Kant's Understanding Research Articles

‘Nachschrift eines Freundes’: Kant on Language, Friendship and the Concept of a People

Kant's brief ‘Postscript of a Friend’ serves as a peculiar coda to his life work. The last of Kant's writing to be published during his lifetime, it is both a friendly endorsement of Christian Gottlieb Mielcke's newly competedLithuanian–German and German–Lithuanian Dictionaryand a plea in Kant's own name for the preservation of minority languages, Lithuanian in particular. This support for minority languages has no visible precedent in his earlier writings, in which national, civic and linguistic identities and associated loyalties tend to overlap. Indeed, Kant's understanding of the commonwealth as nation-state seems predicated on the fact or myth of ethnic and linguistic unity and homogeneity. The same apparent lack of precedent also applies to theNachschrift's singling out as a people of peculiar civic merit of the Lithuanians, who are not otherwise mentioned in any of Kant's published or unpublished writings. The work thus raises an obvious question: why does Kant devote his last published work (and declining powers) to a topic and cause in which he does not seem to have taken much earlier interest?

Reading Kant from a Catholic Horizon: Ethics and the Anthropology of Grace

For two centuries Catholic philosophers and theologians have generally treated Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy as incompatible with principles fundamental to Catholic accounts of the human condition in relation to God. This article argues that contemporary scholarship—particularly about the role of anthropological concerns in the critical project—indicates that Kant's understanding of finite human freedom provides a basis for Catholic theology to engage his thinking positively in the articulation of a theology of grace for humanity's postmodern context.

Sociology, the public sphere, and modern government: a challenge to the dominance of Habermas

There is an unfortunate tendency within some branches of sociology - particularly those usually called 'critical', that is, those associated with 'critical social theory'- to treat with disdain the understanding of the public sphere that many modern governments use daily in making and implementing public policy. The majority of sociologists in those branches seem to prefer, as part and parcel of their normative commitments, Jürgen Habermas's Kantian understanding of the public sphere, which focuses primarily on reason and morality and insists that these two forces are of a higher order than politics and law. This paper offers a set of criticisms of the Habermas-Kant understanding, arguing that its focus on reason and morality, were it to become more widespread, would steer sociology into public policy irrelevance. The paper goes on to describe a very different understanding of the public sphere, a politico-legal or civil-peace understanding which operates as the public policy focus of those governments that have relegated questions of salvation (whether religious or ideological) to the private sphere. This understanding emerged from early modern attempts to carve out a domain of relative freedom and security against the deadly violence of religious disputation sweeping across Europe. The paper readily acknowledges that some 'non-critical' branches of sociology already employ a version of this understanding.

Struggling with reason

The purpose of this article is to suggest an interpretation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an advanced theological critique of practical reason. Dostoevsky deals with Kant's understanding of the relation between will and reason within morality already in his Notes from underground. He criticises Kant indirectly by proposing an alternative kind of imperative for human action where the will is regarded to be free in another sense than within Kantian theory. Dostoevsky develops this approach further in The Brothers Karamazov. The author of this article argues that Dostoevsky's critique of rationalism can be described as three different models of a struggle with reason. These three models are represented by the figures of the three brothers Karamazov and are analysed in relation to the question of the existence of God as it is dealt with in the novel.

Immanuel Kant (International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought). Edited by Arthur Ripstein

Immanuel Kant (International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought). Edited by Arthur Ripstein

KANT E SCHOPENHAUER SOBRE A NATUREZA DA FILOSOFIA MORAL

Este artigo tem como objetivo examinar a crítica de Schopenhauer à compreensão kantiana de filosofia moral. A referência básica para esse exame é o livro Sobre o Fundamento da Moral de Schopenhauer. O artigo tenta sustentar a tese de que a natureza da filosofia moral segundo Kant pode ser defendida com sucesso frente à apreciação negativa que dela faz Schopenhauer.

