Kant Insists Research Articles

Thomistic Existentialism and Cosmological Reasoning, John F. X.Knasas, The Catholic University of America Press, 2019 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3185‐3), xiv + 330 pp., hb $65

Thomistic Existentialism and Cosmological Reasoning, John F. X.Knasas, The Catholic University of America Press, 2019 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3185‐3), xiv + 330 pp., hb $65

The Trouble with Literature

The Trouble with Literature

Rereading Kant on immortality and the highest good

AbstractKant's argument for belief in the immortality of the soul appears tenuous. The standard interpretation suggests that immortality is necessary because agents need an endless time in order to become holy (i.e., incapable of deviation from the moral law). Yet Kant elsewhere argues that sensible beings cannot be holy. This interpretation thus cannot make sense of Kant's insistence that agents become holy, supposing instead that this is an error on Kant's part. Against this reading, I argue that progress toward holiness is simply a definition of virtue, and that Kant's reference to it does not contradict itself by implying that sensible beings must become holy at some point in time. Drawing on Kant's account of the Gesinnung in the Religion, I then proceed to offer a novel reading as to why immortality is needed to secure the complete conformity of a disposition with the moral law.

Kant and the Science of Logic by Huaping Lu-Adler

Reviewed by: Kant and the Science of Logic by Huaping Lu-Adler J. Colin McQuillan LU-ADLER, Huaping. Kant and the Science of Logic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 272 pp. Cloth, $74.00 Huaping Lu-Adler's Kant and the Science of Logic represents the very best that contemporary Kant scholarship has to offer. Lu-Adler's book combines analytical rigor, sensitivity to the historical context in which Kant thought and wrote, and mastery of an extensive body of scholarly literature with methodological insight and clarity of presentation. It is essential reading for Kant scholars, historians of logic, and other historians of philosophy. The structure of Kant and the Science of Logic is straightforward. In the first chapter, Lu-Adler surveys the sources and materials that are necessary to reconstruct Kant's views on logic and explains how they are to be evaluated. She is rightfully suspicious of the textbook published as Kant's Logic (1800) by Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche. While Jäsche's logic can be helpful, it should never be read apart from Kant's Reflexionen, the transcripts of his lectures, and his other published works. It is only when these sources are compared, using what Lu-Adler calls a "perspectival approach," that Kant's distinctive views on logic can be understood. Once this approach has been adopted, Lu-Adler argues, the "critical eclecticism" of Kant's approach to logic becomes apparent. According to Lu-Adler, Kant's conception of logic is both critical and eclectic, because it begins [End Page 375] with "a constructive analysis of how past philosophers might have sought to build and support their systems." However, this is merely a preliminary phase in the construction of a system, in which one must evaluate one's own opinions and those of one's contemporaries, in order to arrive at sound principles and architectonic unity. Lu-Adler thinks this approach helps to avoid the problems of uncritical syncretism and dogmatic system-building, while connecting fruitfully with "Kant's view of what it means to become a genuinely independent thinker," which can be achieved only within "a community of autonomous truth-seekers, through an honest exchange of ideas and perspectives." Chapters 2 and 3 reconstruct the problems that Kant's conception of logic was meant to address. Lu-Adler surveys, in chapter 2, the history of logic from antiquity to the renaissance, highlighting the place logic was thought to occupy within philosophy as well as the utility it was thought to have. Lu-Adler's chapter brings into sharp relief the ambiguous place logic has occupied in the history of European philosophy, showing that it is by no means clear, within that history, whether logic was a science; whether it is a theoretical or practical discipline; whether it has its own subject matter; whether it is merely an aid to grammar, ethics, or metaphysics; and whether the development of a technical, formal logical is to be celebrated or condemned. In chapter 3, she extends this inquiry into the early modern period. Lu-Adler argues that early modern European philosophers faced many of the same problems as their medieval and renaissance predecessors, though their views on logic were also affected by the new methods being developed in the natural sciences (Bacon), a new emphasis on intellectual freedom (Locke), as well as a desire to formalize the rules of thinking and explain their relation to mathematics (Leibniz and Wolff). In chapter 4, Lu-Adler identifies two "breakthroughs" in Kant's philosophy of logic during the pre-critical period. The first is a distinction between (1) the logic of the common understanding and (2) the logic of learned understanding, which corresponds, roughly, to the distinction between pure and applied general logic. Kant insists in the transcripts of some of his logic lectures that the logic of the learned understanding is a science, because it is grounded in a priori principles, but he denies that the logic of the common understanding is a science, because it is grounded in empirical principles. The second breakthrough is the development of Kant's conception of transcendental logic, which Lu-Adler traces back to Kant's characterization of ontology as a subjective...

