Kant's Philosophy Research Articles

Methodology of the Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Law: the transition from “due” to “being”

The article shows the influence of Kantian philosophy on jurisprudence. From the position of neo-Kantianism, law and the state are not objective “things in themselves”, but transcendental logical constructions of the cognizing subject. Law is twofold: as a subject of logic and as a social phenomenon included in social relations as their regulator. In the concept of law, rational and irrational elements are distinguished. According to neo-Kantian methodology, the state can be the subject of research both nomothetic (the state is a recurring fact) and idiographic (the state is a unique phenomenon) sciences. It is shown that in the Russian Philosophy of Law of the 19th - early 20th centuries of the neo-Kantian orientation, special attention was paid to the problems of finding a social ideal, the connectedness of the state by law, the theme of a legal state, the basis of which is a self-sufficient person. The ethical and legal basis of the neo-Kantian Philosophy of Law in Russia was Kant’s idea of individual freedom, its autonomy, of the external protection of all members of society by the state with the help of the rule of law and non-interference in the inner world of a person. In the late 19th - early 20th centuries, Kant’s philosophy was extrapolated to the conditions of the historical reality of that period in the form of requirements for the legal provision of individual rights and freedoms in a legal state.

A normative view of madness from Kantian philosophy to understand anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests of 2020 and 2021

This text aims to offer a epistemic-normative reading of madness in Kant's work and its different developments throughout his work. This to maintain that madness arises from rationality itself when understood it as a force that exceeds the limits that reason imposes on itself. By outlining normality or mental sanity as the restriction of reason to sensibility, Kant intends -I maintain- to outline the minimum subjective and epistemic conditions for a republican political conformation, which is based on the agreement between subjects about the rules that will regulate their actions and interactions. This reading will allow us to outline an understanding of the anti-vaccine protest that took place during the pandemic. Showing that those who promote and follow them break with this minimum agreement on the restrictions of reason, thus reaching selfish excesses that harm democratic dynamics. I concluded that these people can be understood as madness people who represent a danger to the republican and democratic political organization.

"Accompanied Only by My Thoughts": A Kantian Perspective on Autonomy at the End of Life.

Within bioethics, Kant's conception of autonomy is often portrayed as excessively rationalistic, abstract, and individualistic, and, therefore, far removed from the reality of patients' needs. Drawing on recent contributions in Kantian philosophy, we argue that specific features of Kantian autonomy remain relevant for medical ethics and for patient experience. We use contemporary end-of-life illness narratives-a resource that has not been analyzed with respect to autonomy-and show how they illustrate important Kantian themes, namely, the duty to know oneself, the interest in elaborating universalizable principles, and the emphasis on ideals as points of orientation that guide behavior without ever being fully realized. As Kant does, the patient-authors discussed here perceive the end of life as a moment to reflect on the constitutive principles which have governed that life, thereby offering a privileged moment to pursue self-knowledge. We argue that bioethical conceptions of autonomy stand to gain if they revise their conception of Kantian moral philosophy as too formal, abstract, and detached from emotions and personal relationships to be helpfully applied.

Can We Lie to the Murderer in Front of the Door? An Analysis of Kantian Philosophy on Lying

La filosofía moral kantiana ha sido criticada por su compromiso con el rigorismo moral. Esta crítica está basada en la posición kantiana respecto a la mentira; específicamente, se deriva de la afirmación de Kant de que es un deber ser veraces incluso con el asesino que llega a casa preguntando por el paradero del amigo refugiado. Este artículo tiene un carácter enteramente expositivo y tiene el objetivo de reconstruir y examinar la posición de Kant frente a la mentira para determinar si la acusación rigorista está bien fundamentada. Examino tres fuentes: Lecciones de ética (§1.1), “Sobre un supuesto derecho a mentir por filantropía” (§1.2) y Metafísica de las costumbres (§1.3). De este examen comparativo, concluyo que no existe evidencia textual que demuestre que Kant defienda categóricamente el deber de ser veraces en el caso del asesino en la puerta, de manera que la acusación de rigorismo que pesa en contra de la filosofía moral kantiana, al menos en lo que respecta a este caso en particular, no parece estar bien fundamentada.