A Pragmatist Cosmopolitan Moment: Reconfiguring Nussbaum's Cosmopolitan Concentric Circles

Robert Fine and Robin Cohen conclude their essay Four Cosmopolitan Moments by stating that developing cosmopolitanism has become an urgent moral neces sity (2002,162). As resources for this task they offer the Stoics, Kant, Arendt, and Nussbaum as particularly important moments in the history of cosmopolitanism. David Held (2002, 57) shares their sense of urgency but worries that a Kantian understanding of political communities gives an inadequate basis for this task. David Hollinger identifies as cosmopolitans an array of scholars who articu late alternatives Nussbaum's universalism and Kymlicka's pluralism, in attempt ing to connect the notion of a species-wide community actual politics, the complex of possibilities and restraints found on the ground (2001, 238). Noting these scholars' penchant for attaching adjectives cosmopolitanism, Hollinger lists their modifiers as including vernacular, rooted, critical, comparative, national, discrepant, situated, and actually existing (2001, 237). In this article I suggest a large project and carry out a small part of it. The large project is propose early twentieth-century American pragmatism as another moment. Several of the early pragmatists were engaged in precisely the task Hollinger describes above of connecting a species-wide community on-the-ground politics; their work could serve as a historical resource for today's new cosmopolitans. The small project is use essays written around the time of World War I by Randolph Bourne, W. E. B. DuBois, and Jane Addams, three American pragmatists and public intellectuals, assess the Stoic metaphor of cosmopolitan, concentric circles of affiliation. Using Nussbaum's presentation of this metaphor focus the discussion, I will show how these pragmatist cosmo politans unsettle Nussbaum's implicit background assumptions that the circles are conceptually distinct and that the way develop allegiance the widest circle of humanity is through Kantian rationality. This small project will demonstrate how a pragmatist cosmopolitan moment can be a fruitful resource for today's new cosmopolitans.

Précis of Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue*

In this book, I argue that there is a Kantian virtue theory to be explored in which humility plays a central role. The book is at once an interpretation of Kant and an assertion that Kant's understanding of virtue particularly his rehabilitation of the virtue of humility is philosophically preferable.1 Part I is devoted to explaining the account of human nature upon which Kantian virtue is built, and then explaining that account of virtue. At the heart of Kant's conception of human nature are two assertions: a non-Stoic dependence upon things outside of us (the Dependency Thesis) and radical evil (the Corruption Thesis). It is the particular challenge of the Kantian virtuous person to come to terms with both her dependence and corruption. Virtue is based in a meta-maxim of the will (the of the moral disposition) which overturns our original corruption, thus assuring a strong unity of the virtues. Yet, when various aspects of this maxim are internalized in one's person, we can also speak of individual virtues in the more familiar Aristotelian sense. I thus reject Onora O'Neill's more act-based account of Kantian virtue, insisting that Kant's ethics is equally concerned with act and agent.

Transcendental Philosophy and Atheism

Engineers test materials by subjecting them to stress: once a beam has been broken one can specify exactly how strong it was. The same method can be used in philosophy. In the Autumn of 1798 and the Winter of 1799, Fichte’s philosophical position was submitted to extraordinary stress in the extended episode known as the Atheism Controversy, culminating in his forced dismissal from his university post at Jena. The disputed issues explicitly concerned matters of religious faith and philosophical theology, but the stress of the controversy exposed fundamental tensions in Fichte’s broader philosophical position and provoked him to formulate a novel, proto-phenomenological account of the scope and structure of transcendental investigation. Recent years have seen an explosion of new interest in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.1 This recent spate of scholarship has focused attention on Fichte’s distinctive contributions in an array of interrelated areas: the theory of self-consciousness, the theory of subjectivity, idealism, intersubjectivity, private property and political right, freedom, etc.2 In all these areas a common pattern has emerged: Fichte appropriates and radicalizes – sometimes beyond recognition – themes he found in Kant, often mediated by figures such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Friedrich Jacobi, or Salomon Maimon. What has been less systematically interrogated is Fichte’s contribution to the very idea of transcendental philosophy, transcendental inquiry or transcendental proof. There are a few notable exceptions, the most important of which is Gunter Zoller’s study, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy. But this is one of those cases where the exception proves the rule. For while Zoller emphasizes Fichte’s departures from Kant on many key points, when it comes to the theme of his title he generally emphasizes continuity. Zoller: ‘Historically speaking, Fichte’s project of a Wissenschaftslehre continues Kant’s development of a transcendental philosophy; it aims at a comprehensive account of the principles governing human knowledge and its world of objects.’3 And elsewhere: ‘Fichte retains the Kantian understanding of transcendental philosophy as a theory of experience.’4 One might accordingly conclude that Fichte simply did not have much to contribute on this score. Although he was a radical innovator in many areas, he essentially took over an unmodified Kantian construal of the parameters of transcendental investigation: transcendental philosophy is opposed on the one hand to 1 In referring to Fichte’s writings I have made use of the two standard editions. Where possible, I refer to the volume and page of I.H. Fichte, (ed.) Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sammtliche Werke (Berlin: Veit & Comp, 1845-6; reprint: Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), using the abbreviation SW. The pagination of SW is provided in most modern editions of Fichte’s works. For works not included in SW, I refer to R. Lauth et al. (eds.) J.G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964 ); page references to this edition are given with the abbreviation GA. English translations of many of the works cited here can be found in Breazeale 1988 and 1994. Citations to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason make use of the usual A and B numbering. 2 On Fichte’s contributions in these areas see inter alia: Henrich 1966 (on self-consciousness); Neuhouser 1990 (on subjectivity); Pippin 1989 (on idealism); Wood 2006 (on intersubjectivity); Merle, et al. 2001 (on political right). 3 Zoller 1998: 2. 4 Zoller 1998: 74.