Anomaly and Danger: Politics of the Impure in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea

Anomaly and Danger: Politics of the Impure in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea Joel B. Lande (bio) I. Revolution, Evolution For many German-speaking intellectuals around 1800, the events surrounding the French Revolution assumed pivotal importance. Beyond the first-hand reports from prominent authors, including Georg Forster und Joachim Heinrich Campe, there were also figures further removed from the epicenter of revolutionary events, who felt personally addressed by the upheaval.1 Perhaps the most prominent instance of such engagement can be found in the final text Immanuel Kant published during his lifetime, the Conflict of the Faculties (1798). From his far-flung university town along the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea, Kant asserted his belief that the ongoing Revolution was of universal human importance. At the heart of Kant’s observations is the set of concerns expressed in the following paragraph The revolution which we have seen taking place in our own times in a nation of gifted people may succeed, or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price, even if he could hope to carry it out successfully at the second attempt. But I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves [End Page 572] caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race. (Kant, Political Writings 182)2 Kant’s suspicion that the fall of the monarchy, along with the accompanying order of the estates, enjoys a significance untethered from a specific time or place, is closely linked to his philosophical-historical interest in the progress of human society in general. Kant insists on the pivotal place of the Revolution in the course of human history, not because he believes it will immediately result in the realization of the historically ideal form of government—a republican constitution founded on universal principles of natural right—but rather because he senses its potential contribution to that still-distant goal. And so he uses an act of lexical and conceptual sleight-of-hand in order to hide the fact that the events in France since 1789 have involved what he regards as the ultimate political evil, war. Kant’s surprising linguistic move has its source in a problematic aptly described by Hannah Arendt in her study On Revolution. Arendt’s book introduces the claim that “revolutions are the only political events that confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning” (21). Kant, for one, responds to this confrontation by distancing himself from abrupt change; in fact, one can reasonably conjecture that a radical start may well have appeared to him irredeemably linked to the post-1790 violence abroad. In his sleight-of-hand, Kant draws on a subtle terminological choice he encountered in a treatise by his student Johann Benjamin Erhard. He picks up on the description of the events in France as a form of “evolution,” as a contingent and flawed stage in the unforeseeable and intractable path traced by humankind. The choice of the word “evolution” was highly unconventional—it was an essentially unused term in the German language of the time, but was also one that Kant, with his Latin education, could easily make his own. To the eighteenth-century German ear, the Latin evolutio or evolvo possessed a less problematic set of associations than the French loanword “revolution.” Both terms had historically promoted the imagination of a uniform and repetitive temporality (the Vulgate speaks of “anni circulus fuerit evolutus”). But for a mode of Enlightenment thought [End Page 573] searching for a way to describe time linearly, the cluster of prefixes ec-, ex-, e- conjured a more congenial set of associations than re-. Erhard’s use of the term “evolution” has a clear vector of movement—toward a “progress of Enlightenment,” as he says (188–189). The recourse of both Erhard and his teacher Kant to this unusual term testifies to...

