Kant’s commitment to universalism has been called into question since increasing attention has been paid to his work on race in the last 20 years. This worry can easily be applied to Kant’s work on education: when Kant describes education as allowing humanity to fulfill its Bestimmung (vocation), scholars might reasonably conclude that such a claim only applies certain racial groups. Yet Salomo Friedlaender claims that if Kant’s moral theory is taught to children, “Every person is valued according to her (...) morality and no longer, as in our crude days, according to ‘race’ or national and religious affiliation.” This interpretation of Kant might strike some contemporary Kant scholars as naïvely optimistic, but neo-Kantians were well aware of Kant’s racial claims. By examining how neo-Kantians read Kant’s work on race, I argue that Friedlaender’s interpretation provides a way of reading an unracialized Bestimmung in the pedagogy. (shrink)

Kant begins his Lectures on Pedagogy by stating, “[t]he human being is the only creature that must be educated” (Kant, 2007, 9:441), and he argues that it is through education that we can transform our initial “animal nature into human nature” (ibid. 2007, 9:441). Kant understands education as involving an ordered process of care, discipline, instruction and formation through enculturating, civilizing and moralizing (Formosa 2011). Further, Kant envisages that we should pursue as a species the “moral perfection” that is the (...) “final destiny of the human race” through education (Collins, 1997, 27:470; see Dean, 2014). However, to engage in this pursuit Kant believes that, through education and social change, we have to regulate our “animal nature” and counter the moral corruption of our species, which he calls the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant, 1998, 6:32). If humanity is to pursue its final destiny of moral perfection, then education will need to respond responsibly to the propensity to evil that is deeply rooted in us as finite and imperfect rational beings living in imperfect and at times even in morally corrupted social conditions. This paper outlines some of the relevant issues. (shrink)

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant has been important in education theory, especially in the historical context of the Enlightenment and its legacies on contemporary understandings of global education. Particular reference is given to Kant’s writing on Enlightenment thinking and especially to his 1803 Über Pädagogik/Lectures on pedagogy whose groundwork tends to be thought from an empirical anthropology. This paper aims to question education, though from the perspective of a Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience, a perspective developed initially from my reading (...) of Denis J. Schmidt’s Lyrical and Ethical Subjects. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant develops an ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ that offers transcendental grounds for the possibility of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he discusses, somewhat briefly, training in the fine arts and even more briefly offers, somewhat indirectly, a far-reaching transcendental ground for pedagogy. It is these two brief accounts that form the substance of this paper, requiring a somewhat extended introduction to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement in order to develop its analysis. From this analysis, two key questions arise: if fine art cannot be learned, and if imitation would ultimately aim at producing an objectively determinable rule—via a determinable concept—for the production of art works, how does one proceed with education in the fine arts? And, secondly, as a corollary, if genius is reserved for precisely what cannot be learned but yet can be conceived and communicated, what possible purpose is served by aesthetic ideas with respect to cognition itself? (shrink)

Kant’s doctrine of the Fact of Reason is one of the most perplexing aspects of his moral philosophy. The aim of this paper is to defend Kant’s doctrine from the common charge of dogmatism. My defense turns on a previously unexplored analogy to the notion of ‘matters of fact’ popularized by members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century. In their work, ‘facts’ were beyond doubt, often referring to experimental effects one could witness first hand. While Kant uses the (...) German equivalent in different contexts, I argue that the scientific analogy opens up a new framework for interpreting his strategy of justification in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the final section, I address a few possible objections to my reading, one of which I anticipate coming from Dieter Henrich and Ian Proops, who have argued that Kant’s Fact of Reason is best understood under a legal analogy. (shrink)