In her groundbreaking Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy, G. Felicitas Munzel finds extant in Kant’s writings the so-called missing critical treatise on education; it appears in the Doctrines of Method with which he concludes each of his ...

Currently fashionable among critics of enlightenment thought is the charge that Kant's ethics fails to provide an adequate account of character and its formation in moral and political life. G. Felicitas Munzel challenges this reading of Kant's thought, claiming not only that Kant has a very rich notion of moral character, but also that it is a conception of systematic importance for his thought, linking the formal moral with the critical, aesthetic, anthropological, and biological aspects of his philosophy. The first (...) book to focus on character formation in Kant's moral philosophy, it builds on important recent work on Kant's aesthetics and anthropology, and brings these to bear on moral issues. Munzel traces Kant's multifaceted definition of character through the broad range of his writings, and then explores the structure of character, its actual exercise in the world, and its cultivation. An outstanding work of original textual analysis and interpretation, _Kant's Conception of Moral Character_ is a major contribution to Kant studies and moral philosophy in general. (shrink)

Kant was one of the inventors of anthropology, and his lectures on anthropology were the most popular and among the most frequently given of his lecture courses. This volume contains the first translation of selections from student transcriptions of the lectures between 1772 and 1789, prior to the published version, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which Kant edited himself at the end of his teaching career. The two most extensive texts, Anthropology Friedländer and Anthropology Mrongovius, are presented here (...) in their entirety, along with selections from all the other lecture transcriptions published in the Academy edition, together with sizeable portions of the Menschenkunde, first published in 1831. These lectures show that Kant had a coherent and well-developed empirical theory of human nature bearing on many other aspects of his philosophy, including cognition, moral psychology, politics and philosophy of history. (shrink)

“THE ONLY THING NECESSARY IS NOT THEORETICAL LEARNING, but the Bildung of human beings, both in regard to their talents and their character.” Kant’s epigrammatic observation in his 1778 letter to Christian Wolke, director of the Philanthropin, adumbrates not only his mature sense of “enlightenment” but also the pedagogical role of his critical philosophy and his own life’s work. Over a decade earlier, his reading of Rousseau’s Emile: or, On Education had “set him straight” about what constitutes the true dignity (...) of humanity, namely, that it did not consist in the advance of knowledge by scholarly inquiry as he had believed. The primary thing was, instead, the “restoration of the rights of humanity,” an objective articulated in Kant’s mature moral thought as that pedagogical method which facilitates the self-consciousness and efficacy of the moral law in the individual. In another 1778 letter, this time to his former student, Marcus Herz, Kant states that the “main purpose of his academic life,” which he “at all times keeps before him,” is to “cultivate good characters.” In both his lectures on anthropology and on pedagogy, Kant repeatedly emphasizes the need for education and, by extension, for attending to the education of the educator. Human beings are nothing save what education makes of them, but they can only be educated by other human beings who must themselves first be educated. As early as his 1775/ 76 anthropology lectures, Kant observes that “if teachers and priests were educated, if the concepts of pure morality would prevail among them, then... the whole could afterwards be educated.” The resulting task is clear: it is incumbent on every generation to work on the plan of a more purposive education,” a task Kant describes as the “greatest and most difficult problem that can be assigned to humankind.”. (shrink)

The study is carried out in five chapters, with the first two offering a reconsideration of the function of the imagination in the Transcendental Deduction and Schematism of the first Critique. The last three follow the order of topics discussed by Kant in the third Critique in regard to judgments of taste, the sublime, and teleology; they conclude with an interpretation of "productive imagination" as a "model for the ideal of intellectual intuition". The comparison between "human and divine spontaneity" is (...) introduced in the first chapter, where Gibbons notes that while we have "Kant's explicit and repeated emphasis on the difference" between these, "in considering the similarity of these types of spontaneity," she wishes "to correct a possible imbalance in Kant's exposition": there are, she suggests, "formal similarities between these types of spontaneity". The main thrust of the first chapter is to respond to a particular reading of Kant—namely, to those unsympathetic interpreters who see in the Deductions an "imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" and also to those who give a "sympathetic reading" but do so in terms of an identification of "all aspects of synthesis with concept application," thereby reducing the "role of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination to that of unifying a manifold of intuition under a concept". Gibbons holds instead that the "theory of synthesis... focuses on the nature of human cognition and what is required for us to know anything about objects" and, further, that it presupposes "the broader function of the imagination as grounding the possibility of concept-application in the first place". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: “Pedagogy” and “Science” The Educational Reform Movement of the Eighteenth Century Kant, Hegel, and the Reform Movement Kant Hegel Conclusion.

