Kant's Thinking Research Articles

Evil, virtue, and education in Kant

For Kant, we cannot understand how to approach moral education without confronting the radical evil of humanity. But if we start out, as Kant thinks we do, from a morally corrupt state, how can we make moral progress? In response, I explore in this paper Kant’s gradualist and revolutionary accounts of moral progress. These differing accounts of progress raise two key questions in the literature: are these accounts compatible and which type of progress comes first? Against other views in the literature, I argue that gradual progress through a change of mores must come first and can gradually lead toward, as its ideal endpoint, a revolution in our disposition (or a change of heart) and the overthrowing of our radical evil. This has important implications for moral pedagogy.

William James and 18th-century anthropology

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science (in particular biology and medicine) and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology.

Gottlob Ernst Schulzes skeptizistische Kant-Kritik in ihrer Relevanz für Arthur Schopenhauers Systemkonstitution

Abstract: In 1792, Gottlob E. Schulze published one of the most important treatises in the era of the early critical reception of Kant’s transcendental philosophy: the skeptical treatise Aenesidemus. One of Schulze’s later students was the young Arthur Schopenhauer, whose examination of Kant’s philosophy was significantly influenced by Schulze. In this paper, it shall be established that this influence isn’t limited solely to the details of Schopenhauer’s critique of Kantian thinking, but rather extends to the systematic unfolding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a whole. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation can be understood as a direct, positive answer to the questions left open by Schulze’s debate on the internal problems of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

„Nichts“ (Rosenzweig) ir „Il y a“ (Levinas) problema kaip asmens tapatumo koreliatyvumas

The relation between the abyss of death and the human identity is constitutive for the thought of the dialogical thinkers Rosenzweig and Levinas. For Rosenzweig, the Nothing is the end point of Kantian thinking. Death, as the existential experience of this nothingness, was the reality of everyman during the violent decades at the turn of the century. Rosenzweig took this nothingness as the starting point for rethinking and safeguarding human identity. Human identity is a dam against nothingness. But human identity is also open to alterity. In his early texts, Levinas makes a similar move. The there is is the starting point of human identity. Levinas develops a dialectical phenomenology starting from death. Human identity is interpreted as hypostasis. But in Totalite et Infi ni, an important shift takes place. The starting point is now found in human identity as desire. The there is comes to the centre as the flip side of the elementale and human identity is interpreted as separation. Keywords: Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, Levinas, Totality and Infi nity, human identity, nothingness, there is, hypostasis, separation, Kant, Nietzsche, Meinecke, Schelling. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/zz.2017.15

Kant\u2019s epigenesis: specificity and developmental constraints

In this paper, I argue that Kant adopted, throughout his career, a position that is much more akin to classical accounts of epigenesis, although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms. I argue that this is because Kant (1) thinks of what is pre-formed as a species, not an individual or a part of an individual; (2) has no qualm with the idea of a specific, teleological principle or force underlying generation, and conceives of germs and predispositions as specific constraints on such a principle or force. Neither of these conceptions of what is “preformed”, I argue, is in strict opposition to classical epigenesis. I further suggest that Kant’s lingering use of preformationist terminology is due to (1) his belief that this is required to account for the specificity of the specific generative force; (2) his resistance towards the unrestricted plasticity of the generative force in radical epigenesis, which violates species-fixism; and (3) his insistence on the internal, organic basis of developmental plasticity and variation within species. I conclude by suggesting that this terminological and interpretative peculiarity is partly due to a larger shift in the natural philosophical concerns surrounding the debate on epigenesis and preformation. Specifically, it is a sign that the original reasons for resisting epigenesis, namely its use of specific, teleological principles and its commitment to the natural production of biological structure, became less of a concern, whereas unrestricted plasticity and its undermining of fixism became a real issue, thereby also becoming the focal point of the debate.