Kant's philosophy of history

إن حرية اإلرادة عند الفرد تحدد في مظاهرها باألفعال اإلنسانية، وهذا األمر يسير وفق قوانين طبيعية عامة، شأن ذلك شأن أي ظاهرة طبيعية، والتاريخ في موضوعة هو سرد هذه الظواهر أياً كان أسبابها بحثاً عن الدور الذي تقوم به حرية اإل اردة اإلنسانية عامة.

Mou Zongsan’s Critique of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant and his Solution: A Transcultural Discourse on Human Finitude and Infinitude

Abstract Mou Zongsan (牟宗三) extols Heidegger’s interpretation of human Dasein as “being-capable” and admits that he was inspired by Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant in many ways; however, although he, like Heidegger, emphasizes that human finitude is the basic premise of Kantian philosophy, he refuses to apply this premise to Kant’s philosophy as a whole. He argues, for Kant, “human beings are finite but can be infinite.” Moreover, he, on the one hand, criticizes Heidegger for withdrawing the dimension of absolute spontaneity, infinitude, supersensibility and supratemporality from morality and, on the other hand, criticizes Kant for rejecting the possibility of a positive use of intellectual intuition. By the general insight of Chinese philosophy, which positively recognize the intellectual intuition, Mou believes that one can change the downside of Kantian philosophy and organically combine Western and Asian philosophy.

Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A New Reading of Six Thinkers by Henry Somers-Hall

Reviewed by: Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A New Reading of Six Thinkers by Henry Somers-Hall Clayton Crockett SOMERS-HALL, Henry. Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A New Reading of Six Thinkers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 264 pp. Cloth, $99.99 Henry Somers-Hall's book examines how French philosophers in the twentieth century develop a logic of thinking based on sense that is both influenced by but also counters Kant's paradigm of thinking, which is based on judgment. Beginning with Kant and German idealism, including the German responses to Kant in the work of Hölderlin, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, this book then carefully draws out the ways that Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze all work against this understanding of thinking as judging by showing how our experience and our thought precede the categories of judgment. In chapter 1, Somers-Hall carefully sets out Kant's model of thinking and shows how the categories of philosophical thought are fundamentally based on how we judge our sensible intuitions. Judgment is at the center of Kant's thought, and this is apparent in the Critique of Pure Reason, including the famous Transcendental Deduction. Our knowledge has a legislative function in relation to objects, and conscious synthesis takes the form of a judgment. Despite their criticisms of Kant, later German idealists do not fundamentally depart from this modality of judgment that takes place at the center of their philosophy. Even though they put Kant's concepts in motion, it remains a structure of judgment that is understood as dynamic. Chapter 2 turns to Bergson, to show how his emphasis on immediate experience precedes categorical judgement. Bergson distinguishes between temporal and spatial multiplicities, and argues that temporal multiplicities that are expressed in terms of duration underlie the spatial ones that contribute to judgment. Duration is a deeper experience of time that is associated with life. Somers-Hall in chapter 3 examines Sartre's writings on imagination to show how consciousness is a pure relation and an affective mode of thinking that underlies the categorial mode of judgment. Most of these French philosophers develop their accounts of noncategorial sense in either explicit or implicit relation to Kant's philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is no exception, and in chapter 4 we see how it is the organization of perception that gives sense to the world, and this precedes and generates "our reflective categories of judgement." Judgment emerges out of perception, although Merleau-Ponty grounds perception in the embodied person. Derrida does not ground sense or [End Page 365] thinking in a body, but looks for noncategorial grounds that make possible "surface structures of thinking." In chapter 5, Somers-Hall elaborates Derrida's famous nonconcept of différance, which underlies and makes possible our concepts of voice and writing that appear to be oppositions but in fact are not because they rely on each other. Différance is not a concept; it is prior to conceptual determination, and it "operates as an 'origin' that has none of the traits of the structure of judgement." Foucault relies on Kant for his three epistemes of resemblance, representation, and the human being, modern man. Chapter 6 shows how Foucault is concerned in both his archaeology and his genealogy with opening up the structures of power that make any juridical ordering possible. Here a productive biopower works beneath what we recognize more explicitly as "juridico-discursive power" in both positive and negative ways that escape the grasp of a philosophy that is solely based on judgment. In chapter 7 Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze's concept of intensity underlies all forms of representational judgment. Intensity operates according to a process of differentiation that produces a logic of sense, which we miss when we grasp onto a "dogmatic image of thought" that "prevents a genuine encounter with the world [that] conditions us to understand it in terms of unified subjects who make sense of the world in terms of judgements." We think in response to a shock or an encounter with something in the world that forces us to think and to make sense. We form judgments retroactively, by reducing differences to...

