Kant's Work Research Articles

L'unité du monde et les voies de la causalité. Une étude des écrits et des cours de la période précritique de Kant

This essay connects the theme of the nature of the world in Kant's pre-critical works (including the published works and the lectures up to the end of the year 1770) with the examination of the problem of causality. Grasping Kant's position from this gradually evolving perspective enables us to present a unified account of the precritical period. It also helps us to see his Critical revolution as an evolutionary turn, in which there is a growing awareness that the connection between substances must emphasize a real connection whose grounding does not depend in an indirect manner on a transcendent being named God.

Reassessing Kant's geography

This article offers a critical reassessment of Immanuel Kant's lectures on Physische Geographie and his contribution to geographical thought more generally. There are a number of reasons why this reassessment is needed: the lectures are finally about to be published in English translation; careful philological work in German has exposed how corrupted the standard text of the lectures is; and philosophers are finally beginning to critically integrate an understanding of the Geography into their overall assessment of Kant's work. English speaking geographers will therefore soon have access to the lectures in a way that they have not done before, but they need to be aware both of the problems of the edition being translated and the work philosophers have undertaken on their situation in Kant's work and their impact. More broadly, the reassessment requires us to reconsider the position Kant occupies in the discipline of geography as a whole. The article examines the history of the lectures and their publication in some detail; discusses Kant's purpose in giving them; and looks at the way in which he structured geographical knowledge and understood its relation to history and philosophy. In terms of the broader focus particular attention is given to the topics of race and space. While these lectures are undoubtedly of largely historical interest, it is for precisely that reason that an examination of them and Kant's thought more generally is of relevance today to the history of the discipline of geography.

Foucault's Kantian critique

In several lectures, interviews and essays from the early 1980s, Michel Foucault startlingly argues that he is engaged in a kind of critical work that is similar to that of Immanuel Kant. Given Foucault's criticisms of Kantian and Enlightenment emphases on universal truths and values, his declaration that his work is Kantian seems paradoxical. I agree with some commentators who argue that this is a way for Foucault to publicly acknowledge to his critics that he is not, as some of them charge, attempting a total critique of Enlightenment beliefs and values, but is instead attempting to transform them from within. I argue further that Foucault's self-professed Kantianism can also productively be read as a means of encouraging change in his intellectual audience, a call to courage to take up the thread of Enlightenment thought that Foucault finds in Kant's essay, `What is Enlightenment?': that of directing one's philosophical efforts towards questioning and transforming one's own present in its historical specificity, for the sake of promoting the values of freedom and autonomy therein. Though much of Kant's philosophical work is focused on that which lies outside of history, Foucault locates in some of it a concern for what is happening here and now that, I argue, he encourages his audience to take up for themselves through tracing his own intellectual lineage to Kant. In so doing, he encourages contemporary philosophers to consider the value and effects of their work on the present social and political contexts in which they live.

Kant's Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World

Kant's brilliant original contributions to political thought cannot be understood without attention to his dynamic concept of provisional right, argues Elisabeth Ellis in this book - the first comprehensive interpretation of Kant's political theory. Kant's notion of provisional right applies to existing institutions and practices that are consistent with the possibility of progress. Ellis traces this idea through Kant's works and demonstrates that the concept of provisional right can be used both to illuminate contemporary theoretical debates and to generate policy implications. In this new interpretation, Kant's provisionalism provides a broad standard for political right that remains deeply responsive to historical and geographical particulars, directing our attention to the dynamism between our world and our ideals. Ellis offers us Kant for our time - worldly, pragmatic, and intensely committed to the everyday pursuit of human freedom. This book does for Kant's political thought what Manfred Kuhn's magisterial biography did for general Kant studies. Ellis's key contribution is her argument that takes Kant's theory of provisional right as his central political concept. Reading Kant's political theory in any other way from now on will be difficult. Mika LaVaque-Manty, University of Michigan