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication

Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Herder und Kant zum Thema der Natur der Sprache

The aim of the paper is to compare the concept of language in the philosophy of Herder and Kant. Kant insists on the dualism of thought and language - concepts, thoughts and ideas are ontologically preverbal. In this regard, the linguistic sign is just a connection medium that connects the idea with the object and guarantees the intersubjective communication. The linguistic signs are nothing of importance for objective knowledge. Kant knows that in any empirical language works an anonymous form of world interpretation and it precedes all philosophical reflection. This understanding of reality in everyday speech use „works” with sufficient precision, but it is impossible to deduce the whole system of categories from the analysis of language. According to Herder all knowledge is founded on the basis of sensory experience and subjected to historical development.All terms are shaped by sensual imagination, there are no pure categories that would not mediated by senses. The conclusion of its deliberations is the thesis: „no thought without language, no language without sensuality.” Man is a deficient being. He is not adapted to any environment, he has no specialized instincts and sensory organs, and in this sense he is world-open being. However, this unfavorable initial situation has a functional sense. The human deficites are compensated by the language that opens up an absent in the animal kingdom, almost unlimited perspective of the freedom.

Turnabout is Fair Play: A New Humean Response in the Old Debate with Kant

Kant claims that Hume failed to see that mathematics provides us with synthetic a priori knowledge; had he done so, Kant argues, Hume would have to admit the possibility of such knowledge in causal judgments as well. Instead, Kant insists that Hume treats mathematics as analytic, and so missed the key insights of the Critical philosophy. I argue that it is rather Kant who is mistaken: Hume, in fact, endorses a position very similar to the view that mathematics is synthetic and a priori, and arrives at an account of mathematical necessity that stands as a plausible alternative to Kant's. More importantly, recognizing this Humean account of mathematics exposes a potentially grave vulnerability in Kant's system that Hume might exploit: while mathematics can be seen as synthetic a priori knowledge, Hume can argue that this gives us good reason to think that causal judgments cannot meet this standard of necessity.

Can Positive Duties be Derived from Kant’s Categorical Imperative?

Kant’s moral philosophy usually considers two types of duties: negative duties that prohibit certain actions and positive duties commanding action. With that, Kant insists on deriving all morality from reason alone. Such is the Categorical Imperative that Kant lays at the basis of ethics. Yet while negative duties can be derived from the Categorical Imperative and thus from reason, the paper argues that this is not the case with positive duties. After answering a number of attempts to derive positive duties from the Categorical Imperative, most notably those of Barbara Herman, it sketches an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between the universal moral law and specific moral contents.

The Plight of Ethics

Since Kant, ethics has been synonymous with moral law, grounded in Reason. As Kant’s heirs, we are still grappling with a tension he sought to resolve through his appeal to a rational God, namely, between ethics and politics. “Politics says, ‘Be ye wise as serpents,’” remarks Kant: “Morality adds (as a limiting condition) ‘and guileless as doves’” (1795, 338). For Kant, both the serpent of politics and the dove of ethics are bound by the same moral duty that has its source in the freedom of our sovereign rational will. The perfection of this good will is possible not as individuals but only from the perspective of what Kant calls “Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” which it turns out is a view from the cosmos, more specifically, from the perspective of the “dwellers from other planets” whom Kant imagines viewing us from their own place in the universe (1784, n. 2). As we know, Kant insists that the concept of duty cannot be in conflict with doing our duty—or that ought implies can: “It is patently absurd, having granted this concept of duty its authority, to want to say that one nevertheless cannot do it. For in that case this concept would of itself drop out of morals. . . . [H]ence, there can be no conflict of politics as doctrine of right put into practice, with morals, as theoretical doctrine of right” (1795, 338). But what if the reverse were true? What if ought implies cannot? What if our obligations always outstrip our intentions? What if the sovereign will is fundamentally beholden both to other people and to the Other The Plight of Ethics

The Moral Efficacy of Aesthetic Experience: Figures of Meaning in the Moral Field