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation and the Problem of Rational Cosmology

Kant's 1770 Dissertation is surprisingly rarely read as a cosmological treatise about the "world." The few commentators who do so invariably claim that, in the fourth section of the work, Kant presents a purely intellectual cosmology, a relic of dogmatic, Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics. This article aims to show that attention to some often-overlooked passages yields a very different picture. Key to how Kant conceives of the form of the world is his distinction between the relations of co-ordination and subordination of substances. On the basis of this distinction, the author argues that the "principle of the form of the intelligible world" does not pertain to a transcendent intelligible world. Instead, the principle concerns an intellectual perspective on the world of substances co-ordinated in space and time. This interpretation has various consequences for our understanding of the development of Kant's critical philosophy.

Mou Zongsans Auseinandersetzung mit Heideggers Kantinterpretation und seine Lösung durch eine Neuinterpretation der chinesischen Philosophie

Abstract In this essay, we discuss a perspective remote from German academics on the examination of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, which was developed by Mou Zongsan (牟宗三). Mou focuses his interpretation of Kant on the infinite aspect of human morality and he praises Heidegger’s interpretation of the essence of human existence as “being-able-to-be”. Although, like Heidegger, he emphasizes the recognition of human finiteness as the basic premise of Kant’s philosophy, he refuses to apply this premise to Kant’s entire philosophy. He addresses the fact that for Kant man is “finite but can be infinite”. Furthermore, he criticises Heidegger, on the one hand, for withdrawing the dimension of independence, infinity, supersensibility and timelessness from morality, and Kant, on the other hand, for rejecting the possibility of a positive use of intellectual intuition. By making use of a general insight from the schools of Chinese philosophy that positively recognise the intellectual intuition, one can, Mou believes, change the downsides of Kantian philosophy and organically connect Western and Asian philosophy.

К истокам «спора о Софии»: Е. Н. Трубецкой как критик софиологии

The recent growth in research interest in sophology forces us to revisit the criticisms of this teaching that were voiced during the so-called "Paris controversy". The failure of the critique of Father Sergius Bulgakov's sophology by the latter is becoming more and more evident. The criticism of Bulgakov's theology by theologians is becoming increasingly obvious. In particular, the sources of the doctrine were incorrectly identified, and the accusations of heresy made on behalf of some hierarchs of the Russian Church made it impossible to continue the polemic. It now seems that sophology was the moment of a crisis of philosophy in Russian theology. In order to make the critique of sophology more substantive, a revision of the accusations that have been made against Bulgakov's teaching is necessary. The article proposes a return to the first stage of the critique of sophology, which has not been continued due to historical circumstances. As early as 1918 E.N. Trubetskoy wrote that Bulgakov's main mistake was the Gnostic understanding of Sofia. According to Trubetskoy, introducing the qualities of subjectivity and psychologism into Sofia leads to a similarity with the demiurge from Plato's dialogue "Timaeus". The analysis of Trubetskoy's criticism shows that the real reason for this accusation was his rejection of the version of the solution to the transcendental problem of religion which Bulgakov proposed in 'The Everlasting Light'. Here Bulgakov, based on his Philosophy of Economy, develops the concept of Sofia in connection with the concept of the transcendental subject in Kant's philosophy and points out the fundamental connection of the above problematics with Kant's third critique. From Trubetskoy's point of view, a Christian resolution of the "problem of Sofia" is possible only by identifying Sofia with Plato's world of divine ideas. By the Christian doctrine of Wisdom he understands his own interpretation of Platonic idealism. An analysis of Trubetskoy's sophiological ideas leads to the conclusion that they incorporate both the views and intuitions of V.S. Soloviev and many of Bulgakov's ideas and are not original.

Кантианство в раннем творчестве Н. Бердяева (1900–1910 гг.)

