but never the other way around. In these conditions, law only acts on the external acts of people, those of human interiority are carried by moral acts, which are superior to the previous ones. Freedom, as seen by Kant, is based on moral acts, even if law is based on reason, it cannot extend its scope to purely internal acts, as they remain outside legal regulations. For an action to be what is called legal, it is enough that it conforms to the law, whatever its motive; but in order for it to be moral, it must, apart from this, have as its motive the idea of duty that the law prescribes.
What is the function of modal judgment? Why do we (need to be able to) make judgments of possibility and necessity? Or are such judgments, in fact, dispensable? This paper introduces and develops an ...answer to these questions based on Kant’s remarks in section 76 of the
Critique of Judgment.
Here, Kant appears to argue the following: that a capacity to make modal judgments using (categorial) modal concepts is required for a capacity for objective representation, in light of our split cognitive architecture. This split cognitive architecture leaves room for a mismatch between our concepts and intuitions and, Kant argues, that is why we need modal concepts and modal judgments. In this paper, I develop this account of the function of modal judgment and to explore the extent to which it may improve upon contemporary alternatives. I focus on one particularly important challenge for the account: to explain why a distinction between the actual and the
possible,
rather than merely a distinction between the actual and the
non
-
actual
, is required. In order to answer this question, I supplement the account with a particular way of thinking about objectivity.
In contemporary philosophy of science many theories of explanation are rooted in positivist or post-positivists accounts of explanation. This paper attempts to ground a phenomenological account of ...scientific explanation by using the works of Werner Heisenberg and Patrick Heelan. To explain something for Heisenberg is to describe what can be intersubjectively observed and conceptualized in an adequate language. However, this needs to be qualified, as not any adequate account will do. While Heisenberg thinks that Kant is right to think that a priori concepts are the conditions which make science, and thus explanation, possible, he also believes pure a priori concepts have a limited range of applicability. Neils Bohr shared this belief with Heisenberg, but thinks human thought can go no further. However, Heisenberg never gave up on the idea that we could create new concepts that act as a priori grounds for quantum entities. To go beyond Heisenberg, I believe that we should look to Husserl’s account of
Evidenz
and the material a priori to help us think about a phenomenological account of explanation.
The essay begins with an examination of Kant's account of wit in the Anthropologie. It argues that Kant's unexpected inclusion of wit in the higher faculty of cognition raises fundamental questions ...about the subject matter of Kantian anthropology as well as its link to critical philosophy. The essay situates Kant's subsequent exclusion of wit from the understanding proper within the context of the shift from critical philosophy's focus on the rational universal subject to anthropology, with its depiction of man as an actor in and for the world. It is within this world that is comprised, first and foremost, of other men, men who differ greatly in the use of their mental capacities, that communication emerges as a necessity. Orderly conversation becomes, for Kant, the primary means for sorting subjective thought into objectivity reality. While Kant acknowledges that wit is both the driver of conversation as well as the very quality of being sociable, he also deems it a standing threat to conversation and the objectivity that is given with it.
PDF