This paper proposes to analyse the process that makes paths of action meaningful. It argues that this process is one of "figuration". The term "figuration" intends to outline how the experience of moral meaning is one that already positively marks out a field and to identify and analyse the mechanisms used for such marking and selection. It is my contention that these mechanisms predate the persuasion to a moral path; they are the process through which this path is constructed as meaningful. This thesis is elucidated through an analysis of the tactics of meaning in Kant's moral theory. Kant turns to aesthetics as a means of corroboration for his moral theory, but he also attempts to limit the scope of the interactions between his aesthetic and moral theory. For instance, when he writes on the topic of form in aesthetic taste or outlines the technical specifications of aesthetic judgment, it is arguably the arcane peculiarities of his system that are met. For this reason, Kant insists on the merely analogical relations between beauty and morality. However, it is also possible to see how certain aspects of Kant's aesthetic theory execute wider, and potentially more important, functions for his practical philosophy, such as providing meaningful orientation for the ascetic moral attitude of his duty-ethics. In this respect, certain figures of Kant's aesthetic theory may well be viewed as complementing the dependence in his moral philosophy, in the important sections on moral pedagogy and methodology, on appeals to heroic models and stories as ways of shaping and inculcating the moral disposition. This paper considers these aspects of interaction between Kant's aesthetic and moral philosophies as both (1) a problem for the consistency of his philosophy given his avowed exclusion of aesthetic and religious elements of meaning in his duty-ethics; and (2) as a case study for the new, schematic analysis of "moral figuration" outlined in the paper.

Apperzeption und Erfahrung: Kants Transzendentale Deduktion im Spannungsfeld der frühen Rezeption und Kritik (review)

Reviewed by: Apperzeption und Erfahrung: Kants Transzendentale Deduktion im Spannungsfeld der frühen Rezeption und Kritik Rolf Ahlers Martin Bondeli . Apperzeption und Erfahrung: Kants Transzendentale Deduktion im Spannungsfeld der frühen Rezeption und Kritik. Schwabe Philosophica, 10. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2006. Pp. 361. Cloth, €52.50. This book deals with the epicenter of modern philosophy, Kant's transcendental thinking self. It lives and breathes not only in the unity of reason in Kant himself, but also spells out how the problems that emerge in that conception were dealt with in the intellectual world of early German idealism. Bondeli shows how Kant's unity of reason is variously conceived by Kant as the "I think," the "highest point" of the "unity of apperception," as well as the more traditional concept of "soul," which is freighted with heavy metaphysical baggage. According to Bondeli, Kant had the greatest difficulty providing adequate reasons for that unity of apperception. Those difficulties are laid bare in part A of the first part of the book, "Kant's Problem of an Adequate Founding of the Original-Synthetic Unity of Apperception." The problem Bondeli lays bare provided ample fodder for Kant's critics, first and foremost the very early pre-Kantian Carl Leonhard Reinhold, soon, however, to emerge as the "Kantian of the first hour" in his Kantian Letters, but then also for Maimon, Schulze, Beck, and Fichte. Bondeli deals with the criticisms of those important thinkers in part B, "Reactions to Kant's Problem." The author points to the excellent arguments Kant himself provided against his contemporary critics. Those arguments also address the old metaphysical assumptions about God, humanity's soul, and the (real) world. They gain ground not only in Kant's practical philosophy, but also in his theoretical assumptions about substance and with substance the whole empirical world. But despite the "grave problems" in his thought, Bondeli says that Kant is "all in all convincing" with his arguments (92). As for how old metaphysical assumptions reappear in Kant, just consider what he said of the "eternal life of the soul" (85–87) and of the empirical, temporal, and psychological self (75–84) being of necessary relevance to the transcendentally reflecting subject. Of course, the center of Kant's thought, the relation of reality and ideality, needs to be identified as both "old" and "new" metaphysics. [End Page 475] Bondeli's book deals with ambiguities and contradictions mainly in the Critique of Pure Reason in its two editions of 1781 and 1787, which are at the center of the aforementioned "grave problems" in Kant's thought. These are what drove the post-Kantian reception and critique of the transcendental deduction. One grave problem is Kant's conception of the "original apperception" (26), though an array of other issues are also in need of clarification, such as the "relationship of logical and real, intelligible and empirical status of the original apperception" (27). That theme is worked through Bondeli's entire volume, practically on every page. In ferreting it out, many ambiguities come to light, such as in Kant's conception of the "I think": in opposition to Descartes's substantial definition of the "I think" as a res cogitans or thinking thing, Kant understands it as having (mere) intelligible status. On the other hand, Kant also understands the "I think" with Descartes as an "empirical proposition" (B 428) or as a substantive "I am" (B 138), and Kant provides reasons for both propositions. This a vexing situation and Bondeli—and the whole post-Kantian discussion—finds it troublesome, first because Kant is critical of Descartes's cogito conceived as thinking substance. In no way, Kant insists in the "Paralogisms of Pure Reason," is the transcendentally-thinking self to be associated with the concept of substance. That it is devoid of empirical elements is of paramount importance for its critical transcendental capacity of providing the conditions of knowledge. Second, Kant stresses, in the second edition, that "the proposition 'I think', or 'I exist thinking', is an empirical proposition" (B 428). The need to clarify the relationship of the logical and the real, the intelligible and the empirical status of the original apperception in Kant's thought implied a...

