Pure Practical Reason Research Articles

Kantian Moral Motivation: An Affectivist Interpretation

Kant’s theory of moral action faces a serious difficulty concerning motivation: how do commands of pure practical reason solely move human agents to perform moral actions? In his response, Kant claims that human agents perform moral actions out of a feeling of respect for the moral law. However, attempts to accommodate a feeling of respect into Kant’s rigorously rationalist ethical theory have led to two diverging strands of interpretation in the secondary literature: intellectualism and affectivism. Against this context, this paper proposes an interpretation of Kantian moral motivation with an appropriate place for the notion of respect within it to resolve the motivational problem concerning moral actions. According to the model of Kantian moral motivation that this paper develops, motivation to act morally takes place in two sequential stages, each involving the positive role of respect as a motive. By arguing for a positive role of the feeling of respect in the process of moral motivation, this model aligns with the affectivist school of interpretation.

A Pure Practical Reason: Notes on Kant's Practical Strategy

This series of notes reflects on Immanuel Kant's concept of pure practical The notes trace the evolution of the concept from Critique of Pure Reason through Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals to Critique of Practical Reason. The notes show how Kant changed his mind on the meaning of a pure practical reason, eventually arriving at a positive view where the concept provides standards by which to criticise mere practical reason.

Critique of Pure Practical Reason: A Note on Kant's Unwritten Book

Kant never wrote a book with the title Critique of Pure Practical Reason, although at one point he believed he would write it. To readers of Kant, a Critique of Pure Practical Reason seems like an obvious extension to Critique of Pure Reason. Kant also thought so, as he believed in the parallel between the pure speculative reason and pure practical reason. While he never doubted the unity of reason, Kant changed his mind on the parallel. The consequence of this is the fate of Kant’s unwritten book with the title Critique of Pure Practical Reason. This paper examines how Kant came to believe that he needed to write such a book, and the reason he did not write it, and possible content of the Critique of Pure Practical Reason.

Kantian Non-Evidentialism and its German Antecedents: Crusius, Meier and Basedow

AbstractThis article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’ account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’ and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the firstCritiqueand discuss the broader implications of my analysis.

From ‘Critique of Pure Practical Reason’ to Critique of Practical Reason: A Note on Kant’s Practical Strategy

This paper examines the reasons why Immanuel Kant moved from a writing a ‘critique of pure practical reason’ in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) to writing the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). The parallel between a critique of pure reason and a critique of pure practical reason became less obvious to Kant over time as he worked out his strategy for practical philosophy. This paper is one of three focusing on Kant’s practical strategy through a focus on the evolution of his practical thinking.

KANT’S CONSTITUTION OF A MORAL IMAGE OF THE WORLD*

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the idea of a universal history is systematically legitimized in Kant’s transcendental system of philosophy by way of the concept of a need [Bedürfnis] for pure practical reason. In this sense, the idea of a universal history is a fundamental part of the moral image of the world that emerges from Kant’s whole philosophy, and it is crucial for understanding both the possibility of the system of pure reason, as well the full development of Kant’s moral philosophy, especially for political philosophy.

Практический платонизм Канта

At the centre of discussion lies the reception of Plato’s philosophy, particularly his theory of Ideas, in Kant’s moral philosophy, his ethics and his doctrine of right. Kant saw himself as a follower of Platonism insofar as its anti-empiri­cist principles of human conduct are concerned, although his own version of practical rationalism differs considerably from Plato’s. This is also true of Kant’s conception of freedom and of human rights. The greatest impact on Kant’s moral philosophy is due to the doctrine of the two worlds, the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis, which did not originate in Plato himself, but in the Jewish Platonist Philo of Alexandria. Kant reinterpreted this doctrine by taking the intelligible world as a moral world consisting of free rational agents who ought to transform the empirical world of human society and history according to the norms and standards of moral laws. This was meant to be a programme for a moral reform of the human world, both with regard to individual moral­ity and to the cosmopolitical task of the establishment of an international order of legal institutions. Kant’s practical Platonism insists on the creation of a moral world order through human actions that take their lead from pure practical reason.