Kant's Phenomena: Extrinsic or Relational Properties? A Reply to Allais1

Kant's claim that we are ignorant of things in themselves is a claim that we cannot know 'the intrinsic nature of things', or so at least I argued in Kantian Humility.2 I'm delighted to find that Lucy Allais is in broad agreement with this core idea, thinking it represents at the very least a part of Kant's view. She sees some of the advantages of this interpretation. It has significant textual support. It does justice to Kant's sense that we are missing out on something, in our failure to know things as they are in themselves. And it makes tellable, after all, Kant's at first sight untellable tale, about the knowable existence of unknowable things: for we can know that things exist, without knowing what their intrinsic properties are. However, Allais is critical of the way I fill out this core idea, and she has an alternative to offer. She thinks Kant's distinction between things in themselves and phenomena is not a distinction between two kinds of properties, intrinsic and relational. She is critical of my interpretation of causal powers, which I take to be the relevant relational properties: my idea, first, that causal powers are in fact relational properties; second, that causal powers are only contingently associated with intrinsic properties, so that creating substances with intrinsic properties is insufficient for creating causal power; and, third, that intrinsic properties are causally inert. Her criticisms of these three ideas will be the topics of Sections 1-3 below. The last of these, the idea of inertness, will strike many as strange; but it provides an explanation for ignorance of things in themselves. If intrinsic properties are, for Kant, causally inert, then that explains why a receptive knower could have no knowledge of them: Kant's understanding of intrinsic properties and causal powers helps to explain his humility.

Maxims in Kant's Practical Philosophy

A standard interpretation of Kantian "maxims" sees them as expressing reasons for action, implying that we cannot act without a maxim. But recent challenges to this interpretation claim that Kant viewed acting on maxims as optional. Kant's understanding of maxims derives from Christian Wolff, who regarded maxims as major premises of the practical syllogism. This supports the standard interpretation. Yet Kant also viewed commitments to maxims as essential for virtue and character development, which supports challenges to the standard interpretation, and raises questions about the coherence of Kant's overall conception of the role of maxims in practical philosophy.

Authenticity, Freedom, and Gelassenheit

Heidegger and, in his wake, the so-called movement introduced in the philosophical discourse of the twentieth century the concept of authenticity. Properly speaking, the German word Eigentlichkeit, which was translated into French, and subsequently into English and Spanish, with the word authenticity, has a different origin and different semantic possibilities, as the parallel between Eigentlichkeit and the key concept of the later Heidegger, Ereignis, shows. For the purposes of this essay, however, the word authenticity, which in the meaning is not yet recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary, will be used without further qualifications as a Heideggerean concept. I understand this essay to be not so much a contribution to Heidegger scholarship as an attempt to explore the meaning, the presuppositions, and the implications of the concept of with Heidegger's help but without restricting myself to Heidegger's teaching. In this context, I will briefly engage the question of freedom and determinism and the Kantian understanding of morality. The question of freedom, on the one hand, emerges at this point because the concept of involves the possibility of choosing to be who one is, and this possibility is negated by a deterministic understanding of human action. I shall show that the position of determinism is, indeed, irrefutable, but also indemonstrable, and that, even if it were a proved doctrine, it would not eliminate the need, on the part of the agent, to choose a course of action. But deterministic teaching does have a bearing on the question of and, in general, on the question of freedom, insofar as its serves as a mechanism of self-justification which allows the individual to have the conviction that she does not need to exert herself to be her true self. Kant's understanding of morality, on the other hand, is discussed as a way of showing that the idea of and the idea of morality share the fundamental presupposition of the freedom of the human being to choose who she is, in addition to the categorical demand to overcome what one ordinarily already is (fallen or beholden to the inclinations) and to effect what I call a conversion by which the will breaks the attachments to what appears valuable in ordinary life so as to treat it as nothing. After these discussions of morality and freedom I shall conclude by returning to Heidegger in order to show that the idea of Gelassenheit, which he developed later in his career without explicit references to the early concept of authenticity, is nonetheless a development, and indeed a more adequate formulation, of this concept, and that it can be understood as the best formulation of that detachment which is postulated both in the idea of and in that of morality. As a result of the popularity of the existentialist movement, the word authenticity acquired a peculiar meaning and flavor, which has passed into ordinary usage. I am not interested in the ordinary meaning of the word, but only in its place in Heidegger's thought, particularly in Being and Time. An analysis of the meaning of the word, as applied to human beings in an sense, reveals important truths about human existence. Notice the differences in meaning when we apply the word to nonhuman beings. If I say that this rock is not authentic (because it is in fact made of cardboard), I mean that this thing is not genuinely a rock. IfI say of a man that he is not authentic, I do not imply that he is not really a man. And nonetheless it is clear that I mean to say that he is in some way not genuine. What is not genuine about him? His humanity is genuine, we would say, that is, he is genuinely human; or perhaps not, perhaps what we mean (or should mean) by saying that he is not authentic is precisely that he is not genuinely human. But for now it suffices to state that when we say that a man is not authentic we do not mean to say that he is a fake man and in reality a member of a different species. …

