Kantian Terms Research Articles

The “Tower Of Babel” Of Modernity and the Future Prospects of a Nation State

[only abstract in English; full article and abstract in Lithuanian]
 This article discusses the future prospects of nations and nation states in the era of globalization by critically analyzing the theoretical justifications of the philosophical idea that one of the inevitable consequences of globalization is a gradual disintegration of nations and nation states. The origins of this idea are traced back to the political theory of Immanuel Kant, particularly to Kant’s vision of a cosmopolitan, civil society and the concept of the worldwide confederation of republican states. The article introduces an argument that the position that Kant’s vision of the civil society and confederation of states is internally incoherent and utopian, and it should be viewed as a normative moral and political ideal (or, in Kantian terms, a maxim of the practical historical reason that every human being should strive for) rather than as a theoretically coherent and justified political project. This normative ideal of modernity is viewed as the driving force of history, since it facilitates attempts to implement it in practice and achieve the end result – a peaceful, global civil society. In such a state of peaceful coexistence, the nation, as a form of political organization, loses its relevance, and the nation state gets replaced by a cosmopolitan confederation of republican states.The modern vision of a cosmopolitan and apolitical global order is viewed as one of the most important ideas of political philosophy, which has a tremendous influence on the history and geopolitical development of the modern world. It is shown that, for over two centuries, this idea has been both a theoretical and an ideological inspiration for global governance projects. The article suggests that a conceptual “overlap” between the two conceptions of a nation – the traditional natural law and the modern constructivist one – may have been one of the primary reasons of why this idea has retained philosophical and political significance for over two centuries. The article defends the view that this conceptual confusion led to a theoretically and empirically unjustified conviction that the disintegration of nations and nation states will be an inevitable outcome of the development of the modern world, and that this conviction facilitates further political experiments aimed at realizing the utopian apolitical society.

Can human and artificial agents share an autonomy, categorical imperative-based ethics and “moral” selfhood?

AI designers endeavour to improve ‘autonomy’ in artificial intelligent devices, as recent developments show. This chapter firstly argues against attributing metaphysical attitudes to AI and, simultaneously, in favor of improving autonomous AI which has been enabled to respect autonomy in human agents. This seems to be the only responsible way of making further advances in the field of autonomous social AI. Let us examine what is meant by claims such as designing our artificial alter egos and sharing moral selves with artificial humanoid devices as well as providing autonomous AI with an ethical framework modelled upon the core aspects of moral selfhood, e.g., making decisions which are based on autonomous law-giving, in Kantian terms.

Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau, Kant and Marx on the Dialectics of Self-Determination

AbstractThis article argues that alienation (asEntfremdung) should be understood as a particular form of individual and social heteronomy that can only be overcome by a dialectical combination of individual and collective autonomy, recovering a deontological sense of normative authority. If we think about alienation in Kantian terms, the main source of alienation is a denial of standing or, in the extreme, losing a sense of oneself as a rational normative authority equal to all others. I call the former kind of alienation, where persons deny others equal standing as a normative authority in moral or political terms, first order noumenal alienation, as there is no proper mutual cognition and recognition of each other in such a social context. I call the latter kind of alienation, where a subject does not consider themselves an equal normative authority – or an ‘end in oneself’ – second order noumenal alienation (again, in a moral and a political form). In this sense, alienation violates the dignity of humans as moral and political lawgivers – a dignity seen by Rousseau, Kant and Marx as inalienable: It can be denied or violated, but it cannot be lost.