`Aufklärung', freemasonry, the public sphere and the question of Enlightenment

That the Enlightenment was a movement reaching across at least three European countries (France, Germany and Britain) in the eighteenth century, with a similar platform in all three (social improvement on the basis of unassisted reason), is the current orthodoxy. Yet this view can only be accepted with qualifications. It is the intention of this essay to focus attention on these qualifications. A first objection lies with the fact that no platform of Enlightenment was articulated in any country in the eighteenth century apart from Germany. In the debate about Enlightenment initiated in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1783, Kant's insistence that Aufklärung must stay within political limits is considered characteristic not only of the German discussion, but indeed of all broadly Enlightenment thought from the beginning. In considering Koselleck's argument about the Enlightenment, which analysed this same conservatism, a second objection is apparent: the impulse to stay within the confines of the absolutist state suggests that eighteenth-century Enlightenment, politically speaking, was decidedly other than that which has subsequently been found within it.

Are human embryos Kantian persons?: Kantian considerations in favor of embryonic stem cell research.

One argument used by detractors of human embryonic stem cell research (hESCR) invokes Kant's formula of humanity, which proscribes treating persons solely as a means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves. According to Fuat S. Oduncu, for example, adhering to this imperative entails that human embryos should not be disaggregated to obtain pluripotent stem cells for hESCR. Given that human embryos are Kantian persons from the time of their conception, killing them to obtain their cells for research fails to treat them as ends in themselves.This argument assumes two points that are rather contentious given a Kantian framework. First, the argument assumes that when Kant maintains that humanity must be treated as an end in itself, he means to argue that all members of the species Homo sapiens must be treated as ends in themselves; that is, that Kant regards personhood as co-extensive with belonging to the species Homo sapiens. Second, the argument assumes that the event of conception is causally responsible for the genesis of a Kantian person and that, therefore, an embryo is a Kantian person from the time of its conception.In this paper, I will present challenges against these two assumptions by engaging in an exegetical study of some of Kant's works. First, I will illustrate that Kant did not use the term "humanity" to denote a biological species, but rather the capacity to set ends according to reason. Second, I will illustrate that it is difficult given a Kantian framework to denote conception (indeed any biological event) as causally responsible for the creation of a person. Kant ascribed to a dualistic view of human agency, and personhood, according to him, was derived from the supersensible capacity for reason. To argue that a Kantian person is generated due to the event of conception ignores Kant's insistence in various aspects of his work that it is not possible to understand the generation of a person qua a physical operation. Finally, I will end the paper by drawing from Allen Wood's work in Kantian philosophy in order to generate an argument in favor of hESCR.