Кант і «філософія діалогу»: парадокси спадкоємності

The article is devoted to the problem of the Kantian foundations of the "philosophy of dialogue" as one of the original trends in the philosophy of the twentieth century. In the author's opinion, Kant's understanding of man as a dialogical being addressed to the Other appears. The author aims at reconstructing the essential features of the "philosophy of dialogue" as a trend in non-classical philosophy, analysing two key ideas of Kant that determined the innovativeness of his philosophy, and proving the fact of continuity and substantive connection of these phenomena in the history of philosophy. Besides there is shown an essential correlation and the order of Kant’s ideas “the criticism of free mind” and “the things in person” in one sight and the key conceptions: the philosophy of the dialogue” in another one. The latter is analysed as a specific way of implementing the Kantian paradigm of rethinking the foundations of human existence and cognition.

Genetic Enhancement as Care or as Domination? The Ethics of Asymmetrical Relationships in the Upbringing of Children

Should a society oriented towards justice provide parents with the possibility of enhancing their children's genes? The opposing arguments of authors in the Rawls School and of the theorist of communicative action, Jurgen Habermas, are analysed in terms of their key concepts. Their positions are then assessed from the point of view of the principles of the pedagogical task to educate towards autonomy under conditions of asymmetry. They each call for respect both of children's difference and of their dependence, and they ask for parents to moderate their expectations. In the light of this, Habermas's critique of genetic intervention, based on a Kantian understanding of autonomy as the capacity to be moral, on Kierkegaard's concept of being able to be oneself, and on respect for finitude, is here to be justified.

Why be witty? Fichte and Kant on the nature of wit with a view to wit's political ramifications

In a brief section of The Characteristics of the Present Age, Fichte presents one of the strangest ideas to have arisen in transcendental thought: that wit is related to what Fichte calls the highest idea and to truth. The concept of wit does not arise anywhere else in Fichte's philosophy, and he does not analyze it completely in either The Characteristics of the Present Age or his philosophical texts. I contend that Fichte does not expand upon his idea because his understanding of wit arises out of the Kantian analysis of wit, even though Fichte gives his own spin to Kant's view. What I show in this paper is how Fichte both appropriates and alters Kant's understanding of wit, and how wit serves a social/political function in Fichte's thought.

External Freedom in Kant's Rechtslehre: Political, Metaphysical1

External freedom is the central good protected in Kant's legal and political philosophy. But external freedom is perplexing, being at once freedom of spatio‐temporal movement and a form of noumenal or ‘intelligible’freedom. Moreover, it turns out that identifying impairments to external freedom nearly always involves recourse to an elaborated system of positive law, which seems to compromise external freedom's status as a prior, organizing good. Drawing heavily on Kant's understanding of the role of empirical ‘anthropological’information in constructing a Doctrine of Right, or Rechtslehre, this essay offers an interpretation of external freedom that makes sense of its simultaneous spatio‐temporality, dependence on positive law, intelligibility (or ‘noumenality’), and a priority. The essay suggests that this account of Kantian external freedom has implications both for politics and for the metaphysics of everyday objects and institutions.

Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Can’? And Did Kant Think It Does?