Deontological Originalism: Moral Truth, Liberty, and, Constitutional 'Due Process'

Deontological Originalism: Moral Truth, Liberty, and, Constitutional 'Due Process'

Skepticism and Critique in Arendt and Cavell

In this article I compare and contrast Hannah Arendt’s and Stanley Cavell’s understandings of critique, focusing in each case upon the role played in it by skepticism. Both writers are decisively influenced by the later Heidegger’s thought that thinking as such is, first, the necessary turn to a practice adequate to our situation and, second, something that we shun. They also share the desire to take up this Heideggerian thought in Kantian terms: what is at stake is critical thinking. It is here, however, that they part ways, with Arendt insisting that critique is as incompatible with skepticism as it is with dogmatism, and Cavell insisting that skepticism is the central moment within critique. Arendt’s attempt to ban skepticism from critique forces her into the contradictory position of at once denying and affirming the role of dogma in critical thinking. Cavell, in contrast, is able to shed light consistently upon the question of how citizens might best respond to the new – a task, ironically, that is as central to Arendt’s work as it is to Cavell’s. My argument thus functions as an immanent critique of Arendt, an attempt to demonstrate the need to read her in light of Cavell.

WHAT LEIBNIZ MISSED – OR KANT MISREAD? KANT’S CRITIQUE OF LEIBNIZIAN METAPHYSICS IN LIGHT OF TWO RECENT INTERPRETATIONS

Kant famously criticizes Leibniz for his apparent neglect to observe the difference between two sources of cognition: understanding and intuition. This is the reason that Leibniz supposedly intellectualized the phenomena by identifying them with things in themselves. In Kantian terms, Leibniz fell prey to an amphiboly of concepts which, in the case of his understanding of substance, has led him to assume monads—that is to say, ideal unities which exist in a state of pre-established harmony; for this is the only possible form of community between ideal substances. Distinct versions of this argument can be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, notably in the notoriously difficult passage entitled “On the amphiboly of concepts of reflections”, and in some later writings, such as the Kantian reply to the self-declared Leibnizian Johann August Eberhard (On a Discovery whereby any New Critique of Pure Reason is to be made Superfluous by an Older One, from 1790) or the late fragment What Real Progress has Metaphysics made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (originally from 1793, but published post mortem in 1804).

Incommensurability and Trade

Nir Eyal* and Emma Tieffenbach'This one standard which truly measures all things is demand. This includes all commutable things inasmuch as everything has a reference to human need. Articles are not valued according to dignity of their nature, otherwise a mouse, an animal endowed with sense, should be of greater value than a pearl, a thing without life. But they are priced according as man stands in need of them for his own use.-Aquinas (1964 [c. 1263], lecture 5, ch. 3, para. 981)INTRODUCTIONMany forms of trade-for example, trading for human organs, beaches, votes, and works of art-incur moral opposition.1 For some opponents, makes trade of these forms so morally wrong is incommensurability of relevant value bearers with they are traded for, e.g., money. Different commentators variably complain that goods or services exchanged are incommensurate, incomparable, unsubstitutable, nontradeable, inalienable, or irreplaceable. This is not only possible underlying complaint. Alternatively, one could explain that a market in votes, for example, is wrong because it undermines democracy, and not because of anything like incommensurability. Still, many thinkers anchor their condemnation of such exchanges in incommensurability (or incomparability, and so forth).For example, Margaret Jane Radin criticizes tort practice of paying victims of bodily injury in alleged compensation for they have suffered, because that conceives of harm to injured victim as commensurable with money, as if victim's interest in free of injury were same as or a fungible commodity she possessed (Radin 1993, 59). But, Radin says, the value to victim of freedom from pain and suffering be reduced to money (Radin 1993, 70).Radin opposes additional practices such as gestational surrogacy and prostitution on similar grounds. For her, things like sexuality, wisdom, character, work, and bodily integrity are to (1987). But when they are put on sale, they are conceived as being equivalent to a sum of money, and that can be alienated (1987, 1861). Their commodification, she says, is threatening to personhood because it detaches from person that which is integral to (1987, 1881). She concludes that personal attributes are market-inalienable, meaning that they should not be sold, priced, or even referred to in market terms.Similar thinking has been applied to additional areas of law:Legal theorists like Margaret Jane Radin, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Warner have argued that since merits of certain items-e.g. body parts, pristine beaches, and love relationships-cannot be measured by money, it follows that economic approaches to valuation such as cost-benefit analysis are inappropriate for these goods. (Chang 2001b, xvii)Earlier, legal thinker Joseph Raz asked is wrong with accepting a significant amount of in return for leaving one's spouse for a month. He answered that to do so would carry an undue symbolic significance, and what has symbolic significance is very judgment that companionship is incommensurable with money (Raz 1986,350).Such claims have been made by nonlegal philosophers as well. Michele MoodyAdams seems to ground her objection to surrogacy for pay in irreplaceability of babies with money:Surrogacy for pay requires couple to attempt to put a price on very entity which they believe to be beyond price [for no amount of will compensate them should they be deprived of child]; thus their own assumptions commit them to rejecting surrogacy for pay as morally indefensible. (Moody-Adams 1991, 188)Moody-Adams casts this consideration in Kantian terms: couple cannot consistently resist absolute prohibitions against treating persons as marketable commodities [that] are an important part of . …