Kant on Capital Punishment and Suicide

In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant clearly, and indeed ardently, upholds the state's right to impose the death penalty in accordance with the law of retribution (ius talionis). The “principle of equality” as between crime and punishment demands that those who wrongfully kill another should be put to death, for, in having inflicted such an evil upon another, the murderer has effectively killed himself. Kant is quite emphatic on this point: those who have committed murder “must die”. Here, he argues, “there is no substitute that will satisfy justice”, for there “is no similarity between life, however wretched it may be, and death, hence no likeness between the crime and the retribution unless death is judicially carried out upon the wrongdoer […]”. The ius talionis is, for Kant, the basic principle and measure in accordance with which criminal justice functions. Since the ius talionis entails a strict equality between crime and punishment, Kant's insistence that only the death penalty serves as the appropriate response to murder (or to any other equally egregious crime) is fairly straightforward.

A history of reasonableness: testimony and authority in the art of thinking

This book describes a lost tradition that can be called reasonableness. The tradition began with Aristotle, was recommended to Western education by Augustine, flourished in the schools of the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, then got lost in the academic and philosophic shuffles of the twentieth century. Representative of the tradition is John Locke's story of a King of Siam who rejected reports of the existence of ice. The King would have had to risk too much trust in another man whom he did not know too well-a Dutch ambassador-in order to believe that elephants could walk on cold water. John Locke presented the story to encourage his readers to think about the responsibilities and risks entailed in what he called 'the gentle and fair ways of information.' The art of thinking is largely social. Popular textbook writers, such as Quintilian, Boethius, Philipp Melanchthon, John of St. Thomas, Antoine Arnauld, Thomas Reid, Isaac Watts, Richard Whately, William Hamilton, L. Susan Stebbings, and Max Black taught strategies of belief, trust, assent, and even submission as part of reasonableness. For over two thousand years testimony and authority were at the center of lively discussions about teaching the art of thinking. In the twentieth century, the tradition faltered largely due to Immanuel Kant's insistence that there should be no distinction between handling testimony and personal experience. This book recounts the history of a lively educational tradition and hopes to encourage its revival. Rick Kennedy, whose previous books and articles have been about Colonial American logic, mathematics, and science, is professor of History at the Point Loma Nazarene University.

Kant on Truth

This essay discusses Kant's account of truth, arguing that he offers us a weak coherence theory: weak for his insistence on an independent, sensuous content for intuition, coherentist for the transcendental apparatus supporting experience. While Kant is free to use the language of correspondence within experience, empirical truth will always be limited by the formative requirements set by transcendental truth. The difficulty, for Kant, is the role played by sensuous content since the sameness of this content in intersubjective experience seems to point outside the conditions of synthesis to a transcendentally real object. While the consequence of this would seem to leave Kant in a contradiction-denying transcendental realism at the same time that he must affirm it-we must read Kant's insistence on a merely negative use of noumena as evidence that he adopts the role of the skeptic as a means for maintaining his epistemic goals.

Does the Categorical Imperative Give Rise to a Contradiction in the Will?