Дедукция свободы vs дедукция опыта в метафизике И. Канта

My aim is to demonstrate the specificities and differences between transcendental deduction of concepts and deduction of the fundamental principles of pure practical reason in Kant’s metaphysics. First of all it is necessary to examine Kant’s attitude to the metaphysics of his time and the problem of its new justification. Kant in his philosophy explicated not only the theoretical world of cognition, but also the practical world of freedom. Accordingly, the fundamental means of proving metaphysics’ claims are the deduction of pure concepts of understanding (deduction of experience) and the deduction of the principles of pure practical reason (deduction of freedom). The underlying premises of the Kantian project of reviving metaphysics, “the Copernican Turn”, the critical methods and basic principles of transcendental (formal) idealism also provide the methodological basis of transcendental deduction, a new method of proving the claims of metaphysics in various spheres of human being. Proceeding from the above, I analyse the essence, structure and the peculiarities as well as the differences between the deduction of experience and the deduction of freedom. I single out the following features of the two types of deduction. First, theoretical use of reason is aimed at objects while practical reason is aimed at noumena, the foundations of will and freedom. Second, the transcendental deduction of space and time, as well as the deduction of categories, is preceded by transcendental reduction, which is absent in the deduction of freedom. Third, Kant orients the methodological movement of deductions in opposite directions. Theoretical deduction proceeds from pure forms of sensible intuition to concepts of understanding and thence to fundamental principles. Practical deduction proceeds from a priori principles to the concepts of the metaphysics of morals and thence to moral feelings. Fourth, deduction in the theoretical sphere forbids speculative reason to go beyond experience. Practical deduction has pointed to the intelligible world and has proved its “legitimacy”.

ON THE PRACTICAL IRRATIONAL OF IMMORALITY

I argue that the Formula of Humanity, the principle that we should always treat the humanity of a person as an end in itself and never as a mere means, is a principle of pure practical reason. Insofar as that principle is also the fundamental grounds of morality, it follows, then, that all autonomous rational agents are committed to morality.

The problem of J.-J. Rousseau’s influence on the I. Kant’s creative work

The article shows the continuity in the development of key ideas J.J. Rousseau in the works of Immanuel Kant on the nature of morality and its relation to public morality, the nature of the moral sense and the role of ethics for education. It is shown the main achievements and limitations of the methodological approach by J.J. Rousseau and those aspects of his position that I. Kant developed by their dialectical negation with preservation of the continuity of all the best. Our research involves analysis of primary sources and critical literature. The dialectical method synthesized with the hermeneutical method. The hermeneutical method allows us to understand the system of Rousseau and Kant in their entirety and at the same time to point out the most significant aspects of these theoretical systems. The dialectical method revealed contradictions in the ideas of Rousseau, which prompted Kant to continue these ideas, but already on other grounds. The article discusses how Rousseau influenced Kant in determining the nature of morality through the definition of the essence of the moral law. But at the same time the article shows the differences in the understanding of the moral feeling in Kant and Rousseau: according to Kant, it has its source in pure practical reason, while, according to Rousseau, moral feeling has its source in compassion to the human race (human nature). The conclusion to the article is the statement that major discoveries of Kant in the fields of theoretical reason and of practical reasons were directly prepared by Rousseau, but Kant resolve the contradictions in the attitude of the great “citizen of Geneva”.

Conceptions of Authority and the Anglo-American Common Law Divide

This Article seeks to explain the puzzle of the divergence of American law from the rest of the common law world through the lens of legal theory. I argue that there are four competing ideal-type theories of the authority of the common law: reason, practice, custom, and will. The reason view explains the authority of the common law in terms of correspondence to the demands of pure practical reason; the practice view sees the authority of the common law as derived from the expertise of practitioners (especially judges and practice-oriented academics) who try to develop the common law as a slowly changing, historically binding tradition; the custom view sees the authority of the common law as derived from its correspondence to contemporaneous norms and values; and the will view sees the authority of the common law (like that of all other law) as derived from the acts of a sovereign. These competing views imply different answers to various questions (such as the relationship between statutes and the common law, or the role of judges in the legal system). They also lead to very different attitudes towards the idea of a single, supranational common law: generally speaking, the first two approaches are more sympathetic to common law convergence than the latter two. I argue that these days English common law is close to the second, practice-based conception of common law authority, whereas American law adopts a combination of the third and fourth conceptions. This explains why American common law is largely uninterested in maintaining commonality with other common law jurisdictions, as well as many other differences between American and English common law.