On the “negative utility” of Ernst Cassirer׳s philosophy of physics: An application to the EPR argument

This paper tries to reconstruct Ernst Cassirer's potential reception of the EPR argument, as exposed by Einstein in his letter to Cassirer of March 1937. It is shown that, in conformity with his transcendental epistemology taking the conditions of accessibility as constitutive of the quantum object, Cassirer would probably have rejected the argument. Indeed, Cassirer would probably not have subscribed to its separability/local causality presupposition (which goes against his interpretation of the quantum formalism as a self-sufficient condition constitutive of the quantum object, without any reliance on spatial intuition), nor to its completeness requirement (as his partial endorsement of Bohr's complementarity, and his rejection of the Kantian "idea of complete determination", illustrate). By rejecting both of its premises, Cassirer's philosophy of physics thus enables to escape the EPR dilemma, and exhibits what, in Kantian terms, might be called a "negative utility" with respect to physical science. A further investigation of the anti-reductionist utility of Cassirer's systematic philosophy with respect to physics and other "symbolic forms" is finally suggested.

The mission of ethics teaching for the future

The goal of education is the promotion of the intellectual, moral and human skills as well as the character of human beings. In Kantian terms, it is to foster their autonomy. This is a quite strange activity, given most of the influences the environment exerts on human beings (through the media, as well as through commercial, political, and cultural propaganda) are pursuing the exact opposite: compel us to do what they want us to, that is, to act heteronomously. Ethics is quite the only academic discipline whose direct aim is to empower people to do what they should; hence its enormous importance, comparable to its complexity. But all throughout Western history, ethics has also fallen into the habit of promoting heteronomy over autonomy. Such practice claims for immediate correction in such a troubled moment as the initial steps of the 21st century.

Confucian Ethics and the Spirit of World Order: A Reconception of the Chinese Way of Tolerance

Faced with worldwide crises today, the value system based on liberalism has proven to be inadequate on a global scale. There has appeared an urgent need to approach global predicaments from the perspective of a common ethics. In 1993, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions issued a Declaration, “Toward a Global Ethic,” signed by more than two hundred leaders from over forty different faith traditions and spiritual communities. It unequivocally declares: “No new global order without a new global ethic!” This truism leads us to ask: In the construction of a new world order, what moral principle or categorical imperative in Kantian terms can we find in ethical systems of the world that may serve as the spirit of a new world order? This article argues that the Confucian way of tolerance is perhaps a suitable choice because tolerance is now acknowledged as one of the spiritual achievements of modern times and may hold the ethical key to regulating human differences and resolving conflicts involving class, race, religion, nation, and culture. The idea of tolerance is found in all cultural and spiritual traditions, but it is in Confucianism that it was elevated to a moral virtue, a way of life, an ethical theory, and to the exalted status of Dao (恕道) two millennia ago and has remained so since. This article will compare the ideas of tolerance in various traditions, examine the extent to which the Confucian way of tolerance transcends the limitations of regional religions and spiritual faiths, and explore how it may be modernized into the cornerstone of a universal ethics underlying the inner spirit of a new world order.

