Foundations of the metaphysics of morals.--Critique of practical reason.--An inquiry into the distinctness of the principles of natural theology and morals.--What is enlightenment?--What is orientation in thinking.--Perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch.--On a supposed right to lie from altruistic motives.--Selections from The metaphysics of morals.

CHAPTER I OF THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON § i. — DEFINITION PRACTICAL principles are propositions which contain a general determination of the ...

The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, one of his three major treatises on moral theory, and a seminal text in the history of moral philosophy. Originally published three years after his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique provides further elaboration of the basic themes of Kant's moral theory, gives the most complete statement of his highly original theory of freedom of the will, and develops his practical metaphysics. (...) This new edition of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason – prepared by an acclaimed translator and scholar of Kant's practical philosophy – presents the first new translation of this work to appear for some years. A substantial and lucid introduction by Andrews Reath places the main themes of the Critique in the context of Kant's moral theory and his critical system. (shrink)

The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, one of his three major treatises on moral theory, and a seminal text in the history of moral philosophy. Originally published three years after his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique provides further elaboration of the basic themes of Kant's moral theory, gives the most complete statement of his highly original theory of freedom of the will, and develops his practical metaphysics. (...) This new edition of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason – prepared by an acclaimed translator and scholar of Kant's practical philosophy – presents the first new translation of this work to appear for some years. A substantial and lucid introduction by Andrews Reath places the main themes of the Critique in the context of Kant's moral theory and his critical system. (shrink)

The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, one of his three major treatises on moral theory, and a seminal text in the history of moral philosophy. Originally published three years after his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique provides further elaboration of the basic themes of Kant's moral theory, gives the most complete statement of his highly original theory of freedom of the will, and develops his practical metaphysics. (...) This revised edition of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason - which contains Mary Gregor's acclaimed translation - is now the authoritative translation of this work. A substantial and lucid introduction by Andrews Reath places the mains themes of the Critique in the context of Kant's moral theory and his critical system. For this edition, the introduction has been revised and the guide to the secondary reading completely updated. (shrink)

This seminal text in the history of moral philosophy elaborates the basic themes of Kant ’s moral theory, gives the most complete statement of his highly original theory of freedom of the will, and develops his practical metaphysics. This new edition, prepared by an acclaimed translator and scholar of Kant ’s practical philosophy, presents the first new translation of the work to appear for many years, together with a substantial and lucid introduction.

The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, and his second work in moral theory after the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Its systematic account of the authority of moral principles grounded in human autonomy unfolds Kant's considered views on morality and provides the keystone to his philosophical system. The essays in this volume shed light on the principal arguments of the second Critique and explore their relation to Kant's critical philosophy (...) as a whole. They examine the genesis of the Critique, Kant's approach to the authority of the moral law given as a 'fact of reason', the metaphysics of free agency, the account of respect for morality as the moral motive, and questions raised by the 'primacy of practical reason' and the idea of the 'postulates'. Engaging and critical, this volume will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars of Kant and to moral theorists alike. (shrink)

The chapter first discusses the general meaning of a 'doctrine of method' in Kant’s work, as well as the specific goals of the Doctrine of Method of the second Critique. The central section, then, focuses on the notion of 'receptivity to morality', which here has a central role and a quite distinct meaning. I argue that Kant’s main point in his account of how to 'make objective practical reason subjectively practical' (5:151) is that one ought to (...) lead the individual agent to become aware of his own dignity as a moral being. In Kant’s view, recognition of this point is relevant to the overall aim of the second Critique – to show that pure reason is practical – and of moral theory itself. The task of the Doctrine of Method is to show how it is possible to make agents aware of their basic moral capacities, and through that awareness to instil genuine moral dispositions. Accordingly, the Doctrine of Method is the completion of the Critique, confirming the conclusions of the Analytic through the common use of pure practical reason and connecting them with the experience of every moral agent. (shrink)

With particular focus on imagination, Bernard Freydberg presents a close reading of Kant’s second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason. In an interpretation that is daring as well as rigorous, Freydberg reveals imagination as both its central force and the bridge that links Kant’s three critiques. Freydberg’s reading offers a powerful challenge to the widespread view that Kant’s ethics calls for rigid, self-denying obedience. Here, to the contrary, the search for self-fulfillment becomes an enormously creative endeavor (...) once imagination is understood as the heart of Kantian ethics. Seasoned scholars and newer students will find a surprising and provocative view of Kant’s ethics in this straightforward and accessible book. (shrink)

Jeanine Grenberg - Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 335-336 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Jeanine M. Grenberg St. Olaf College Bernard Freydberg. Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 180. Paper, $19.95. At the heart of the task of the historian of philosophy is the effort to (...) interpret well what has been said by another philosopher. Like the poet who chooses to create verse under the constraints of meter and rhyme, the historian does philosophy under the constraints of the historical text. Given these constraints, any historian of philosophy—continental or analytic—must bind herself to the text. The significant distinction one.. (shrink)