Conversion of Consciousness as Principle of Morality

Kant shows that a fundamental theory of normativity and morality can give neither an explanation nor an explication of normativity, but can only articulate and render explicit its origin. It can do so by indicating the place or topos and the turn or trope of its originating. According to Kant, the topos of normativity is the will qua practical reason and its trope is the general, typically instrumental use of this reason, i.e. reflection. The trope of the origin of morality is autonomy, i.e. practical reason turning on itself and thus becoming pure practical reason, thereby establishing its own form as law: the categorical imperative. Consequently, fundamental ethics serves two functions (if it is indeed successful): formally, it provides evidence for the originality or authenticity of morality; materially, it gives a criteriological principle for the content of morality. The article argues that Kant was right in his view of the foundation of ethics, but was wrong in the manner in which he met the requirements thus established. The topos of normativity and, consequently, of morality cannot be reason, but must be consciousness or, more precisely, (actual) knowledge de se; and its fundamental trope cannot be reflection (and then autonomy), but must be what can be described as a conversion of consciousness. This conversion can be identified with philein in the sense of Aristotle. It has four different aspects: desire, cognition, benevolence, and recognition. When philein is reciprocal and lived, philia ensues. Friendship (in the broad sense of Aristotle) is then described as the topos of the origin of Normativity and Morality.

Reply to Dews, and a plea for Schelling

ABSTRACTThe discussion is a response to Dews on the question of how Schelling's Freiheitsschrift should be interpreted. It falls into two halves, the first defending my interpretation, and the second expanding on the case that Dews makes for the unavoidability of metaphysics in the theory of human freedom, with which I am in full agreement. The main criticism that Dews makes of my reading is that the argument I attribute to Schelling concerning the metaphysical significance of evil rests on Kantian assumptions regarding the existence of pure practical reason, which Schelling rejects. I argue that, though certainly matters are more complicated than my earlier discussion made them seem, Schelling remains sufficiently close to Kant for the argument I attribute to avoid inconsistency. In the second half I raise what I claim to be a neglected but important question: Why is the legacy of classical German philosophy not regarded as significant for contemporary discussion of human freedom? My answer in brief is that the concept of freedom has undergone a profound contraction. In this context I also try to define more precisely what is distinctive of Schelling's view of human freedom.