The German Invention of Race (review)

Reviewed by: The German Invention of Race Shannon Sullivan Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore , eds., The German Invention of Race (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006). Pp. vii, 221. $60.00. The German Invention of Race argues that the eighteenth century was a crucial point in the development of modern notions of race and that German thinkers in particular played an important role in transforming race into a relatively stable concept. As editors Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore explain in this book's introduction, most histories of the idea of race have focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have examined how race became an object of scientific study by sociologists, physicians, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and others. The eighteenth century generally has not been seen as an equally important era in the modern racialization of the human species that helped establish white supremacy and dominance over nonwhite people. But as this multidisciplinary collection shows, eighteenth-century Germany was a hotbed of debate around the meaning and importance of the emerging idea of race as a category marking different groups of people related by common descent. The rich diversity of positions in that debate, which produced the concept of race on which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racial science relied, deserves thoughtful attention and study. The German Invention of Race provides just that, in eleven chapters divided into four parts. Part I, "Modes of Difference: Race, Color and Culture," examines conflicting eighteenth-century attempts to make sense of visible differences between groups of people, such as skin color. The two essays in this section, Peter Feaves's "What 'Progresses' Has Race-Theory Made Since the Times of Leibniz and Wolff?" and Michel Chaouli's "Laocoon and the Hottentots," show how some eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Leibniz, turned to language and reason, rather than physiological differences, to mark the decisive distinction between different beings, whereas others, such as Lessing and Hegel, believed that skin color was indicative of not only the aesthetic but the moral and metaphysical superiority of white people. [End Page 273] The second part of this collection fittingly focuses on Kant, who increasingly is recognized as the "inventor" of the scientific concept of race. "Race in Philosophy: The Problem of Kant" is the anthology's longest and strongest section, with four essays that carefully discuss the role of race in Kant's critical philosophy. John H. Zammito's "Policing Polygeneticism in Germany, 1775: (Kames,) Kant, and Blumenbach" provides a microhistory of Kant and Blumenbach's different reasons (theoretical and empirical, respectively) for rejecting the then-popular polygenetic views of the origin of the human species. In "Kant's Concept of a Human Race," Susan M. Shell asks why Kant concludes that white people are intellectually and morally superior to nonwhite people when this view is not entailed by his conception of race. The answer, as Shell explains, is found in Kant's cosmopolitanism, which requires a way of measuring humanity's progress toward perfection. Robert Bernasconi returns to the relationships of Kant and Blumenbach in "Kant and Blumenbach's Polyps: A Neglected Chapter in the History of the Concept of Race." Even if Blumenbach's work was the main point of reference for nineteenth-century scholars of race, it was Kant's work in The Critique of Judgment that led Blumenbach to adopt a concept of race very similar to that of Kant. For this reason, Bernasconi argues, Kant must be regarded as "the first champion of a scientific concept of race" (73). Mark Larrimore's "Race, Freedom and the Fall in Steffens and Kant" closes the section on Kant by reading his views of race through the lens of Henrich Steffens's anthropology. Showing how Kant's contemporaries would have understood Kant's account of race in theological terms, Larrimore connects race to sin, freedom, and a fall from God's grace in eighteenth-century German thinking. The three essays in Part III, "Race in the Sciences of Culture," explore the emergence of disciplines related to race theory. Focusing on early ethnology, Han F. Vermeulen's "The German Invention of Völkerkunde: Ethnological Discourse in Europe and Asia, 1740–1798" demonstrates...

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 and the Magnitude of Sensation: A Neglected Prologue to Modern Psychophysics

Quantitative relations between the sensations and the stimuli that produce them are the domain of psychophysics, a branch of natural science not yet known at the time of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). But Kant's philosophical doctrines of perception imply that sensations can be quantified. Accordingly, he proposed not only to consider the magnitude of both sensations and stimuli but also to work out an appropriate mathematics that would relate these magnitudes to each other. This part of Kant's work received almost no attention up to the present time although it contains some essential elements of modern psychophysics.