13. The Normative Thoughts of Neighborly Love, Part 1.

Currently fashionable among critics of enlightenment thought is the charge that Kant's ethics fails to provide an adequate account of character and its formation in moral and political life. G. Felicitas Munzel challenges this reading of Kant's thought, claiming not only that Kant has a very rich notion of moral character, but also that it is a conception of systematic importance for his thought, linking the formal moral with the critical, aesthetic, anthropological, and biological aspects of his philosophy. The first (...) book to focus on character formation in Kant's moral philosophy, it builds on important recent work on Kant's aesthetics and anthropology, and brings these to bear on moral issues. Munzel traces Kant's multifaceted definition of character through the broad range of his writings, and then explores the structure of character, its actual exercise in the world, and its cultivation. An outstanding work of original textual analysis and interpretation, _Kant's Conception of Moral Character_ is a major contribution to Kant studies and moral philosophy in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in QuestionG. Felicitas MunzelRichard L. Velkley. Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. x + 192. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $18.00.In this collection of essays Velkley realizes a dual achievement: a penetrating scholarly analysis of a familiar topic, modern philosophy's on-going criticism of rational Enlightenment as a "project aiming at progressive rational mastery of nature (...) and the human situation" (60, 3), and an exemplary presentation of philosophizing as a self-reflexive activity in which the "know thyself" is posed to philosophy itself. The focus is on the German Idealist tradition, taking its origins from Rousseau and Kant to "reform, not simply to reject," but still to "overcome earlier modern accounts of scientific reason as abstract, mechanistic, and narrow, and as failing to do justice to the concrete wholeness or richness of nature and human experience, thus impoverishing our conceptions of morality, political life, and human aspirations toward the noble, the sacred, and the beautiful" (93). Velkley's scholarly interpretation identifies Rousseau as the pivotal figure who is the source both of the modern philosophical effort to achieve "human wholeness" by recovering an "original prediscursive or prerational unity" (an account that is the further source of the distinction between culture and civilization [12]) and of the "bifurcation in the ways to reach such wholeness," the ways of "citizenship" and "natural freedom" (13-14). The essays argue for an "important connection between Rousseau and Heidegger, through Kant and Schelling" (6). [End Page 345]While other thinkers are treated (for example, Pufendorf and Nietzsche), the essays primarily examine the writings of these four thinkers to elucidate "the persistence of a set of problems and a way of questioning" particular to modern philosophy (8).Velkley points out that Rousseau's critique of modern rationality is far more subtle than it is usually read. Granted, "through its introduction of self-reflectiveness into the previously 'innocent' and prereflective human situation," reason is perceived as the "true origin" and not the means for overcoming human ills (53). However, the "prereflective origin is nowhere to be found," it is an "imaginative construction," and it is a "mistake to take at face value any apparent assertion that natural man was merely an animal with only instinct and sensation" (37, 41). Because of his distinctively human awareness of time, natural man, "far from being mere animal," is "the only being whose openness to being exposes him to the nonbeing of death" (48). In short, "some 'bondage' to reason" is inescapable and "Rousseau's various plans for the reform of politics, education, the family, and the philosophical life" should be read as "ways of making the most of that bondage" (33).In the case of Kant, Velkley's emphasis is on the critical effort to resolve the dialectic, to correct the rational self-ignorance "so that the striving of reason for totality will not turn into a nihilistic rejection of reason" (112); or put another way, Rousseau inspires Kant's quid juris question, the issue of the "justification of reason as a whole," specifically the legitimacy of the categories (50-61, 101). Schelling, together with Kant's other Idealist successors, seeks a "greater unity, integration, wholeness, and concreteness than Kant provides" (113). The two main aspects of Schelling's project that Velkley discusses are (1) the discovery of the true human self in nature, the "hidden infinite unconscious self beneath the apparent finite conscious self," a "self whose objectification by the finite categories of discursive reason is quite impossible" and which thus discloses an "infinite contradiction" (115); and (2) the affirmation of the error of earlier philosophizing as belonging "essentially to philosophical inquiry" and being the very "precondition for finding truth" (125). From the philosophical attempt to correct reason's fundamental error, to its reading of "being in error" as an ineliminable step in the historical progress of reason and philosophy, Velkley turns to Heidegger's effort to step behind traditional metaphysics altogether and to move "forward into a new thinking beyond metaphysics" (142), from speech about Being to language as a power of disclosure of Being that overpowers the... (shrink)

To perfect human beings with an innate propensity for radical evil is a formidable task. Kant explicitly says that the propensity for evil is not eradicable; it is rooted in human nature, specifically in the human power of choice-making. The task is to reorient the natural order of choice-making, to the moral order that takes the moral law as its supreme principle. I explicate the role of a specific capacity of the human subjective side of judging in this process; namely, (...) of ‘mind’ in its sense as Gemüt. While human willing and choice-making are subject to the influence of sensuousness, Gemüt is a capacity of sensibility that allows the human subject to enjoy the feeling of being pleased in the fulfillment of duty. Its four specific aesthetic preliminary concepts of responsiveness to concepts of duty – moral feeling, conscience, love of humanity, and respect for ones... (shrink)