Metafizyka praktycznego rozumu. Autonomia i heteronomia wedle Kanta i Lévinasa

Relacje, które określają dwa odmienne projekty etyki – etykę autonomiczną Kanta i etykę heteronomiczną Lévinasa – są skomplikowane i niejednoznaczne. Z jednej strony Lévinas zalicza Kanta w poczet myślicieli transcendentalnych, którzy bronią silnego podmiotu poznawczego wraz z właściwą mu władzą tworzenia przedstawień. Z drugiej jednak strony Lévinas odnajduje w Krytyce praktycznego rozumu ważny ślad transcendencji, a mianowicie: możliwość przekroczenia skończoności ludzkiego bytu w przestrzeni refleksji moralnej. Wskazanie na sens niezależny od bytu, a więc myślenie wykraczające poza granice zakreślone przez zmysły, to w przekonaniu Lévinasa właściwa zasada Kantowskiej „rewolucji kopernikańskiej”. Największa zasługa Kanta nie polega więc ani na tym, że uznał podmiot za aktywny element poznania, ani na tym, że zażegnał spór między empiryzmem i racjonalizmem. Wielkość Kanta, którego interpretuje Lévinas, polega na odkryciu drogi wiodącej od skończoności wiedzy naukowej do nieskończoności poznania moralnego. Choć mogłoby się wydawać, że w ograniczonym kręgu rozumu teoretycznego jesteśmy zamknięci w sposób nieodwołalny, to jednak szansa przełamania granic wyznaczonych przez zmysłowość pojawia się w polu rozumu praktycznego. Dobitny wykład prawdy o skończoności ludzkiego poznania nie jest ostatnim słowem Kanta. Właściwe przesłanie jego filozofii – zarówno części krytycznej, jak i pozytywnej – można by sformułować w taki oto sposób: tam, gdzie kończy się wiedza ściśle naukowa, rozpoczyna się poznanie o charakterze moralnym. Poza horyzontem świata, który znamy dzięki widzeniu, patrzeniu i dotykaniu, otwiera się pole metafizycznej spekulacji.Te właśnie wątki, a więc zarówno podobieństwa, jak i różnice, które dzielą etykę Kanta i Lévinasa, podejmuje niniejszy artykuł. Kant zastrzega, że wyłącznie „czysty rozum praktyczny”, wolny od wszelkich zmysłowych wrażeń, gwarantuje powszechność prawa moralnego. Lévinas natomiast przekonuje, że to właśnie unikatowe wydarzenie, a więc „twarzą w twarz” z drugim człowiekiem, jest pierwszym impulsem moralności. Zgodnie z wykładem Kanta relacja z drugim człowiekiem jest z góry zapośredniczona przez siłę imperatywu, który nakazuje traktować go zawsze jako cel sam w sobie, nigdy zaś jako środek. To samo zagadnienie inaczej przedstawia Lévinas, który twierdzi, że warunkiem etycznej relacji z drugim człowiekiem jest bezpośrednie doświadczenie jego odmienności. W tak określonej przestrzeni sporu rodzą się dwie konkurencyjne koncepcje etyki.

The Highest Good and the Practical Regulative Knowledge in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason

In this paper I defend three different points: first, that the concept of highest good is derived from an a priori but subjective argument, namely a maxim of pure practical reason; secondly, that the theory regarding the highest good has the validity of a practical regulative knowledge; and thirdly, that the practical regulative knowledge can be understood as the same “holding something to be true” as Kant attributes to hope and believe.

Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics by Julian Wuerth (review)