A Realistic and Effective Constraint on the Resort to Force? Pre-commitment to Jus in Bello and Jus Post Bellum as Part of the Criterion of Right Intention

This paper explores Brian Orend's contribution to the just war tradition, specifically his proposed jus post bellum criteria and his idea of pre-commitment to jus in bello and jus post bellum as part of an expanded jus ad bellum criterion of right intention. The latter is based on his interpretation of Kant's work: that as part of the original decision to begin a war, a state should commit itself to certain rules of conduct and appropriate war termination, and if it cannot so commit, it should not continue further down the path to using force. Orend's revised right intention brings jus post bellum ‘into the fold’ of the just war tradition, requiring that state obligations go beyond correct conduct in war. The article argues that whatever the nature of the just cause, there is a compelling argument for committing to jus in bello and jus post bellum as part of jus ad bellum right intention. The justness of the cause in the contemporary era requires strictness rather than leniency in the conduct and termination of war for a state to remain legitimate in the eyes of the world. In the context of Orend's proposals, this would require that states ‘do their homework’ and ‘tie themselves to the mast’; this includes providing proof that the situation on the ground is understood, conducting a feasibility test on the proposed intervention and publicly identifying and committing to their obligations and responsibilities during and after war. Recognising the practical and political obstacles to adopting this idealistic revision of the just war tradition, the paper nevertheless concludes that Orend's contribution is significant and worthy of exploration: it offers a kernel of hope for counteracting pressures to lower the threshold of resort to force, delivering greater justice for the innocent victims of war and providing greater probability of durable peace post-war.

Reading Kant Hermeneutically: Gadamer and the Critique of Judgment

The relationship between 20th-century phenomenology and the transcendental program launched by Immanuel Kant is crucial, but delicate. First there is Husserl, who seemed both attracted to and seriously critical of Kant's first Critique. Then there is Heidegger's ambition to scour the entire field of the three Critiques. Most important in this context, is probably his reading of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). Faithful to his notion of a salvaging “destruction” of the philosophical tradition, Heidegger argues that the earliest version of Kant's work, the so-called A-deduction, is radically different from the philosophy promoted by the neo-Kantians. Kant, he claims, was not really interested in epistemology in the narrow meaning of the term. He was, rather, a philosopher verging upon a genuine ontology of Being, but who, for reasons that remain unknown, felt forced to leave these tracks behind in order to pursue the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Then there is the second Critique, which Heidegger approaches through a discussion of the Kantian notions of freedom and causality. And, finally, there are his remarks about the Critique of Judgment, scattered all over his writing on art from the early 1930s onwards. However, Heidegger never produces a proper, systematic account of the relevance of the third Critique. Such an account, I argue in this essay, is provided by Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus: Tübingen—Jena 1790 –1794