Kant did not initially intend to write the Critique of Practical Reason, let alone three Critiques. It was primarily the reactions to the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that encouraged Kant to develop his moral philosophy in the second Critique. This volume presents both new and first-time English translations of texts written by Kant’s predecessors and contemporaries that he read and responded to in the Critique of (...) Practical Reason. It also includes several subsequent reactions to the second Critique. Together, the translations in this volume present the Critique of Practical Reason in its full historical context, offering scholars and students new insight into Kant’s moral philosophy. The detailed editorial material appended to each of the eleven chapters helps introduce readers to the life and works of the authors, outlines the texts translated, and points to relevant passages across Kant’s works. (shrink)

When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_ and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike. This _Critique_ is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into (...) a unified argument. Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

A compact edition of Mr. Beck's excellent translation of the second Critique, slightly revised, together with a helpful short introduction and a bibliography.--V. C. C.

In the Typic chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant aims to enable moral judgment by means of the law of nature, which serves as the ‘type’, or formal analogue, of moral law. The present monograph is the first comprehensive study of this key text. It provides a detailed commentary on the Typic, situates it within Kant’s ethics and his theory of symbolic representation, and critically engages with the relevant secondary literature.

The Critique of Practical Reason is traditionally regarded as one of Kant’s central works on practical philosophy. Its structural and stylistic parallels with the Critique of Pure Reason sustain one’s conviction about its fundamental systematic relevance in Kant’s ethics. Nevertheless, the compositional sketch of the system of critical philosophy in the first Critique does not presume any separate critique of reason in its practical use. This inspires to investigate the question (...) of the sense and aim of the critique of practical reason in Kant’s main works of the 1780s. Such an investigation discovers, that the concept of such a critique emerges in Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, which intends to find and to establish the supreme principle of pure morals, to supply its full-value deduction and insofar to present a sufficient introduction to the system of moral metaphysics. It is for the purpose of such a deduction, which demonstrates the normative validity and truth of categorical imperatives, that Kant considers a transition to a critique of practical reason necessary. And yet this transition as well as this critique are presumed to take place within the subject field of the Groundwork itself: the main features of the practical critique of reason as described in the Groundwork III are, according to Kant, sufficient for the purpose of justification of critical morality. If, however, the deduction of the moral law given in Groundwork III should fail, no possible future “progress of metaphysics” could compensate this failure, - because this deduction occurs at the «extreme boundary of all practical philosophy”, beyond which lies the realm of moral faith. Kant scholars consider the concepts of the “fact of pure reason” and the doctrine of the highest derivative good as crucial innovations of the second “Critique”. There are however reasons enough to dispute the question as to whether both doctrines really make for an innovation - and for an advance. (shrink)

This article offers a critical review of the Ukrainian translation of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Translations of classical works should serve a twofold function. They do not only facilitate the adoption of the terminology within the academic community but should first and foremost allow those unacquainted with the language of the original to engage with a foreign philosophical tradition meaningfully. The translation of a philosophical text has to preserve terminological rigidity and strictly follow the letter (...) of the original while simultaneously being a product of interpretation and, to a certain extent, a paraphrase, the result of cooperation between the author and the translator. Decent knowledge of the original language does not suffice to successfully deal with the outdated vocabulary and the peculiarities of authorial language use, as many of the crucial translation decisions cannot be justified without understanding the inner logic of the argument. However, my detailed analysis of terminological patterns and Ukrainian renderings of complex and ambiguous syntactic constructions proves that none of these tasks were achieved here. Unfortunately, despite the efforts, the quality of this translation does not correspond to the standards of consistency and does not reflect the letter and spirit of Kant’s original due to numerous mistakes, misreadings, and distortions. Neither the impressive list of translator’s notes nor the occasional practice of giving German equivalents in the brackets is of any help to the reader in understanding Kane’s practical philosophy unless they already possess sufficient knowledge of the German language. This translation, therefore, cannot be used as teaching material at universities and stands in the way of a wider reception of Kant’s philosophy and productive public discussions. (shrink)

When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship.