Reviewed by: Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics by Julian Wuerth Kelly Sorensen Julian Wuerth. Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 349. Cloth, £50.00. This textually well-supported book takes seriously Kant’s corpus as a system, claiming that devoted attention to the whole makes each individual work in turn more intelligible, consistent, and compelling. Wuerth claims that a key to Kant’s system is Kant’s account of the self or soul. For Wuerth, Kant’s self is a simple, noumenal substance that possesses powers (such as reason, judgment, imagination, and sensibility) by which it effects accidents. This is against the familiar interpretation, associated with Patricia Kitcher, Henry Allison, [End Page 175] Robert Pippin, Karl Ameriks, and Béatrice Longuenesse, that Kant in the critical period rejects any and all ontologically significant claims about the self. Wuerth says this familiar interpretation wrongly assumes that Kant, in opposing conceptions of the ontology of the self among his rationalist predecessors, cannot himself be defending an ontologically significant view of the self as a substance. On the familiar interpretation, the self may be a logical ground, but it cannot be an ontologically significant ground; Wuerth argues instead that Kant’s arguments in the first Critique about the self as a substance are only arguments against the rationalists’ inferences that the self is a permanent substance and can be known as such. So for Wuerth to say that Kant held that the self is a simple substance is to make only a comparatively modest claim: the self is a substance in which powers can inhere, a thinking thing that is distinct from its particular mental states. This ontological conclusion is “useless” for the more tantalizing things about oneself that one wants to know—for example, whether one’s existence is permanent and incorruptible, and whether one is an independent self-causing substance. But the self is a substance in an ontologically significant sense, and it has pure and immediate self-consciousness of being a simple substance with powers. This view is compatible with Kant’s critical epistemology, Wuerth claims, because of the singular nature of self-consciousness: it is the one case where one’s epistemic access to something is not colored by one’s receptive powers. The self has an “immediate, pure, and indeterminate consciousness of being something” (5). Wuerth amasses considerable textual evidence to show that this is more or less Kant’s view across the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical periods. A middle chapter offers a rough map of the noumenal soul’s powers under the broad faculties of cognition, desire, and feeling, with higher and lower sets of subfaculties under each of these three. Wuerth argues that even lower, largely passive subfaculties are nevertheless active in some (non-spontaneous) way: for instance, Kant says that we can only passively receive the sound of a trumpet because we are active representers of sound. This activity in the largely passive subfaculties helps pave the way for Wuerth’s challenge to interpretations of Kant by Henry Sidgwick and Christine Korsgaard, who share the view that Kant’s choosing noumenal self is just the cognitive faculty of pure practical reason. Along with Lewis White Beck, Allison, and others, Wuerth responds that the noumenal self’s choosing faculty is instead Willkür, a faculty of desire. And to this classic Beck response Wuerth adds that the distinction between Wille and Willkür is already functioning well before the second Critique, and even present in the Groundwork, where the noumenal self deals in two kinds of “conative currencies”: “motives” from the higher subfaculties and “stimuli” from the lower subfaculties. The noumenal self feels the tug of both. The late chapters oppose Korsgaard’s interpretation using close textual exegesis of the Groundwork and a wide set of other texts. Against Korsgaard’s constructivist and anti-realist interpretation of Kant’s moral philosophy, Wuerth argues that Kant is a moral realist who asserts that humanity has value found not only in our capacity to set ends, but more fundamentally in our capacity for self-consciousness. And against Korsgaard’s intellectualized and hyper-rationalized Kant, Wuerth’s Kant is...

Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism by Sonia Sikka

Reviewed by: Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism by Sonia Sikka Chunjie Zhang Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism. By Sonia Sikka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 294. Paper $34.99. ISBN 978-1107686830. Sonia Sikka’s study of Johann Gottfried Herder’s theory of culture is a book of great finesse. Soothing the lament of the editors of A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder (2009), Wulf Koepke and Hans Adler, that Herder, as a philosopher, is “the famous nobody,” Sikka is determined to show that Herder’s major works reveal coherent and well-developed philosophical positions, especially those that ground the concept of humanity between cultural relativism and anthropological commonalities. Sikka analyzes Herder’s accounts of ethics, history, race, climate, language, reason, and religion and relates Herder’s positions to those of Kant, Heidegger, and Nietzsche in seven major chapters. The first chapter, “The Question of Moral Relativism,” carefully delineates Herder’s oscillation between relativism and universalism. Sikka admits that Herder passes moral judgments on European and non-European cultures despite his dictum that every culture has its own center of gravity. She criticizes Herder’s cultural prejudices and Eurocentrism, while she explains the ethical constant in Herder’s thought as his concept of Humanität, which denounces violence and supports justice and equality. Sikka then stresses Herder’s critique of European colonial violence and coercive Christian missions and Herder’s firm belief in happiness as a quality defined and confined by local circumstances. Sikka insightfully concludes that universalism coexists with relativism in Herder’s thinking and this blend permeates through almost all areas of Herder’s thinking. The second chapter, “Happiness and the Moral Life,” my favorite one, compares Herder’s and Kant’s statements on happiness. Sikka contends that, for Kant, happiness is a subjective sensation that is natural, ephemeral, and self-seeking. Actions motivated by emotions, for Kant, do not contain moral worth. Only actions guided by pure practical reason promise autonomous self-legislation and freedom. Herder shares Kant’s point on the subjectivity and ephemerality of happiness but sees irreplaceable moral values in the ecstatic state of happiness. For Herder, happiness is not something that needs to be tamed and isolated, as Kant cautions; rather it is an essential part and motivation of morality. While, for Kant, obligation and responsibility guarantee a [End Page 376] better path toward morality regardless of emotional inclinations, Herder emphasizes sympathy and emotion as intrinsic sources of virtue. Sikka contends that Herder does not posit a final purpose of creation, which is essential to Kant; rather, for Herder, acting out of the care for others is the highest goal of human existence and history. History is the theme of the third chapter “History and Human Destiny.” Back to the oscillation between relativism and universalism, Sikka first focuses on Herder’s negative portrayal of China in Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind to illustrate his notion of historical development from lower to higher stages. She points out Herder’s Eurocentric narration of history as developing from ancient and changeless China to mature and dynamic Europe. At the same time, she stresses that Herder also criticizes European Enlightenment rationality as senile and in need of fresh oriental sensibility to rejuvenate itself. China functions as an absolute other onto which Herder projects his critique of the French Enlightenment’s Sinophile predilection. Sikka also mentions Herder’s view that historical progress never happens without irredeemable loss and that progress cannot be judged according to European Enlightenment criteria. Progress has to be measured in multiple ways. Sikka sees connections between Herder’s historicism and the concept of race in the eighteenth century. In chapter 4, “The Concept of Race,” Sikka contends that, even though Herder never uses the term race (Rasse), which Kant relates with skin colors, Herder still divides human beings into different types. But he is not as rigid as Kant in insisting that “races” are permanent and have clear biological boundaries. Herder’s criteria are more flexible. Referring to Herder’s negative descriptions of Africans, Sikka argues that environmental and external influences are important for physiology and national characters in Herder...