The role of examples, current designs and ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education

This paper discusses the value and importance of examples in Kantian terms, and how students can cultivate their moral disposition through the use of examples in education. It is argued that students should not just copy or imitate examples automatically, nor appraise them unreflectively and uncritically. They should instead be enabled to think for themselves in the position of the other and consistently, through the use of examples. This paper also discusses the extent to which students in teacher education programmes in Sweden were enabled to cultivate a moral disposition through the use of literature which unveils a design of education in national, European and cosmopolitan terms. However, since it seems that they lacked such opportunities it is argued that they were not enabled to cultivate their moral disposition through the use of the above-mentioned literature.

The Work of Treason in the Age of User-Generated Content Revolution

Gil Anidjar's essay reflects upon the occurrence of revolution in the context of user-generated content: as a self-promulgating and, purportedly, instantly consumable spectacle of power. Anidjar discusses the ‘seeming collapse’ of the temporal distance between the event and its narrative, its actor and its spectator, its survivor and its witness. Drawing on the valuation of spectatorship, in Immanuel Kant's insights on the French revolution, as embodying the significance of the event itself, and invoking the inherent element of ‘danger’ Kant perceived in the act of public utterance of judgment on the event, Anidjar suggests that such judgment may only, in Kantian terms, be responsibly pronounced in the immediate wake of the event as a manifestation of ‘treason’. To seek to endow the revolutionary effort with the urgency of fame will be a necessarily premature gesture, and the shortening of the distance between the event and its judgment an impossible exercise, Anidjar argues, since ‘we have not been granted the power to decide, much less to know whether, by our actions or reactions, we are betraying ourselves or our people or state, or whether we might be bringing about the faithful redemption of that which that people or that state of ours should already have been.’

The Will to Poetry: Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees”

Wordsworth’s greatest poetry represents the most fundamental of human volitions. This is the will to achieve a wholeness of experience that is identical to the will to poetry itself. “Yew-Trees” is an exemplary representation of that will. In the 1815 Preface to his Poems Wordsworth, speaking of Milton’s poetry, locates the structure of the will to poetry — the volition for represented wholeness of experience — in “alternations” between the points of view of “unity” and “multitude.” The meanings and usages of these terms are not self-evident. In fact, the provenience of this terminology and structure are profoundly Kantian, likely derived, most immediately, from F. A. Nitsch’s General and Introductory View of Professor Kant’s Principles (London, 1796). Coleridge, who was himself early indebted to Nitsch’s Kant book and other Kantian sources, willfully repressed yet, in spite of himself, vividly, even if obliquely, recorded his recognition of Wordsworth’s will to poetry and, correlatively, of Wordsworth’s Miltonic and Kantian wholeness of experience, in “Yew-Trees.” In Nitsch’s Kantian terms, Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees” represents an “unconditioned concurrence [that] excludes the conditions of time.” This “mutual concurrence” engenders a simultaneity of effect and cause: (a) The desire or will created by such a whole of experience “inclines to disinterestedness” and “the way to virtue.” (b) The desire or will to form such a “whole . . . may be denominated the grand object of human happiness.” This “happiness” is a fulfillment of the will to the “highest good.” In “Yew-Trees” we encounter, concretely, a will to poetry that is the primary volition to grasp a wholeness of experience. Achieved, as it must be, from the point of view not only of the self but of the coexistence of all the entities of nature, the wholeness of such experience necessarily includes a moral purposiveness aimed at the good of the largest possible community.

