In The Sources of Normativity Korsgaard introduces her conception of practical identities understood as the source of moral obligations. This conception forms a point of transition from Korsgaard’s theory of action to her solution to the problem of the authority of moral norms. In order to describe how universal categorical reasoning is compatible with the moral content of particular practical decisions, Korsgaard needs to show how our contingent practical identities can be reconciled with what she defines as the universally shared (...) identity that expresses our humanity. To make this reconciliation work, she devises an argument for the public shareability of reasons amended by her reinterpretation of the Kantian as if principle. I suggest that, in doing so, Korsgaard steps too far away from Kant’s architectonic approach to the question of why moral norms bind us, and that, consequently, the Korsgaardian reconciliation between the two kinds of identities, as it stands, cannot be accomplished. (shrink)

The conception of two kinds of practical identities, which Korsgaard introduces in the Sources of Normativity, helps her explain how universal categorical reasoning is compatible with the moral content of individual practical decisions. Based on this conception, she devises an interpretation of the Kantian as if principle amended by her argument for the public shareability of reasons. I suggest that, in doing so, Korsgaard steps too far away from Kant’s architectonic approach to the question of why moral norms bind us, (...) and that, as a result, the Korsgaardian explanation, as it stands, cannot be accomplished. (shrink)

This paper is a systematic comparison between two well–known and theologically relevant concepts – the sublime as developed in Kant’s third Critique, and Marion’s saturated phenomenon. Although it discusses the significant and apparent similarities between them, it also criticizes Marion’s identification of the sublime as a possible example of a saturated phenomenon. This is primarily because of the different origins and philosophical presuppositions guiding the elaboration of these two ideas. Kant’s aim is to confine the reception of the phenomenon to (...) the conditions of experience, so that both in the case of judg-ments of beauty and judg-ments of the sublime, the subject achieves pleasure through self-centred appreciation of its rational capacities. Marion’s saturated phenomenon, on the other hand, aims at dispensing with the ‘metaphysical’ horizon of either the object, or the transcendental subject, in favour of passive appropriation of givenness. Although both are meant to describe what happens when the limits of understanding are breached, in the sublime this breach only serves to reinforce the capacity of the rational subject, whereas in the saturated phenomenon it points to the possibility of apprehension of the totally Other as purely given. (shrink)

In his theory of beauty, Kant introduces the free and harmonious play of the faculties as a kind of judging. This judging should precede the pleasure in the beautiful. But being the determining ground of the judgement of taste, the pleasure should precede the judgement. Regarding this problem, two opposing models have been proposed: Paul Guyer's ‘two-acts model’ and Hannah Ginsborg's ‘one-act model’. I propose a third model that, I argue, resolves the difficulty and does not fall prey to the (...) problems of the other two resolutions: the ‘subsumption model’, according to which the pleasure is followed by a subsumption under the concept ‘beautiful’. (shrink)

A comprehensive and practical study tool, introducing Kant's thought and key works and exploring his continuing influence.

This dissertation is intended as an intervention in the interminable and apparently antinomical philosophical exchange between political theories of radical democracy descended from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and liberal democracy descended from John Rawls. Radical democrats have deployed the friend-enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt to criticize liberal democracy as hypocritical and ultimately undemocratic in its refusal to critique its own ground; liberal democrats have riposted by characterizing radical democracy as dangerously anarchic. In this project, I read Immanuel Kant in (...) dialog with the work of Ingeborg Maus to show in a novel way that contemporary radical democratic theories ultimately fall to the very critique upon which they indict liberal democracy, that they degenerate into the valorization of mere war, and that it was in fact in full recognition of this dynamic that Kants theory of liberal democracy begins. Kants theory of countervailing liberalism is ultimately discovered to be a politics of love over barbarism. The project ranges over a wide ground, from a close reading of Kant, to the 19th Century Pantheismusstreit, to works by Arendt, Hardt and Negri, Žižek, and Strauss. (shrink)