Reason, Rhythm, and Rituality. Reinterpreting Religious Cult from a Postmodern, Phenomenological Perspective

Contemporary philosophy of religion is often focused, at a theoretical level, on the epistemic value of religious doctrines, and at a practical level, on the possible impact of organized religion on secular society and politics. However, the cultic dimension of religion, such as prayer, religious service, ascetic practices, and other rituals, is considered as completely “irrational” and incomprehensible from a secular perspective and therefore often neglected by postmodern philosophy. The paper intends to call into question this rather simplistic interpretation by retracing the historical origins of the devaluation of religious symbolism in occidental thought, which culminates in Kant’s philosophy of religion. We then shall analyze to what extent certain paradoxical aspects of Habermas’ view on religion can be interpreted as consequences of the dilemma brought about by the Kantian dichotomy between man as moral subject and man as natural, sensible being. In a third step, we shall develop an alternative, phenomenological interpretation, which does not consider religious practice as a primitive, irrational phenomenon but as a proto-ethical schematism that aims at integrating the sphere of pure practical reason into the rhythmic structure of living, embodied consciousness.

Kants „Ich“ in „Ich soll …“ und Freuds Über-Ich

Abstract Kant’s and Freud’s respective investigations of the mind obey fundamentally different concerns. And yet their views of the structure of our mental life are strikingly similar. The article explores some of those similarities. It compares Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and the organization of mental processes Freud calls ‘ego’ (Ich). It then proceeds to compare Kant’s categorical imperative of morality and Freud’s structure of ego/superego (Ich/ÜberIch). Freud’s structural view of the mind, it is suggested, might offer a developmental account of just those aspects of mental life Kant thought could be explained only by appealing to our belonging in a noumenal world escaping the deterministic laws of the natural world. However, Freud’s approach is exclusively developmental. He does not take any position on questions of justification, the very questions that are central to Kant’s concern. The paper offers a cautious response to the question: what remains, under the Freudian developmental account, of the justificatory ambition of Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative as an imperative of pure practical reason?

If God’s Existence is Unprovable, Then is Everything Permitted? Kant, Radical Agnosticism, and Morality

This essay is about how four deeply important Kantian ideas can significantly illuminate some essentially intertwined issues in philosophical theology, philosophical logic, the metaphysics of agency, and above all, morality. These deeply important Kantian ideas are: (1) Kant’s argument for the impossibility of the Ontological Argument, (2) Kant’s first “postulate of pure practical reason,” immortality, (3) Kant’s third postulate of pure practical reason, the existence of God, and finally (4) Kant’s second postulate of pure practical reason, freedom.