The Metaphysics of the Epigenesis of Reason

It is not enough to say, Jennifer Mensch argues, that, in addition to his more familiar interest in reconciling Newtonian physics and Leibnizian metaphysics, Kant nurtured an abiding awareness of the life sciences of his day. These were not inert, isolated interests, but productively interrelated moments of a broader view. Indeed, the connection between Kant's understanding of the nature of cognition and the nature of organic generation is so thoroughgoing, Mensch claims in the final chapter of the book, that getting to the bottom of the central sections of the Critique of Pure Reason demands reflection on the significance of Kant's pervasive employment of organicist language.1Mensch's claim is not primarily literary, though Kant's Organicism does evince a remarkable sensitivity to the philosophical water carried by rhetorical and linguistic choices. It's not simply that Kant wraps his understanding of reason, cognition, and the mind in organic metaphors. Rather, Kant's regular participation in debates central to the incipient life sciences provided the intellectual parameters within which he first formulated his now-famous questions regarding the possibility of pure cognition and then develops powerful conceptual resources to respond to those questions. As Mensch writes, Kant prepared to borrow freely from the models and vocabulary of the embryological debates then underway. Indeed . . . it was these models that would eventually help Kant discover the origin of knowledge itself.2A central moment in Mensch's reconstruction illustrates this point nicely. In his 1770 Dissertation, Kant distinguishes between sensible and intellectual concepts. Sensible concepts are abstracted from sense experience. Intellectual concepts, Kant argued in 1770, cannot be innate, but neither can they be gleaned from sense experience. They are instead the product of an original acquisition. Just what this original acquisition amounts to, though, remains unclear in the Dissertation. No matter, for Mensch points us to a series of notes written between 1769 and 1776, showing that Kant had come in the first half of the 1770s to see that his understanding of the original acquisition of intellectual concepts-what would become the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique-was intimately connected to his reflections on epigenesis. Crusius explains the real principle of reason on the basis of [preformationism], Kant writes, Locke on the basis of [physical influx] like [Aristotle]; Plato and Malebranche, from [intellectual intuition]; we, on the basis of epigenesis from the use of the natural laws of reason3 The connections Kant established between his work on the origin of concepts and the biological theories of generation effectively resolved the earlier problem and ushered in the even more vexing problem of the connection between representations of different origins. This new problem, the problem of the deductions, would in time, Mensch argues, also find its answer in Kant's organic model of the mind.Mensch's book has convinced me that the development of Kant's thinking about the nature and limits of cognition in the 1760s and 1770s was deeply informed by his understanding of debates in the life sciences during that period. What I would like to explore is the question of just how deeply into the critical philosophy Kant's organicism penetrates. To what degree can the intellectual context in which Kant came to articulate his critical philosophy be separated from the critical philosophy itself? How tightly bound to the details of eighteenth-century conceptions of organic unity and development are the core concepts of Kantian transcendental philosophy? And what does Mensch's excavation of the context of discovery of transcendental philosophy imply for current efforts to marry Kantian insights to contemporary interests and commitments?4 To my mind, all of this turns on how we are to understand the character of the contribution Kant's thinking about the life sciences makes to the more familiar doctrines and strategies of transcendental idealism. …

Contractualist reasoning, HIV cure clinical trials, and the moral (ir)relevance of the risk/benefit ratio

Institutional review boards (IRB) normally require of a morally defensible clinical trial that any trial participant will benefit from the inquiry, or at least not be exposed to a significant...

Habitual Desire: On Kant’s Concept of Inclination

AbstractTamar Schapiro has offered an important new ‘Kantian’ account of inclination and motivation, one that expands and refines Christine Korsgaard’s view. In this article I argue that Kant’s own view differs significantly from Schapiro’s. Above all, Kant thinks of inclinations as dispositions, not occurrent desires; and he does not believe that they stem directly from a non-rational source, as she argues. Schapiro’s ‘Kantian’ view rests on a much sharper distinction between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul. In the process of explaining these (and other) differences, I argue that Kant’s own view is in some respects philosophically superior to Schapiro’s.

Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things by Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance: Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. 336 pp.Empire of Chance investigates the codependence of the transformation of chance into an organizational of modern reality and the cultural predominance of war in European cultural memory. Engberg-Pedersen opts to demonstrate that the state of war-an epistemological mode whose origins he locates in the Napoleonic and Revolutionary Wars-has become emblematic of the modern perception of the world. cipher of war, he argues, has had far-reaching ramifications, which can be scrutinized in literary texts negotiating this epistemic transition. To Engberg-Pedersen, fills two roles in the kind of discourse analysis that he proposes: first, literature as a medium plays a privileged role because it conjures a dynamic empirical field (246). Aesthetic choices, such as replacing the traditional sequence of narrative with an unpredictable set of events, evince a new perception of reality. Thus, in his reading of Tristram Shandy, Engberg-Pedersen argues that the novel, which refers to battles in its plot, develops a poetics of contingency that makes chance its organizational principle (27). Second, concurrently to its experimentation with a given discourse, negotiates the cultural inf luence of this discourse by challenging the conditions that gave rise to its centrality: within the military discourse also occupies the position of the outsider. It is itself a prism in which the military discourse is broken into the different rays by way of a metareflection on its claims and suppositions (247).The first chapter presents the state of war in the eighteenth century as a catalyst of narratological innovations in the modern novel. Chapter 2 centers on the influence of the state of war on German idealism in challenging Kantian thinking, whose dogmatism appeared to pertain to times of peace. Chapter 3 examines how war provoked skepticism about the ability of the subject to apprehend the empirical world and question the validity of human sensibilities and the effectiveness of human judgment. Chapter 4 seeks to connect emerging pedagogic strands in modernity, such as antidogmatic education tuned toward real-life circumstances, to lessons learned on the battlefield. Chapters 5 and 6 center on changes in cartography in the nineteenth century. They propose that the state of war evinced a new perception of space as territories to be invaded, fought over, and ultimately conquered. Literature radically amends the functional use of objects instrumental for warcraft, as seen in the appearance of maps in literary texts, thereby employing its critical role as an outsider to the discourse on war.War diverges significantly from other ciphers that have been described as important for modernity: war undergirds the perception that disorder is inherent to human existence by challenging the ability of the subject to understand reality. This assumption underlies the book's approach to discourse analysis. author takes issue with Foucault's description of the epistemological disjunction that occurred with the rise of history as a leading paradigm around 1800, which dictated a radical turn from metaphysics to a focus on empirical objects. Reiterating the view of modern epistemology as disrupted, Engberg-Pedersen contends that chance refutes the apprehension of the world through empiricism: The state of war is articulated in a diverse range of forms, materials, and genres that all, with shifting emphases, respond to the disappearance of a secure foundation of knowledge (246). disruption of reality is the logical result of the loss of the ability to make sense of the world altogether. …