Reviewed by: Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus: Tübingen—Jena 1790-1794 Peter Gilgen Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus: Tübingen—Jena 1790–1794. Von Dieter Henrich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. 2 Bde. 1740 Seiten. €56,00. Among the more important contributions of the past forty years of scholarship on German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century are the numerous accounts that have helped us reconceive the transition from Kant's critical philosophy to German Idealism as articulated by Fichte, Schelling, and of course Hegel. No other scholar has contributed more to this change of perspective than Dieter Henrich. He has published on Kant's late works; on Fichte's original insight; and on the early development of the Tübingen roommates Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling. Furthermore, he has brought to our attention numerous forgotten figures who had a major impact on the philosophical developments of the day, such as Isaac von Sinclair, Jacob Zwilling, and—most importantly—the young Hölderlin, whom Henrich single-handedly established as a significant philosopher in his own right. At the outset of Grundlegung aus dem Ich, Henrich notes that even in 1790, when Kant's "Copernican turn" had become all but irreversible, it would have been impossible to foresee the enormous burst of philosophical creativity and the changes to which it led during the following decade. This entire development took place in two small cities, Tübingen and Jena, and many of the dramatis personae spent longer periods in both of them. The center of Henrich's study is Immanuel Carl Diez who was an influential graduate and teaching fellow or Repetent at the Stift in Tübingen. Already in an essay [End Page 230] of 1970, "Historische Voraussetzungen von Hegels System," Henrich had indicated that Hegel's adaptation and further development of Kant's philosophy had to be seen in connection with his years at the Stift. There, he befriended, and learned from, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Niethammer. For all of them, Diez exemplified the struggle over the question concerning the consequences of Kant's critical philosophy for religion and theology. Henrich announced future works that would make available hitherto unprinted sources, among them "manuscripts and letters by the Repetent Immanuel Diez." Having fulfilled this promise with the publication of Immanuel Carl Diez: Briefwechsel und Kantische Schriften in 1997, Henrich saw the necessity of bringing his unmatched erudition in the history of German Idealism to bear on these texts, which to non-specialists might have looked rather disjointed and impenetrable, and to reconstruct systematically Diez's highly original and rigorous defense of Kant against the attempt by the Tübingen theologians to subordinate reason to revelation. Henrich's book contains several monographs. The parts on Diez make up its first half. Niethammer, Süßkind, and Erhard are each dealt with in book-length chapters, as is Schelling's first fundamental philosophy. But Henrich's magnum opus is more than its parts. Here, Henrich's Konstellationsforschung reaches a new level. The intricate communicative network between different thinkers and the implications of their various philosophical statements are brought out with the utmost conceptual precision and in such rich detail that the reader can follow every move and, in the process, becomes deeply immersed in an entire life-world. The result is a book of outstanding historical merit and even greater philosophical insight. No future account of the emergence of German Idealism will be complete without engaging the early post-Kantian positions—Diez's foremost among them—that Henrich has reconstructed with such care. Naturally, a work of such proportions does not always make for easy reading. Henrich, however, is a patient interpreter who methodically lays out the evidence before drawing his stringent conclusions. In order to get the full benefit of the present work, it is advisable to consult Henrich's edition of Diez's original documents. Both works combined have put Immanuel Carl Diez on the philosophical map, thanks to Henrich's ingenious interpretation. Relying on his constellation approach, in which a simple separation between text and context can no longer be maintained, Henrich manages to open the reader's eyes...

Silence! When Anthropology Speaks: Recounting Kant's Narrative of Man

This paper is engaged in a dialogue with one of the minor works of Immanuel Kant's-Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The value of Kant's work is measured in the context of the Enlightenment's organization of knowledge into a science of Man. More precisely, it examines the fundamental problems at stake when the subject of knowledge is also the object of knowledge. Mainly the polemics lies in the possibility of an objective evaluation or truth and a just practice of science to assure the impartial truth of its results. It raises this question: if Anthropology speaks for the human, how does it practically do so and what truth does it speak?

Educating Honorable Warriors

Kant is not typically considered a major figure in the just war tradition's canon, although his work has informed recent discussions about international justice and just war theory. More specifically, philosophers have suggested that Kant's work may provide a coherent, normatively practical just war theory, basing this claim, in the main, on his views on the goal of peace and its purpose of establishing a cosmopolitan civil society.1 Such discussions are mostly concerned with jus ad bellum and jus in bello constraints on nations and how Kant's writings can guide deliberation and, perhaps, the considered policy and practices of governments. Yet, the fact remains that it is embodied men and women and not the metaphysical ‘nation’ who actually conduct war. Hence, this paper seeks to determine the extent to which Kant's thought might contribute to the moral deliberation of those individuals who a fortiori will be bound to jus in bello constraints. To this end, the idea of moral learning will be explored, emphasizing the Kantian idea of autonomy. The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate how some aspects of Kant's thought would contribute to ethics education in a military academy.