The article analyzes the influence of Kantian philosophy on the formation and philosophical work of Nikolai Berdyaev from 1900 to 1910. The attitude of the Russian philosopher to the basic ideas of I. Kant was critical from the very beginning. Nikolai Berdyaev directed his main criticism of kantianism in his first serious book against Kantian dualism, the existence of an absolute transcendent principle. Kantianism was for Berdyaev the most important philosophical experience, thanks to which he moved at the beginning of his creative path from critical marxism to idealism. During the period of turning to idealism, he came to the idea that transcendental consciousness immanently contains a religious attitude to the world. Kant's ethical postulates have not lost their fundamental significance for him. However, he associated the fundamental shortcoming of Kant's philosophy with the absence of a teleological approach to reality. Striving for metaphysical realism, Nikolai Berdyaev very soon overcomes the ethical normative idealism that was so characteristic of his early work. Without staying long within the framework of idealistic philosophy, Berdyaev subsequently made the transition to mystical religious realism. The critical philosophy that Kant represented, according to Berdyaev, absolutized the role of rational knowledge and closed access to true transcendental reality, narrowed being by the boundaries of the phenomenal world. He saw the way out of the grip of Kantian rationalism in expanding the framework of transcendental reason to the metaphysical or supra-rational. It was in mystical cognition that Berdyaev saw the only true way of cognizing reality. The Russian philosopher built his epistemology on the fundamental idea that being is closed and transcendent to thinking or rationalized consciousness, and it becomes immanent only to primary, integral and living consciousness, which has access to transcendent metaphysical experience.

Современные исследования философии Владимира Соловьева: Томас Немет

The article examines the research of Thomas Nemeth, the largest modern American specialist in the history of Russian philosophy, related to the reception of Kantian philosophy, phenomenology in Russia, as well as the work of V.S. Solovyov. Russian philosophy has historically been characterized by a weak interest in epistemological problems, which affected the ways of development of “Kantian studies” in Russia: the perception of the ideas of the German thinker was set by ethical and ontological perspectives, which led, among other things, to the fact that the so-called ontological turn, having started in German neo-Kantianism in the last quarter of the XIX – first quarter of the XX centuries, was largely consonant with Russian philosophy of the beginning of the last century. It is concluded that the key role in such a perception of Kantian philosophy was played by the early Vl. Solovyov. The article T. Nemeth's interpretation of Solovyov's legacy is critically comprehended as an evidence of the failure of the philosophical project proper, the author's thesis about the inherent “ontological error” of V. Solovyov's philosophy, allegedly not allowing the Russian philosopher, with all the depth of the formulation of philosophical problems, to develop ways to resolve them properly, is analyzed. The conclusion is made that trying to comprehend the Russian philosophical tradition as a whole, Nemeth continues, albeit with a number of reservations, the line of its humanistic interpretation. The new English translation of “The Justification of Good”, made by T. Nemeth, is compared with the previous translation made by N. Duddington, being widely used in the English-speaking world. The conclusion is made about the comparative advantages of the new translation.

The Truth of Moral Act from the Perspective of Taha Abdelrahman

This research studies Taha Abdel Rahman's perspective on ethics to face the moral challenge witnessed by our contemporary world and open the horizon to build a global ethical project, which represents the practical part of his moral philosophy. By diving into modernist ethics and by referring to Kantian philosophy within the scope of the abstract mind, Taha therefore sought to present an alternative, reverse philosophical theory, based on religious ethics and the return of Allah in the Islamic religious sense to the world and existence, and at the same time bet on the possession of the Islamic world and its societies with the right to differ in the corner of the world and to present an alternative to salvation from the problems of civilization and the world in contemporary history. The study concluded that Taha Abdel Rahman's critical project presents an ethical theory from an Islamic perspective, and the creation of an Islamic moral philosophy, based on the values of faith and worship as common Islamic human values.

Расовая теория И. Канта в контексте колониального дискурса эпохи Просвещения

The paper deals with analysis of the works of I. Kant from the point how these works fit into the colonial-enlightenment discourse of the late modern period. During a long time, this issue was out of the research attention, because the colonial issue was not considered to be the central aspect of I. Kant's works. The purpose of the study is an attempt to answer the questions, firstly, what place did colonial knowledge occupy in the ontological and epistemological systems of I. Kant, secondly, what was the specificity of Kant's racial theory, and, thirdly, how in Kantian philosophy the relationship between the ideas about the world's wholeness and the fact of the existence of other races was constructed. This author uses the method of historical and cultural contextualization by E. Said, which allows us to correlate Kant's ideas directly with the worldview system that developed in European intellectual thought in the late 18th - early 19th centuries. A special feature of the Kantian racial theory is that, on the one hand, it served as a cognitive strategy for systematizing knowledge about the conquered peoples within the framework of the scientific picture of the world, which was conceived as unified and expedient, on the other hand, it legitimized the domination of Europeans over the colonial population in terms of natural science.