The Brave New World-style utilitarian dystopia is a familiar feature of cultural landscape; Kantian dystopias are harder to come by, perhaps because, until Rawls, Kantian morality presented itself as a primarily personal rather than political program. This asymmetry is peculiar for formal reasons, because one phase of deliberative process on which Kant insists is to ask what world at large would be like if everyone did whatever it is one is thinking of doing. I do not propose to write a Kantian Brave New World myself, but I am going to ask, of what these days is called the CI-procedure, what would happen if everybody followed it. I will argue that if CI-procedure works as advertised, it exposes a practical incoherence in commitment to having it govern one's actions: in Kantian vocabulary that goes with territory, that Categorical Imperative gives rise to a contradiction in will. (Less formally, that it is self-refuting.) My target will be a recently influential interpretation of Kant, due primarily to John Rawls and a number of his students, most prominently Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, and Barbara Herman, a group I will for convenience refer to as New Kantians.1 Although it does draw on earlier interpretative work, this body of writing is relatively self-contained, and manageable in a way that Kant literature as a whole no longer is. I don't myself wish to take a stand on whether New Kantian reading is exegetically correct; it suffices for present purposes that it has proven itself interesting, plausible, and powerful enough to have moved Kantian moral philosophy back from marginalized position it occupied a little over a quarter-century ago to center of contemporary ethics. I will begin by rehearsing CI-procedure and theory that accompanies it; reader is warned that setup will take more time than is usual in papers of this kind. Kant himself used label 'Categorical Imperative' to mark three ideas that he thought were at bottom same: practical priority of universalizability, of respect for persons, and of autonomy. They are, however, at any rate on surface, rather different, and in order to sidestep issue of whether different versions of Categorical Imperative are in fact equivalent, I

Das Medusenhaupt der Kritik, Kantstudien Ergänzungshefte 128 (review)

Reviewed by: Das Medusenhaupt der Kritik, Kantstudien Ergänzungshefte by Manfred Gawlina Henry E. Allison Manfred Gawlina. Das Medusenhaupt der Kritik, Kantstudien Ergänzungshefte 128. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. ix + 345. This work is the first full scale study of the controversy between Kant and the Wolffian philosopher Johann August Eberhard. The controversy was launched by Eberhard’s publication in 1788 of the first part of the first volume of the Philosophisches Magazin, a journal which he and a handful of associates created specifically as an organ for attacking the Kantian philosophy from the standpoint of Leibniz and Wolff. The central claim was that whatever is true in the Kantian philosophy is already contained in Leibniz, and where Kant differs from Leibniz (such as in the denial of knowledge of things in themselves or “true things”) he goes astray. Kant reacted strongly to this [End Page 632] critique, first in a pair of letters to Reinhold (May 12 and 19, 1789) and then in his own published response, with the sarcastic title: Über eine Entdeckung. nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll1 From Eberhard’s side the controversy continued through three more volumes of the Philosophisches Magazin (1790–92), and two volumes of its successor, Philosophisches Archiv (1792–95). Although Kant himself did not respond directly to these subsequent attacks, he contributed material to Johann Schulz for his review of the second volume of the Philosophisches Magazin. Gawlina analyzes the controversy at both the pragmatic and philosophical levels. The former includes a consideration of the motivations of the protagonists and the various strategies and tactics adopted in an attempt to convince the philosophical public of the correctness of their respective positions. Eberhard, for his part, was particularly concerned with the threat which the Critique, which Kant himself describes as the “Medusa head” (hence the title), posed to the survival of Leibnizian-style metaphysics, while Kant’s primary concern was with the misrepresentation of his own philosophy that he saw in Eberhard’s attack. At the philosophical level, the controversy is presented as a clash between two conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable philosophical paradigms: the first being the ontological orientation of Leibniz (defended by Eberhard) according to which pure (contradiction-free) thought mirrors being (this entails that logic has ontological significance), and the epistemological-transcendental orientation of Kant, according to which the fundamental questions concern the conditions of human knowledge and the justification of its claims. The author is well aware that there are epistemological elements in Leibniz and ontological ones in Kant (most notably the claims about space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic), but he argues persuasively that these are grounded in the philosopher’s respective ontological and epistemological standpoints. This general thesis serves to illuminate virtually all of the main points of the controversy, including the question of why Eberhard refuses to admit either the significance or novelty of the analytic-synthetic distinction, while Kant insists on both. Of particular interest in this regard is the author’s discussion of the distinction between Schranken (limits) and Grenzen (boundaries), which Kant himself draws in the Prolegomena (§58). This distinction becomes relevant to the controversy because of Eberhard’s frequent appeal to the fact that Leibniz recognizes the Schranken of human knowledge as part of his attempt to show that Leibniz anticipated Kant in providing a “critique of pure reason.” As Gawlina notes, however, the limits of knowledge, as understood by Leibniz, are merely de facto constraints on the extent to which finite minds are capable of grasping things from the eternalistic perspective of God, whereas the boundaries insisted on by Kant are principled restrictions, grounded in the positive conditions of the possibility of cognition for finite knowers. [End Page 633] Although Gawlina thus clearly indicates the ways in which Eberhard misunderstood and misrepresented Kant’s position, he refuses to declare Kant the victor in the controversy. This is partly on historical and partly on philosophical grounds. Historically, the reason is that in spite of all of its limitations, Eberhard’s critique of Kant did succeed in raising questions among Kant’s followers regarding the coherence of the...