Kant, Skepticism, and Idealism

Skeptical problems arising for Kant's version of transcendental idealism have been raised from Kant's own time to the present day. By focussing on how such problems originally arose in the wake of Kant's work, and on the first formulations of absolute idealism by Schelling, I argue that the skeptical problems in question ultimately depend on fundamental features of Kant's philosophy of natural science. As a result, Naturphilosophie and the organic conception of nature cannot easily be separated from the deep and insightful response to these problems offered by absolute idealism.

Kant on Community: A Reply to Gehrke

Some attempts have been made in recent research on Immanuel Kant and rheto ric to enunciate guidance he may have for communicative practice and ethics. This is promising, since Kant has held relatively minor role in contemporary analyses of rhetoric and communication ethics, due to misunderstandings both on part and on the part of commentators. I firmly believe that Kant's works contain insights on community and the role of rhetoric therein, and that accounts that attempt to mine these resources must do appropriate justice to the depth and breadth of writings. Otherwise, one risks solving problems that Kant already solved elsewhere, or worse yet, one risks misidentifying problem in Kant by not giving developed due attention in the first place. In what follows, I will discuss one recent contribution to the philosophy and rhetoric literature by Pat Gehrke in this journal that I believe falls prey to such problems.1 While I applaud attempt to bring Kant back into discussions of communica tion ethics and rhetoric by rebuilding notion of community, I must voice some concerns I have over account of Kant on community. Indeed, this seems to be in the spirit of Gehrke's analysis, which begins by lamenting the loss of much richness and complexity of Kant's thought in the work of modern commentators, as well as their lack of focus on what Kant's own works say about his articulation of ground for duty to community.21 take Gehrke at word, and will explore how true of an account this is in terms of both the problems in Kant's as well as Gehrke's putative Kantian solution.3 Research considering the relationship between Kant's moral philosophy and rhetoric has been quite sparse. Robert Dostal's account notes Kant's hostil ity to rhetoric as conceived in terms of the manipulative production of what we can call human effects, but ends right where Kant becomes interesting the connection between historical/religious forms of community and communica tive interaction among agents.4 A more recent analysis of Kant's implications for rhetoric comes from Gehrke. Gehrke's purpose is to combine a reading