HAYDEN WHITE'S ENTHUSIASM FOR HEGEL

ABSTRACTThis article traces the formation of Hayden White's chapter on Hegel in Metahistory by comparing it with his earlier essay titled “Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism.” It also analyzes White's review of George Armstrong Kelly's Idealism, Politics and History and White's well‐known essay titled “The Burden of History.” This article argues that White's main concerns in his review essay and in Metahistory were (1) to respond to the existentialist challenge, posed especially by Camus, that history does not matter and (2) to use Hegel to articulate an answer regarding how historical consciousness and action can be combined. White created his version of Hegel early in “Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism” by absorbing (probably) Josiah Royce's interpretation of the Absolute and (more certainly) Erich Auerbach's idea of tragic realism. However, White's idea of tragedy, which focuses on the consequences of action, is not the same as Auerbach's idea, which concerns treating the psychological depth of characters seriously. In his review of Idealism, Politics and History and in Metahistory, White further injected the Kantian philosophy of history—as interpreted by Lucien Goldmann and Lewis White Beck—into Hegel's idea of tragedy and comedy. In doing so, White affirmed the philosophical activist's ability not only to recognize the tragic circumstance of the past and the present but also to hold on to the hope for a better, comic future.

Einbildungskraft Kavramının Türkçe Felsefe Sözlüklerindeki Yolculuğu ve Kant’ın I. Kritiği’nden Hareketle Muhayyile Melekesi Üzerine Düşünmek

Bu çalışma, Einbildungskraft teriminin Türkçe felsefe sözlüklerindeki Fransızca karşılığından hareketle imagination terimi üzerinden bir soruşturma gerçekleştirir. Kant’ın eleştirel felsefesi içerisinde terimin kullanım alanlarına işaret etmeyi amaçlar. Bu yönde, felsefenin yapıtaşı sayılan kavramlar ve bunların zihnî bir geleneğin sürdürülebilmesi adına taşıdığı anlamları bir arada tutan felsefe sözlüklerinden bazıları çalışmaya konu edilmektedir. Felsefenin kavramlarıyla teşekkül eden kültürel hafızanın aktarımı ve terimsel ihyâ faaliyetinin önemi üzerinde durulmaktadır. Bu çalışma ile geçmişten günümüze felsefe ıstılâhına hâkim olmanın, Kant’ın eleştirel felsefesindeki kavramların Türkçede yeniden inşa edilmesin-deki önemine işaret edilmektedir. Böylelikle, Einbildungskraft terimi üzerinden, Kant’ın verdiği manalar ve Türkçeye çevrimde tercih edilen kelimeler üzerinde durulmaktadır. Dilde ıslâh faaliyetinin değeri ve düşünce geleneğine bağlanma ihtiyacının önemi vurgulanmaktadır. Bu manada Kant’ın, kendi eserlerindeki terimsel tutumu ve kavram seçimleri ele alınmaktadır. Kant’ın, kavram inşasına dair eleştirel felsefesi içerisindeki değinilerine yer verilmektedir. Diğer yandan felsefî bir kavramın taşıdığı anlam yükünü en iyi karşılayacak terimin seçimi hususunun önemi üzerinde durulur. Kant’ın Einbildungskraft teriminin Türkçedeki karşılıkları ve bu kelimelerin, kavramın karşılığı olarak yeterliliklerine işaret edilmiştir. Kavramın kendi içerisinde taşıdığı nüansların ayırt edilmesi adına eleştiri öncesi dönem ve eleştirel dönemdeki kullanımları üzerinde durulmuştur.