Warm glow of giving collectively – An experimental study

We report on an experiment to test for a warm glow of giving collectively. Comparing subjects’ affective state before and after the experiment, we find that individual charitable donations create a feeling of warm glow while collective donations do not. Proposing to donate the full endowment collectively improves subjects’ affective state significantly, though the behavioral data suggests that this result cannot be explained by the notion of expressive voting. We also find that subjects who consider Kant’s Categorical Imperative to be an important guideline for individual decisions are more likely to donate the full endowment to charity. This result supports the notion of Kantian thinking as an independent factor explaining cooperative behavior (Roemer, 2014).

MAKNA BERAGAMA MENURUT IMMANUEL KANT DALAM RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASONALONE

The searching oflmmanuel Kant's thought in this paper will try to explain his ideas concerning to the meaning of religion from his critical philosophical perspective by set up from his work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. That work, will show later, is one of important Kant's work, especially concerning the relation between reason, religion, and morality. Although Religion could be classified as a work in philosophy of religion's field, however Kant's writing style in this work was not in popular fashion as commonly the work in philosophy of religion's field to be written. Kant's views ofreligion and the meaning ofbeing religious in this work are closely related to the moral frame work that he explained in his other works. The writer underlines some important points of Kant's thoughts: First, Religion has showed Kant's interest to religious problems, especially concerning religious meaning, in relation to morality and rationality. Second, the main discussion in Religion is about religious meaning. Third, Kant's explanation to religious meaning in Religion could be traced in to areas, i.e. individual area and social-community area. Fourth, the core of religious meaning in Religion is situated to Kant's implicit invitation to shift from just as ''having religion" to the ''being religious", or from having religious falsely to being religious authentically. Fifth, being religious or to be religious authentically is a representation of critical religious attitude.

Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences

Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences

Kant's Thoughts on Morality and Happiness

Morality makes the rational ontology and happiness make the perceptual phenomenon world, both of which have different qualitative regulation due to the binary world and human’s duality, which leads to the opposition and conflict. In order to solve the conflict between them, realizing reunification, namely “good”, Kant puts forward the famous “immortal soul” and “God exists” suspension set.

The Square of Opposition: From Russell's Logic to Kant's Cosmology

In this paper, I will show to what extent we can use our modern understanding of the Square of Opposition in order to make sense of Kant's double standard solution to the cosmological antinomies. Notoriously, for Kant, both theses and antitheses of the mathematical antinomies are false, while both theses and antitheses of the dynamical antinomies are true. Kantian philosophers and interpreters (including Schopenhauer, for example) have criticized Kant's solution as artificial and prejudicial. In the paper, I do not dispute such claims, but I show that our modern understanding of the Square of Opposition enables us to more naturally deliver the result Kant was aiming at. Accordingly, the paper does not pretend to be exegetically accurate. It is an attempt to revise the antinomies with the help of standard classical logic. And although such a revision entails some re-interpretation, in the end, it will actually help to unveil some of Kant's thoughts.

Self-Improvement: An Essay in Kantian Ethics. By Robert N. Johnson. (Oxford UP, 2011. Pp. I + 174. Price £27.50.)