Kant Without Sade

Kant without Sade Francis Sparshott Ermanno Bencivenga’s discussion of “Kant’s Sadism” rests on a misrepresentation of Kant’s enterprise. 1 It presents Kantian morality as a matter of motivation, so that reason has to be pitted against desire. But Kant’s whole point is that, because the psychological causes of one’s actions can never be ascertained, they are irrelevant to morality. Morality is entirely a matter of the reasons for one’s actions, no matter what one’s feelings. It is true that moral questions arise, morality exists, only for finite rational beings, who have inclinations that are relatively independent of the dictates of reason. But that independence does not mean that one should always act against one’s inclinations. The morality of an action depends on the agent’s “maxim”—the subjective practical principle on which one acts, the reasons one has and can give for thinking that what one is doing is right. Kant’s whole discussion is in terms of maxims. The word does occur twice in Bencivenga’s paper, but his account makes no use of it. When he says that “It is the motives of the action, the motives the person actually has—never mind what evidence we have for them—that confer moral content on the action” (p. 41), he does so in flat contradiction of Kant. The confusion underlying Bencivenga’s misunderstanding is most familiar to English-language Kantians from Schiller’s joke: “Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. / Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person. // —Surely, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely, / and then with aversion do what your duty enjoins you.” 2 Both participants in the exchange think [End Page 151] the morality of an action depends on its psychological causes, not on the reasons the agent has for thinking the action right and doing it. Both are wrong. What is revolutionary in Kant’s position is his contention that all a maxim requires to be moral is that agents should really make it their principle at the time of action—that the agent should really stand by it. That means, obviously, that at that moment the agent should be able consistently to will that everyone should act on it. Kant argues that it also means, less obviously, that doing the right thing should be one’s paramount principle, which involves treating humanity and human freedom as an end in itself—ultimately, treating oneself and others as “law-making members of a kingdom of ends.” Thus, for Kant, morality is entirely a matter of rational consistency. Since rational consistency is all that morality requires, morality lays down no plan of action, but presupposes the familiar world in which people already have plans and purposes. What one wills is always some particular thing. Morality has to do with the principles to be followed in pursuing these objectives. 3 Bencivenga’s contention that “making the well-being of some other human, or of one’s own community, or of humankind the goal of one’s action would be relegating rationality to (at best) an instrumental role, and thus denying any ethical value to that action” is wrong. Kant insists that finite rational beings inevitably pursue happiness, 4 and it is their duty to do so for others and (in a sense) for themselves. 5 A leading contention of the Critique is that happiness, like duty, is a component of the summum bonum. Making a principle of maximizing happiness does not destroy the autonomy of the will; the principle is a principle and subject to the critique of consistency, like other principles. Kant explicitly denies what Bencivenga asserts, that it is merely an empirical matter that humans are desirous as well as rational. On the contrary, it belongs to their essence. 6 What is empirical, as Kant explains at some length, is the specific content of a person’s desires. Neither of Bencivenga’s examples tends to show that morality is opposed to inclination. It is true that if the reason moral agents treat people well is really only that, on each occasion, this is...