To perfect human beings with an innate propensity for radical evil is a formidable task. Kant explicitly says that the propensity for evil is not eradicable; it is rooted in human nature, s...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 149-151 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Brandt. Kritischer Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). Kant-Forschungen, Band 10. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999. Pp. 543. Cloth, DM. The appearance of a commentary on Kant's Anthropology is very timely, indeed indispensable, given the advent of a new phase in Kant scholarship, attentive to the writings surrounding the main critical texts as (...) a way of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of his thought. This new approach has been partly precipitated by the 1997 release of Volume 25 of the Academy edition containing the student transcriptions of Kant's anthropology lectures spanning a period of twenty-four years. The Anthropology is especially important for understanding Kant's moral philosophy. From 1773 forward, Kant himself never taught morality without concurrently offering his course in anthropology. His own students were thus cognizant of Kant's conception of human nature. Yet during the last 200 years few have paid attention to what sort of being, in Kant's view, was called upon to fulfill the moral vocation. As Brandt points out, the Anthropology has previously provoked no notable study, no discussion among either advocates or detractors.The precise nature of the relation between the Anthropology and Kant's critical philosophy remains an open question. Brandt himself is skeptical about the importance of the Anthropology for moral philosophy. He argues against seeing an integrated relation between the Anthropology and the critical system. For Brandt, the two stand alongside each other. The pragmatic anthropology serves merely as an "encyclopedia of the Kantian philosophy on an empirical level," providing an empirical discussion of its problems (8). He also argues that the pragmatic anthropology is neither identical with the anthropology required as a discipline supplementary to pure moral philosophy (14) [End Page 149] nor with the transcendental anthropology providing the self-knowledge of understanding reason (17). The seeming hallmarks of Kant's thought, such as the triadic structure of cognition, feeling, and desire, are simply an omnipresent "psychological division of European cultural history" (99-100) and so unpersuasive as evidence for a systematic connection of the texts. Anthropology has no "idea of reason" as its "basis." It begins in empirical psychology (especially Baumgarten's) and in Kant's effort to separate it from this discipline as a distinct, "pragmatic discipline" with the goal of "facilitating the prudent action of future world citizens" (9, 11). Brandt's interpretation probably influences his selection of passages from the critical philosophy referenced in his Kommentar.The commentary sets Kant's Anthropology in the historical context of Western thought, identifying related passages in texts which Kant is known to have read, as well as materials unfamiliar to him, but still pertinent for a given theme. Over 400 primary sources (from Homer and the philosophers of antiquity, to such recent writers as Richard Rorty) are referenced, as well as over 300 authors in the secondary literature. The commentary is critical, including in its textual analysis differences between the 1798 and 1800 published editions of the Anthropology, and comparisons with the manuscript in Kant's own hand (now located in Rostock). Marginalia are noted, and in some cases passages struck from Kant's manuscript are reproduced in the Kommentar; one such particularly long passage pertains to Kant's discussion of sensibility as contrasted with the understanding (175-181). Parallel passages are identified in Kant's other writings, including his published works, Reflexionen, correspondence, and other lecture notes. These include references to the anthropology lecture notes compiled in Volume 25, thus making the commentary helpful for someone investigating shifts and developments in Kant's treatment of a given topic. The historical context is also quite helpful for understanding the very concepts of "anthropology" (49-63), "pragmatic" (53), and "application" (57). Brandt concludes that with regard to its sources, Kant's anthropology is a "literary anthropology" (85) and that its central thematic is "the human being as an acting being" (89).Brandt offers very interesting and helpful discussions of various topics, with helpful citations, which... (shrink)

Within Kant’s own writings, it is complicated by the further tension between his pedagogy and his moral philosophy. When one sees Kant’s conception of character as a systematic connection between these three aspects of his philosophy, light is shed on the role and limits of the pedagogical function of the republican constitution. Thereby, too, the inherent limit of the extent to which perpetual peace, practically defined, can be a political goal effected by political means is unveiled.

As a phenomenon, as a concept, as an essential trait of human individual and collective activity, to be “global” has become a familiar commonplace. As is often the case with the familiar, it is not necessarily well understood, and as such a problematic concept, “globalization” evokes contradictory emotions of hope and anxiety. In his extremely penetrating and encompassing philosophical analysis of this notion as a complex political concept and phenomenon affecting every arena of life today, Otfried Höffe offers a vision (...) and analysis of the need for and the constitution of a worldwide system of law and government in which the concepts of law and an order of law, human rights, justice, and peace are pivotal. (shrink)

The broadest aim of Wood’s project is the improvement of our own self-understanding by: “replacing commonly accepted ideas” about Kant’s ethical thought with “more accurate and less oversimplified ones”, the hope is that this “might help to transform our conception of our own history and of ourselves as heirs of the Enlightenment”. Our age, writes Wood, “needs Kant’s sober, principled hope for a more rational, cosmopolitan future”.