One of the distinguishing features of Kant's ethics is its recognition of duties that are owed to oneself. Among such duties is the duty to develop one's natural abilities, which is the subject of Robert Johnson's recent work. Self‐Improvement offers an extended argument for a non‐derivative duty to develop oneself in non‐moral respects. As Johnson describes it, ‘my project is not so much concerned with what Kant's own views were on the subject as it is trying to construct a defensible position regarding such an obligation grounded in a broadly Kantian ethical theory’ (p. 4). Self‐Improvement's argument takes as its starting point Kant's thoughts on the nature and extent of the obligation to develop our natural capacities, which Johnson summarises in ch. 2. Kant classifies the duty of self‐improvement as a wide, imperfect duty. Johnson offers an account of the significance of this classification that is thorough and lucid. He reminds us that while the duty of self‐improvement is wide enough to leave room for inclination to play a role, the duty nonetheless requires agents to choose in the context of rational reflection and deliberation about the sort of life they wish to lead (and can reasonably expect to achieve), deliberation which necessarily occurs in the context of particular cultural practices and traditions. The duty of self‐development, Johnson tells us, ‘is a duty to “broaden” ourselves as much as to perfect some particular ability’ (p. 34).

Intended’ and ‘Experienced’ Meaning: Reevaluating the Reader-Response Theory

Typically, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has been discussed in the context of epistemology, the study of human knowing. However, one aspect or implication that scholars seem to have missed is the relevance that Kant’s theory has for the field of literary criticism; in particular, its relation to the “Reader-Response” theory.In this paper, we will reexamine the basic claims of the Reader-Response and ask whether one may draw a connection between the assertions of Immanuel Kant – that truth is construed by the observer – and of proponents of the Reader-Response theory. As it is commonly accepted, the Reader-Response proponents believe that the reader of a given text should receive a more prominent role than he or she is given in the traditional schools of literary criticism. That is, “instead of asking ‘what does this sentence mean?’ one should ask ‘what does this sentence do?’ “ (R. Williams, Literary Meaning). In other words, as soon as a reader approaches the text, he or she “compromises” its meaning by the mere fact of experiencing it. Accordingly, we will want to examine the link between Kantian thinking and the premises that operate behind the logic of the Reader-Response arguments. Without attempting to acknowledge a direct influence of Kantian logic on the Reader-Response theory, we will show that Kant’s epistemology did influence the wider context of philosophy, science and literature and that this influence must be taken into account. We will also want to ask whether criticism of Kantian epistemology may be used against the Reader-Response logic. We will consider the arguments of several of the more important authors who have written on this subject, but will state a more personal, and perhaps controversial, understanding of the issue. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p519

Moral Evil, Freedom and the Goodness of God: Why Kant Abandoned Theodicy

Kant proclaimed that all theodicies must fail in ‘On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy’, but it is mysterious why he did so since he had developed a theodicy of his own during the critical period. In this paper, I offer an explanation of why Kant thought theodicies necessarily fail. In his theodicy, as well as in some of his works in ethics, Kant explained moral evil as resulting from unavoidable limitations in human beings. God could not create finite beings without such limitations and so could not have created humans that were not prone to committing immoral acts. However, the work of Carl Christian Eberhard Schmid showed Kant that given his own beliefs about freedom and the nature of responsibility one could not account for moral evil in this way without tacitly denying that human beings were responsible for their actions. This result is significant not only because it explains an otherwise puzzling shift in Kant's philosophy of religion, but also because it shows that the theodicy essay provides powerful evidence that Kant's thinking about moral evil and freedom underwent fundamental shifts between early works such as the Groundwork and later works like the Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason.

Nietzsche, Kant, the democratic state, and war

AbstractThis article offers a reconstruction of Nietzsche's critique of Kant's scheme for perpetual peace distilled from his life-long confrontation with Kant's critical philosophy. Through this reading strategy, it sheds light on Nietzsche's controversial and yet surprisingly under-researched reflections on the problem of conflict and war in human affairs. Although Nietzsche embraced many of the basic premises of Kant's critical philosophical project, he considered the ethico-political conclusions Kant drew from these to be both irrational and nihilistic. From Nietzsche's perspective, Kant's thoughts on politics and International Relations rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of the phenomena of agency, statehood, and war that elides both the tragic relationship between politics and culture, and the violence which Nietzsche believes to be latent in all attempts at reconciling individual with collective autonomy. According to Nietzsche, Kant's influential association between liberal republicanism, freedom, and peace contributed unwittingly in ushering in the cult of the nation-state, which Nietzsche warned would engulf Europe into a wholly new kind of organised violence in the coming decades. Although clearly not without their uncritical assumptions and hubristic tendencies, Nietzsche's reflections on war and peace draw attention to some of the more insidious risks and difficulties attending liberal attempts at accommodating cosmopolitan values and principles within the framework of the modern nation state.