Over and above the modalities with which it is expressed in the domains of Kant’s system, the theme of cosmopolitanism embodies the meaning of a philosophy seen as a plan to build on the connection between man, polis and reason; an essential connection that in human reason identifies not a simple endowment which everyone has by nature but a form of life to be realized in the world, a purpose whose binding strength is only fully expressed in the public dimension.

In delineating the idea of a teleological accord between theoretical possibility and practical reality of the supersensual, between what reason may think and what it gives the order to create, the postulates of pure practical reason become the voice of the eminently architectural sense of metaphysics as a science in which reason ultimately confronts herself, in a dialogue on whose success it wagers nothing less than the survival of its internal consistency, that is to say brings into play its very (...) nature as reason. (shrink)

Volume 1. Perspectives in modern philosophy -- volume 2. Contemporary lines.