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.
Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is one of the most difficult but also most important of Kant's works. Published in 1786 between the first (1781) and second (1787) editions of the ...Critique of Pure Reason, the Metaphysical Foundations occupies a central place in the development of Kant's philosophy, but has so far attracted relatively little attention compared with other works of Kant's critical period. Michael Friedman's book develops a new and complete reading of this work and reconstructs Kant's main argument clearly and in great detail, explaining its relationship to both Newton's Principia and eighteenth-century scientific thinkers such as Euler and Lambert. By situating Kant's text relative to his pre-critical writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy and, in particular, to the changes Kant made in the second edition of the Critique, Friedman articulates a radically new perspective on the meaning and development of the critical philosophy as a whole.
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.
This book represents the most comprehensive account to date of an important but widely contested approach to ethics--intuitionism, the view that there is a plurality of moral principles, each of ...which we can know directly. Robert Audi casts intuitionism in a form that provides a major alternative to the more familiar ethical perspectives (utilitarian, Kantian, and Aristotelian). He introduces intuitionism in its historical context and clarifies--and improves and defends--W. D. Ross’s influential formulation. Bringing Ross out from under the shadow of G. E. Moore, he puts a reconstructed version of Rossian intuitionism on the map as a full-scale, plausible contemporary theory. A major contribution of the book is its integration of Rossian intuitionism with Kantian ethics; this yields a view with advantages over other intuitionist theories (including Ross’s) and over Kantian ethics taken alone. Audi proceeds to anchor Kantian intuitionism in a pluralistic theory of value, leading to an account of the perennially debated relation between the right and the good. Finally, he sets out the standards of conduct the theory affirms and shows how the theory can help guide concrete moral judgment.
InKant and the Scandal of Philosophy, Luigi Caranti corrects this omission, providing a thorough historical analysis of Kant's anti-sceptical arguments from the pre-critical period up to the ...'Reflexionen zum Idealismus' (1788-93).
Immanuel Kant is rarely connected to rhetoric by those who study philosophy or the rhetorical tradition. If anything, Kant is said to see rhetoric as mere manipulation and as not worthy of attention. ...In Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric, Scott Stroud presents a first-of-its-kind reappraisal of Kant and the role he gives rhetorical practices in his philosophy. By examining the range of terms that Kant employs to discuss various forms of communication, Stroud argues that the general thesis that Kant disparaged rhetoric is untenable. Instead, he offers a more nuanced view of Kant on rhetoric and its relation to moral cultivation.
For Kant, certain rhetorical practices in education, religious settings, and public argument become vital tools to move humans toward moral improvement without infringing on their individual autonomy. Through the use of rhetorical means such as examples, religious narratives, symbols, group prayer, and fallibilistic public argument, individuals can persuade other agents to move toward more cultivated states of inner and outer autonomy. For the Kant recovered in this book, rhetoric becomes another part of human activity that can be animated by the value of humanity, and it can serve as a powerful tool to convince agents to embark on the arduous task of moral self-cultivation.
Kant, Duty and Moral Worth is a fascinating and original examination of Kant's account of moral worth. The complex debate at the heart of Kant's philosophy is over whether Kant said moral actions ...have worth only if they are carried out from duty, or whether actions carried out from mixed motives can be good. Philip Stratton-Lake offers a unique account of acting from duty, which utilizes the distinction between primary and secondary motives. He maintains that the moral law should not be understood as a normative moral reason but as playing a transcendental role. Thus a Kantian account of moral worth is one where the virtuous agent may be responsive to concrete particular considerations, whilst preserving an essential role for universal moral principles.Kant, Duty and Moral Worth is a lucid examination of Kant's moral thought that will appeal to Kant scholars and anyone interested in moral theory.
Palmquist's Commentary provides the first definitive clarification on Kant's Philosophy of Religion in English; it includes the full text of Pluhar's translation, interspersed with explanations, ...providing both a detailed overview and an original interpretation of Kant's work. * Offers definitive, sentence-level commentary on Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason * Presents a thoroughly revised version of Pluhar's translation of the full text of Kant's Religion, including detailed notes comparing the translation with the others still in use today * Identifies most of the several hundred changes Kant made to the second (1794) edition and unearths evidence that many major changes were responses to criticisms of the first edition * Provides both a detailed overview and original interpretation of Kant's work on the philosophy of religion * Demonstrates that Kant's arguments in Religion are not only cogent, but have clear and profound practical applications to the way religion is actually practiced in the world today * Includes a glossary aimed at justifying new translations of key technical terms in Religion, many of which have previously neglected religious and theological implications
In this bold and innovative new work, Adrian Moore poses the question of whether it is possible for ethical thinking to be grounded in pure reason. In order to understand and answer this question, he ...takes a refreshing and challenging look at Kant's moral and religious philosophy.
Identifying three Kantian Themes - morality, freedom and religion - and presenting variations on each of these themes in turn, Moore concedes that there are difficulties with the Kantian view that morality can be governed by 'pure' reason. He does however defend a closely related view involving a notion of reason as socially and culturally conditioned. In the course of doing this, Moore considers in detail, ideas at the heart of Kant's thought, such as the categorical imperative, free will, evil, hope, eternal life and God. He also makes creative use of the ideas in contemporary philosophy, both within the analytic tradition and outside it, such as 'thick' ethical concepts, forms of life and 'becoming those that we are'. Throughout the book, a guiding precept is that to be rational is to make sense, and that nothing is of greater value to use than making sense.