Les Marges des Lumières françaises (1750–1789) ed. by Didier Masseau

848 Reviews standards of the Voltaire cEuvres compl'tes, which one might describe as cultivated formality. BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ROBIN HOWELLS Franfoise de Graffigny: Her Life and Works. By ENGLISH SHOWALTER. (SVEC, 2004:l i)Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2004. xix+374pp. ?69. ISBN o-7294 o847-7. The modern rehabilitation, which began over two decades ago, of Francoise d'Hap poncourt, Mme de Graffigny, as a significant literary figure of eighteenth-century France, is now almost complete. Six critical editions of her best-seller, the Lettres d'une Pruvienne (I 747), one of them including an English translation, since I966, the publication, edited by Jonathan Mallinson, of most of the papers delivered at amajor conference held atOxford in the summer of 2002 (SVEC, 2004: I2), and above all the ongoing edition of the Correspondance (I985- )all attest to the interest she has aroused among contemporary scholars of the Enlightenment. Principal among those scholars is English Showalter and, given his unrivalled knowledge of de Graffigny's life and work, it is entirely appropriate that he should have written the first biography of her to appear for nearly a century. The major source for details of de Graffigny's life isher correspondence with Francois-Antoine Devaux ('Panpan'), who remained behind in Lorraine after her departure for Paris in 1738. The events of her life as revealed in her long epistolary conversation with Devaux are exploited to the full by Showalter and yet this book is by no means a simple narrative chronology of those events. Showalter gives what must be the correct version of de Graffigny's so-called 'betrayal' of Voltaire and Mme Du Chattelet; he demonstrates a detailed knowledge of her financial affairs; he devotes a considerable section of thework to the delightful and sometimes hilarious efforts of both herself and Anne-Catherine de Ligniville ('Minette'), the daughter of de Graffigny's first cousin once removed, to secure a husband for the young woman, a campaign that culminated in Anne-Catherine's exceptionally happy marriage to Helvetius. Showalter also provides an assessment of de Graffigny's relationship with Devaux, who was a kind of provincial Thiriot, a spoilt child for his entire adult life who certainly did not deserve such a good friend although, as Showalter points out, the friendship gave 'purpose and meaning to everything else in her life' (p. 302). Showalter does not neglect the literary works, of course, especially the Lettres d'une Pruvienne and her successful play Cenie (I750), all of which are subjected to a fair and detailed appraisal. A writer of great talent, generous, compassionate, witty, Mme de Graffigny was one of the most appealing personalities of eighteenth-century France. She merited a sympathetic and knowledgeable modern biographer and in English Showalter she has found one. This is a very good book, thoroughly researched and admirably well written. UNIVERSITYOFWALES SWANSEA MICHAEL CARDY Les Marges des Lumieres franfaises (I750-I789). Ed. by DIDIER MASSEAU. (Bib liotheque des Lumieres, 64) Geneva: Droz. 2004. 284 pp. SwF 62. ISBN 2 600-oo96I-2. This book is remarkable, not just as a collection of contributions to a conference (organized by the Groupe de recherches Histoire des representations at Tours in MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 849 200 I)which is also of a consistently high standard, but also because it so successfully stimulates reflection about what we mean by Enlightenment. Clearly, Kant's famous I784 work was not the end of the matter. A reviewer may therefore participate, after the fact, in the conference debate, which was clearly lively. For example, Jean-Marie Goulemot's article on parody (towhose bibliography of theory one might incidentally add Fuzelier's Discours . . ., appearing in its final form in Les Parodies du Nouveau Theatre Italien (I738 edition)) begins with doubt about defining Enlightenment at all, as well as about 'margins' which imply the existence of a 'centre': 'pour d&crire des marges, les reperer plus simplement, notons [. . .]qu'il faut un centre clairement delimite, parfaitement decrit et relativement homogene' (p. 202). This, however, per haps implies that definitions need to be closed and quasi-scientific if a notion such as 'Enlightenment' is to be of any critical use. But Wittgenstein has taught us that...

Continuity and Inheritance: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Work of C.S. Peirce

/. Revisiting Peirce3 s Kantian Inheritance When I a babe in philosophy, Charles Peirce wrote, my bottle filled from the udders of Kant.1 It is widely recognized that this early form of philosophic nourishment granted young Peirce the opportunity to recognize the respective shortcomings of empiricism and idealism and provided the point of departure for his philosophic architectonic. Peirce himself comments on this indebtedness to Immanuel Kant at multiple points, especially in the early stages of his work. In reference to his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, Peirce writes that the list grew originally out of the study of the table of Kant.2 This table, found in the beginning of the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason is crucial in Peirce's thinking, for it stands as Kant's attempt to bring analytic unity to the manifold of representations in judgment and supplies the necessary triadic structure that characterizes Peirce's system. The community of Peirce scholars today seems to acknowledge the contribution Kant made to the development of American pragmatism3 and, more particularly, Peirce's pragmaticism. This acknowledgement, however, has been somewhat cursory, and often serves as a mere preparatory move in highlighting the way in which Peirce overcomes and abandons the Kantian project as framed in the First Critique. According to Karl-Otto Apel, Andre De Tienne4 and Sandra Rosenthal,5 Peirce grows up, and weans himself from Kant's formal theory of cognition. The commentators' perspective on the relation between Peirce and Kant is understandable; despite his praise for the king of modern philosophy, Peirce regards Kant's work as antiquated and underscores the way in which the Critique of Pure Reason stands apart from a more organic, active, and pragmatic reading of ontology and epistemology. Peirce writes that he was a pure Kantist until he forced by successive steps into pragmaticism.6 My intent is not to reemphasize the arguments posed by Peirce against his philosophic forefather, but rather to suggest a type of response to these criticisms a response made on Kant's own terms. I will not attempt to

