Understanding Modern Philosophy through Political Philosophy: The Unity of Ideal Subjects—Political, Epistemological, and Moral

Abstract

Francis Slade offers a view of modern philosophy through the prism of political philosophy, thereby departing from the more traditional interpretive route of epistemology. For Slade, reason understood as rule proves the key to the unity of the modern project of philosophical idealism. Modernity's political form, the state, is an ideal entity that is constituted by the rule of a pure, disembodied, and sovereign reason, paralleling the same employment of reason that generates the epistemological cogito of Descartes, the moral legislator of Kant, and the “disinterested and benevolent spectator” of Mill. The rule of modern reason effects what Slade calls the political, epistemological, and moral ideal subjects of modernity.