The Transcendental Dimension of Interest

교육의 분야에서 흥미는 학습의 원리로서의 지위를 인정받고 있으며, 그만큼 교육에서 중요한 역할을 담당하는 것으로 널리 받아들여지고 있다. 그러나 흥미를 단순히 모종의 목적을 달성하는 데 요구되는 보조수단으로, 혹은 지식을 효과적으로 전달하는 데 요구되는 정서적 보조물로 간주하는 통념은 흥미에 과연 그만큼의 중요성을 부여해도 좋은가 하는 의문을 불러일으킨다. 헤르바르트는 아프리오리를 도입하여 삶과 교육의 이상을 선험적 차원에 올려두는 칸트철학을 높이 평가하면서도, 거기에는 그 이상을 향한 여정이 간과되었다는 점을 지적하였다. 헤르바르트는 흥미 개념을 도입함으로써 구체적인 교육의 실천 과정에서 개인의 마음이 이념에 합치하는 것이 어떻게 가능한가를 밝히려고 하였다. 그가 보기에, ‘사이에 있음’을 의미하는 흥미는 시간 계열에서 이루어지는 이념을 향한 부단한 여정, 즉 교육의 실천을 지속할 수 있게 해 주는 근본적인 힘이다. 인간은 흥미에 의하여 삶과 교육의 목적에 해당하는 경지를 부단히 추구해 나갈수 있으며, 동시에 그 경지로 발돋움하는 것을 기대할 수 있다. 이 점에서 흥미는 교육의 목적으로 간주될 수 있다.In the field of education, interest is recognized as a principle of learning, and it is widely accepted that it plays an important role in education. However, the common notion of interest simply as an aid required to achieve some sort of purpose or as an emotional aid required to effectively transfer knowledge raises the question of whether it is possible to attach that much importance to interest. Herbart highly appreciated Kant's philosophy, which puts the ideal of life and education on a transcendental dimension by introducing the concept of a priori, but also points out that the journey toward it was overlooked. By introducing the concept of interest, Herbart tried to reveal how an individual's mind can conform to the transcendental idea in the process of concrete education. In his view, interest, which means ‘to be between’(Inter-esse) is a fundamental force that enables the continuous journey toward the transcendental idea that follows the temporal process, that is, the practice of education. Human beings can continuously pursue the state corresponding to the purpose of life and education through interest, and at the same time can expect to rise to that state. In this regard, it is not an exaggeration to say that interest can be construed as an aim of education.

『갈매기의 꿈』: 철학적 갈매기의 비상과 제4부의 재발견, 그리고 텍스트의 재탄생

The personified storytelling of the protagonist Jonathan of Jonathan Livingston Seagull spreads out with its picture/photo images, which has a mystic metamorphosis motif while learning and developing through torture. Jonathan’s dialogue with his mother that seems to narrate the Kantian philosophy is about knowledge well-known with his question, “What can I know?” Jonathan’s philosophical flight is going to confront the existential situation that accelerates his conversion. Jonathan’s fable is an expression of free will to escape from a comfortable life. It is a narrative of adventure about a being deserted in the universe, and today in the early 21st century, it invokes us an ecological imagination of how to confront the extreme state of environmental crisis and how to overcome it. This novella that conveys a lesson of an adventure of selfhood, or contains a fable of adventurous seagulls can be read from new perspectives from the situation of an era. Its topic sentence as a proverb, “The gull sees farthest who flies highest.” has its Absolute Superlative whose deep structure we need to understand. Unlike its original English versions, only those of the Korean translation has its proverb with a picture/photo image, published by Munyechulpansa in 1973 and 1986 per se. In the Complete Korean Edition of 2015, the decorative sentence is finally excluded. This article involves a study on incongruities in its construction between the narrative and picture/photo images, and the rediscovery of Part 4 and its effect.

Harmony without equality: Schiller's theory of virtue

AbstractIn this paper I reconstruct Schiller's theory of virtue from his essay “On grace and dignity” and discuss how it fits into Kant's moral philosophy. According to Schiller, a virtuous person – a beautiful soul – is characterised by harmony between reason and sensibility. I show that despite some misleading textual clues and interpretations based on them, Schiller does not regard the harmony between reason and sensibility as an equal partnership. On the contrary, just like Kant, Schiller fully recognises the priority of reason. The difference between their positions is more subtle. Whereas Kant holds that sensibility must be overtly subordinated to reason, Schiller believes that there should be a semblance of an equal partnership between reason and sensibility, provided that the latter is sufficiently ennobled.

From Jean-Paul Sartre to Critical Existentialism

This article examines Sartre’s works in which his attempt to find an existentialist ethics is evident. Most of the clues to this project are to be found in texts published posthumously since during his lifetime he never managed to fulfil the promise he made at the end of Being and Nothingness. It will be argued that this existentialist ethics owes a strong debt to Kantian philosophy, even if it confronts more directly the historical dynamics of violence and oppression. Despite the fact that this project is unfinished and only sketched out, it is possible to ask what Sartre’s direction of development would have been, pointing to the outline of a normative theory, Critical Existentialism, that could have its place in contemporary ethical debate.