Libertad estética y libertad práctica. La <i>Crítica del discernimiento</i> y su incidencia en el concepto kantiano de «libertad moral»

The problem of how liberty can coherently be conceived is deeply anchored in Kant's critical works and strictly relates with each other epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and the teleological interpretation of nature. This article gives an outline of the different conceptions of liberty developed by Kant and investigates them in the light of how to think the relation between liberty and legality (legality is taken in a broad sense). Having sketched the concepts of transcendental liberty, psychological liberty, freewill, moral liberty and, which is the same for Kant, practical freedom in the sense of the autonomy of a reasonable being, the significance of aesthetic freedom is analysed in a more detailed way. In this context, an investigation of three different functions of imagination reveals the importance of imaginative freedom for each type of symbolisation and its deep connection with our practice of the use and understanding of signs as a whole. In so far as, in an aesthetic attitude, the perspective of the empirical and logical judgement can be dismissed to a certain extent and non-propositional constructional processes prevail within the perception, the aesthetic freedom lays the foundation for new perspectives, new relations between concepts and new ways of understanding. This aesthetic freedom requires an openness which can be set into a relation with the ethical concept of tolerance.

Kant's practical philosophy: from critique to doctrine

The whole range of Kan't philosophy is examined in this book. Unlike the majority of studies, this work traces the evolution of Kant's practical concerns from his 'pre-critical' works to the culminating Metaphysics of Morals and argues for a remarkable continuity in Kant's treatment. In demonstrating Kant's commitment to a material understanding of ethics, Gary Banham cogently argues that they have to be understood as teleological and perfectionist. Tracing in detail the connection between Kant's critique of morality and his account of rational religion provides a new setting for Kant's treatment of evil. In distinguishing Kant's critical works from his doctrinal ones, this study sets out the importance of Kant's accounts of property, right and virtue. Providing a comprehensive treatment of Kant's enquiries, Banham shows the extent of Kant's creative engagement with tradition and challenges the reception of his work current in moral philosophy and political theory.

Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

This paper pursues the double task of (a) presenting Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a systematic critique of culture and (b) assessing this systematic approach with regards to the question of reason vs. relativism. First, it reconstructs the development of his theory to its mature presentation in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer here presents a critique of culture as fulfilling Kant's critical work by insisting on the plurality of reason as spirits manifesting itself in symbolic forms. In the second part, the consequences of this approach will be drawn by considering the systematics Cassirer intended with this theory. As can be reconstructed from his metaphilosophical reflections, the strength of Cassirer's philosophy is that it accounts for the plurality of rational-spiritual activity while at the same time not succumbing to a relativism. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms steers a middle course between a rational fundamentalism and a postmodern relativism.

A critical perspective on the harmonisation of accounting in a globalising world

Abstract This article explores cosmopolitan implications associated with the accounting harmonisation project. It takes up Hopwood's [Europ. Acc. Rev. 3 (2) (1994) 241] invitation to explore accounting harmonisation effects. The article explores processes of globalisation by focusing on Kant's work on cosmopolitan governance. It uses Foucault's work on Kant's notion of a peaceful world and applies it to the accounting harmonisation project which has been approved by accounting standard-setting bodies around the world. It is claimed that international accounting harmonisation projects extend notions of accounting decision-usefulness and representational faithfulness, but this only reflects an instrumental stance toward how we account for corporate activity and its impacts on communities. A critical conception of ‘accountability’ is developed in this article by teasing out ideas for a critical accountability through a comparison with central post-modern and post-structural accounting models. The aim is to balance modernity's dominant and instrumental stance to global social and environmental impacts which harmonisation and international accounting perpetuate.