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it is argued that while the principle of ‘ought implies can’ is certainly plausible in some form, it is tempting to misconstrue it, and that this has happened in the way it has been taken up in some of the current literature. Second, Kant's understanding of the principle is considered. Here it is argued that these problematic conceptions put the principle to work in a way that Kant does not, so that there is an important divergence here which can easily be overlooked.

Between Termini: Heidegger, Cassirer, and the Two Terms of Transcendental Method

The debate between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos, though relatively short, turns out to be wide-ranging one. As the debate progresses it seems less and less clear that there is a common language between the two disputants, making it hard to identify the exact point of contention between them. Nevertheless, I think there is on both sides, though perhaps more on Cassirer's, an attempt to find some common ground, if only to make the differences between them clearer. In the course of the debate Heidegger takes up a distinction Cassirer introduces early on between the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quern of their respective philosophical positions. In what follows, I want to explore this notion of the two termini as a guide to thinking about the criticisms raised by each side in the debate. But as well I will argue that it leads us to see a certain commonality in their conception of the task of a transcendental philosophy, one that gives weight to the multiplicity and autonomy of factical forms of life and objective spirit, even at the price of a certain systematicity. First, a clarification of the terms. In the first place the notion of two termini is used by Cassirer to designate the two ends of the process of constitution, the constituted as the endpoint of the process, and the constituting subject as its point of origin. But the figure of the two termini also doubles for him as a way of characterizing the distinctively neo-Kantian conception of transcendental research as a reconstruction of this process of constitution. Transcendental research is a Copernican turn by which we turn back from the constituted to its conditions of possibility in the constituting subject, thus a return from the terminus ad quern to the terminus a quo. Early in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms we find Cassirer using this distinction to characterize Natorp's psychology. Describing the problem that the object of psychology is no ordinary object, that "We can never lay bare the immediate life and being of consciousness as such,"1 Cassirer characterizes Natorp's approach to study of consciousness as one that explores the "unhalting process of objectivization in a twofold direction: from terminus a quo to terminus ad quern and back again." "In Natorp's opinion," Cassirer continues, "it is only by a continuous back and forth, by this twofold direction of method that the object of psychology can be made visible as such. It comes to light only when a new reconstructive effort is opposed to the constructive effort of mathematics and natural science, and of ethics and aesthetics as well."2 For Cassirer, then, the two termini signify the key neo-Kantian methodological stricture that consciousness can only be reconstructed as the formal transcendental conditions of the constituted objective world, and cannot be directly studied through any form of intuitive self-consciousness. But note also the emphasis on the idea of transcendental philosophy as an ongoing back and forth between the two termini, rather than a one-way ticket from constituted to constituting. This implies that a turn back to the factical, to the realm of the constituted in it's factical and historical multiplicity, provides a critical check on the success of the initial transcendental turn from the constituted to the constituting. At the Davos debate, Cassirer uses the contrast between the two termini in a similar fashion to characterize the contested place of the schematism in Kant's thought. Agreeing with Heidegger on the importance of the schematism to Kant's analysis of theoretical knowledge, he points out that Kant nevertheless forbids the schematism in the ethical sphere, saying, "For Kant, the Schematism is . . . the terminus a quo, but not the terminus ad quern."3 Cassirer's criticism, then, is that Heidegger has overlooked the terminus ad quern of Kant's philosophy: the sphere of the infinite, the sphere of an objectivity that one finds in Kant's understanding of the theoretical, the ethical, and the aesthetic. …

John Locke ve George Berkeley'in Kesin Bilgi Anlayışı

In this article, it will be briefly comprehended two empiricist philosophers, Locke and Berkeley's exact knov/ledge understanding and, it will be also discussed their aporiae. Meanwhile it will be compared Platon, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant's knowledge understanding.

A Rights-Based View of the Idea/ Expression Dichotomy in Copyright Law

The paper offers a rights-based, Kantian interpretation of the idea/expression dichotomy in the law of copyright. It demonstrates that the idea/expression dichotomy normatively structures the relation between the parties to a copyright action in terms of their equal rights to authorship. To the extent that the defendant has not copied the plaintiff’s expression but has instead expressed an idea anew, the defendant has exercised her own authorship. The limits of the plaintiff’s right (i.e. the law’s refusal to copyright ideas) are therefore the contours of a public domain that, as a matter of equality, the plaintiff himself must be held to recognize. The public domain is not externally imposed upon but internally constitutive of authorial right. Thus the paper shows that a Kantian understanding of the fundamentals of copyright questions the perceived opposition between authorial right and public domain that informs much of contemporary copyright discourse. In so doing, the paper establishes the largely neglected possibility of a rights-based defense of the public domain.