In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant portrays the supreme moral principle as an unconditional imperative that applies to all of us because we freely choose to impose upon ...ourselves a law of pure practical reason. Morality is revealed to be a matter of autonomy. Today, this approach to ethical theory is as perplexing, controversial and inspiring as it was in 1785, when the Groundwork was first published. The essays in this volume, by international Kant scholars and moral philosophers, discuss Kant's philosophical development and his rejection of earlier moral theories, the role of happiness and inclination in the Groundwork, Kant's moral metaphysics and theory of value, and his attempt to justify the categorical imperative as a principle of freedom. They reflect the approach of several schools of interpretation and illustrate the lively diversity of Kantian ethics today.
In this collection of essays Béatrice Longuenesse considers the three aspects of Kant's philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, his moral philosophy and his aesthetic theory, under ...one unifying standpoint: Kant's conception of our capacity to form judgements. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world - what Kant calls the 'human point of view' - have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgements. Her discussion ranges over Kant's account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgements, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant and his thought.
This book is a study of the second-edition version of the 'Transcendental Deduction' (the so-called 'B-Deduction'), which is one of the most important and obscure sections of Kant's Critique of Pure ...Reason. By way of a close analysis of the B-Deduction, Adam Dickerson makes the distinctive claim that the Deduction is crucially concerned with the problem of making intelligible the unity possessed by complex representations - a problem that is the representationalist parallel of the semantic problem of the unity of the proposition. Along the way he discusses most of the key themes in Kant's theory of knowledge, including the nature of thought and representation, the notion of objectivity, and the way in which the mind structures our experience of the world.
The claim that Rousseau's writings influenced the development of Kant's critical philosophy, and German idealism, is not a new one. As correct as the claim may be, it does not amount to a systematic ...account of Rousseau's place within this philosophical tradition. It also suggests a progression whereby Rousseau's achievements are eventually eclipsed by those of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, especially with respect to the idea of freedom. In this book David James shows that Rousseau presents certain challenges that Kant and the idealists Fichte and Hegel could not fully meet, by making dependence and necessity, as well as freedom, his central concerns, and thereby raises the question of whether freedom in all its forms is genuinely possible in a condition of human interdependence marked by material inequality. His study will be valuable for all those studying Kant, German idealism and the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas.
This book continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in the author’s highly acclaimed book, Kant’s Impure Ethics. Drawing on a wide variety of both published and unpublished works ...spanning all periods of Kant’s extensive writing career, the author focuses on Kant’s under-appreciated empirical work on human nature, with particular attention to the connections between this body of work and his much-discussed ethical theory. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question, “What is the human being” is philosophy’s most fundamental question, one that encompasses all others. The author analyzes and evaluates Kant’s own answer to his question, showing how it differs from other accounts of human nature. The book is divided into three parts. Part One explores the nature and role of virtue in Kant’s ethical theory, showing how the conception of human nature behind Kant’s virtue theory results in a virtue ethics that is decidedly different from more familiar Aristotelian virtue ethics programs. Part Two uncovers the dominant moral message in Kant’s anthropological investigations, drawing new connections between Kant’s work on human nature and his ethics. Part Three explores specific aspects of Kant’s theory of human nature developed outside of his anthropology lectures, in his works on religion, geography, education, and aesthetics, and shows how these writings substantially amplify his account of human beings.
Kant is said to be the first to distinguish between consciousness of oneself as the subject of one's experiences and consciousness of oneself as an object, which he calls transcendental and empirical ...apperception, respectively. Of these, it is empirical apperception that is meant to enable consciousness of any empirical features of oneself; what this amounts to, however, continues to puzzle interpreters. I argue that a key to understanding what empirical apperception consists in is Kant's claim that each type of apperception corresponds to a distinct type of unity of apperception-that is, a distinct way in which representations can be related for a subject. Whereas transcendental unity of apperception requires that representations be actively combined by the understanding, empirical unity of apperception obtains when representations are passively combined by the reproductive imagination. In light of this, I develop a novel account of Kant's two types of apperception, according to which they correspond to a cognitive subject's consciousness of two essential aspects of herself-namely, her spontaneity and receptivity.
The Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is a text of unparalleled importance in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Its main claims are adopted by some and ...rejected by others. A significant number of responses, of both kinds, take the Analytic to apply to all experiences of beauty—most notably, to the beauty of both nature and fine art. Our principal claim is that this assumption is mistaken. The analysis in the misleadingly titled Analytic of the Beautiful applies paradigmatically to judgments of natural beauty. The experience of the beauty of most artworks is different and requires a separate analysis. We detail the modifications required in all four moments of the Analytic and thereby explicate the experience of artistic beauty. This reveals that Kant holds an interesting and historically consequential account of the experience of artistic beauty, which is significantly different from the experience of natural beauty. The analysis further reveals that despite these significant differences, the experiences are both species of a single genus.
Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason was written late in his career. It presents a theory of 'radical evil' in human nature, touches on the issue of divine grace, develops a ...Christology, and takes a seemingly strong interest in the issue of scriptural interpretation. The essays in this Critical Guide explore the reasons why this is so, and offer careful and illuminating interpretations of the themes of the work. The relationship of Kant's Religion to his other writings is discussed in ways that underscore the importance of this work for the entire Critical philosophy, and provide a broad perspective on his moral thought; connections are also drawn between religion, history, and politics in Kant's later thinking. Together the essays offer a rich exploration of the work which will be of great interest to those involved in Kant studies and philosophy of religion.
This paper explores Kant's conception of the relation between philosophy and its history. The idea that philosophy must account for its historical development is often associated with German ...Idealism. On the traditional view, the German Idealists departed from the ahistorical Kantian framework by conceiving of reason in a developmental manner, thus initiating a “historical turn” within philosophy. However, I argue that Kant's sketch of the history of metaphysics in the final chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the so‐called Progress Essay anticipates this turn. Specifically, I argue that in this essay Kant articulates a developmental conception of reason as a basis for understanding the history of metaphysics. My aim is to change the prevailing view of Kant as an ahistorical thinker and to challenge the canonical account of the genesis of the historical turn in philosophy.
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