Study Abroad and Moral Development

Why should students study abroad? The standard answer universities give cites three types of benefit: academic, cultural, and professional. We argue that this answer sells the value of study abroad short. Just as important as any of these benefits is the value study abroad has in promoting moral development. Drawing on key ideas of the seminal developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, we make the case that study abroad can facilitate moral development, whether one understands morality in utilitarian, Kantian, or sentimentalist terms. It does so by helping students take the perspective of those who are culturally different, inducing the cognitive disequilibrium that is crucial to growth in moral and empirical knowledge, and expanding the scope of feelings of empathy.

Document: Fact and fiction

Abstract In turning to photography the paper explores ways of conveying historical truth. It seems that contemporary art places itself at the very limit of representation in an attempt to remain faithful to historical eventuality. In fact, one is reminded of the type of historical occurrence which can be grasped only through ‘as-if presentations’, to remember the Kantian term. ‘Fiction’, therefore, is no longer opposed to ‘truth’, but becomes its conductor and ally.

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

The unsustainability imperative? Problems with ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ as regulative ideals

Normality is imminently catastrophic. Climate change is a contemporary instantiation of the perpetual sense of crisis that characterises the human condition, and concepts such as sustainability and resilience serve as regulative ideals (cf. beauty, perfection, and truth) in the fight against ubiquitous unsustainability. Unsustainability is an aspect of time, and is thus, in Kantian terms, a fundamental schema underlying the categories of human understanding. Current growth will decay, therefore only as yet unforeseen adaptation and innovation can give humanity more time to encounter the next set of crises. On this account, the arts and humanities operate as a collective memento mori, reminding us of our fragility and fallibility. Only thus reminded can we act with the greatest possible care in the world, but this can never ensure ‘sustainable development’, which remains an inherently paradoxical policy slogan.

A cosmopolitan design of teacher education and a progressive orientation towards the highest good

In this paper I discuss a Kantian conception of cosmopolitan education. It suggests that we pursue the highest good – an object of morality – in the world together, and requires that we acknowledge the value of freedom, render ourselves both efficacious and autonomous in practice, cultivate our judgment, and unselfishly co-operate in the co-ordination and fulfilment of our morally permissible ends. Now, such an accomplishment is one of the most difficult challenges, and may not be achieved in our time, if ever. In the first part of the paper I show that we, according to Kant, have to interact with each other, and comply with the moral law in the quest of general happiness, not merely personal happiness. In the second part, I argue that a cosmopolitan design of teacher education in Kantian terms can establish moral character, even though good moral character is ultimately the outcome of free choice. Such a design can do so by optimizing the freedom of those concerned to set and pursue their morally permissible ends, and to cultivate their judgment through the use of examples. This requires, inter alia, that they be enabled, and take responsibility, to think for themselves, in the position of everyone else, and consistently; and to strengthen their virtue or self-mastery to comply, in practice, with the moral law.

Sensus Communis: On the Possibility of Dissent in Kant's "Universal Assent"

This essay examines the concept of sensus communis (common sense) in Kantian aesthetic theory. Kant argues that sensus communis , and in particular the “universal assent” or agreement of others to an individual’s judgments of taste, is necessary to ground the communicability of subjective aesthetic judgments. The community of others invoked in these expressions of common sense, however, remains entirely virtual, and both Kant and his later readers (most notably Jean-François Lyotard) express uneasiness about extending the theoretical framework to describe empirical aesthetic communities. As a result, the possibility of aesthetic communities built around dissent or disagreement rather than universal agreement appears to be ungrounded, or at least underdeveloped. The essay proposes several possibilities for grounding such dissent on Kantian terms, and concludes with a discussion of recent works by Rei Terada and Daniel Heller-Roazen that explore similar questions, albeit from perspectives that are explicitly outside the Kantian framework. Rethinking and refining the function of sensus communis emerges as a crucial task in the formation of an aesthetic theory that allows judgments to be shared and communicated while still leaving room for disagreement and debate and limiting the coercive demand for agreement.