The highly arcane 'wisdom' produced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is either endlessly regurgitated and recited as holy writ by his numerous acolytes, or radically dismissed as unpalatable nonsense by his equally countless detractors. Contrary to these common, strictly antagonistic yet uniformly uncritical practices, this book offers a meticulous critique of some key theoretical and clinical aspects of Lacan's expansive oeuvre, testing their consistency, examining their implications, and investigating their significance. In nine interrelated chapters, the book highlights both (...) the flaws and the strengths of Lacan's ideas, in areas of investigation that are as crucial as they are contentious, within as well as outside psychoanalysis. Drawing on a vast range of source-materials, including many unpublished archival documents, it teases out controversial issues such as money, organisational failure, and lighthearted, 'gay' thinking, and it relies on the highest standards of scholarly excellence to develop its arguments. At the same time, the book does not presuppose any prior knowledge of Lacanian psychoanalysis on the part of the reader, but allows its readership to indulge in the joys of in-depth critical analysis, trans-disciplinary creative thinking, and persistent questioning. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike in psychoanalytic studies and philosophy, as well as all those interested in French theory and the history of ideas. (shrink)

칸트가 최고선을 정의하기 위해 활용하는 최상선과 완전선은 공히 덕과 행복을 인과적 관계로 잇는 개념들이다. 전자는 ‘덕을 갖추었다면, 반드시 행복할 자격이 있다’고 말하는 개념이라면, 후자는 더 나아가 ‘덕스러운 자의 행복할 자격이 세계 안에서 정말로 실현될 수 있어야 한다’고 말하는 개념이다. 이를 통해 칸트의 최고선은 궁극적으로 ‘최상선의 실현으로서의 완전선’으로 정의된다. 이렇게 정의된 최고선 개념 안에는 덕스러운 자들이 곤궁하고 비참한 사회는 ‘불의’한 세계이며, ‘행복할 자격’이 있는 자들에게 정말로 ‘행복한 삶의 현존’을 보장해주는 사회가 정의로운 세계라는 것, 그리고 이런 정의로운 사회를 실현하는 것이 윤리적 존재로서의 (...) 우리의 책무라는 수수하지만 강력한 통찰이 담겨 있는 것으로 보인다. 그러나 칸트는 이런 통찰을 본격적으로 전개하는 쪽으로 나아가지 않고, 최고선의 가능성을 보증하기 위해 영혼의 불멸과 신의 현존을 요청하는데 그친다. 이런 도덕-신학적 해법은 지극히 불충분하다. 칸트의 말대로 덕과 행복이 이질적 성분들이며 이 양자의 인과적 종합을 요하는 ‘실천적’ 이념이 최고선이라면, 이 이념은 이 세계 안의 유한한 존재인 우리의 삶을 규정하는 물질적, 경험적 조건들을 고려하고 개선할 때에만 실현 가능할 것이기 때문이다. 그러나 칸트의 ‘순수’ 이성의 실천 철학이 포괄하기를 거부하는 것이 바로 이 조건들이다. (shrink)

Zhang Zai’s 張載 “Western Inscription ” and Kant’s “Conclusion” of the Critique of Practical Reason are two profound pieces. As of yet, no comparative study has been made of the two. I argue that a comparative and contrasting study provides us a window into the central and powerful ideas within these two pieces. Section 2 of this article contrasts Zhang Zai’s “Heaven-Earth” with Kant’s starry heavens, his external “wonderland.” Section 3 contrasts Zhang Zai’s teaching of morality by (...) personal commitment and exemplars with Kant’s teaching of morality by a theory based on the moral law within, his inner “wonderland.” Section 4 compares and contrasts Zhang Zai’s human self-realization in the one world of Heaven-Earth with Kant’s human realization in the coming-together of the two “wonderlands.” By stressing some significant differences between Zhang Zai and Kant, I conclude that the view that takes Kant’s coming-together of the two “wonderlands” as a version of the union or interpenetration between the cosmos and the human will need important qualifications. (shrink)

Kant’s moral philosophy is celebrated for its doctrines of the primacy of the good will, the categorical imperative, and the significance of autonomy. These themes are pursued in the section of the Critique of Practical Reason which Kant called the Analytic, as well as in less formal works such as The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. In his main work Kant added a Dialectic, which is less well studied but is still essential to understanding his whole (...) project. The concept of the Highest Good, summum bonum, the ultimate goal in life, incorporates both an objective and a subjective element. It pronounces on what we ought to want and how we ought to want it: it bears on our happiness and on our virtue. The aim in the Dialectic is to highlight the tension that can result from these twoelements, so that the need for a rapprochement between them becomes better appreciated. This tension remains in contemporary moral philosophy, with its diverse approaches of virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. Kant’s stance regarding this dialectical tension needs to be understood, by Kant scholars and by moral philosophers. (shrink)

In _Critique of Black Reason_ eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black (...) class='Hi'>reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With _Critique of Black Reason_, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. (shrink)

It is widely claimed that the second Critique’s argument for the postulate of immortality is relevantly different from the first Critique’s argument for the postulate. It is also widely claimed that after the second Critique, Kant distances himself from its particular version of the argument, and even the postulate altogether. It is the purpose of this article to challenge these claims, arguing instead that (a) there is overwhelming textual evidence showing that Kant did not abandon the postulate; (...) (b) the second Critique does not contain a substantially different argument for the postulate than how it is argued for in the first Critique; and (c) the philosophical objections levied against the second Critique’s argument, including its putative substitution of holiness for virtue, become moot once its argument is better understood. (shrink)

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.