O artigo ten como obxectivo facer un percorrido por tres momentos da escritura filosófica no que o fenómeno do límite ou fronteira do pensamento se pon claramente de manifesto no discurso. En primeiro lugar, Kant, como artífice da produtiva noción dunha “fronteira [Grenze]” da razón como condición e límite do pensamento; en segundo lugar, Hegel, como o seu máximo crítico na “asunción [Aufhebung]” da negación da fronteira kantiana; e, finalmente, Kierkegaard, cuxa contribución á discusión dos seus predecesores consiste no “pathos (...) [Lidenskab]” do límite que Kant demarca e Hegel supera, pois no caso do pensador dinamarqués o límite da filosofía é ao mesmo tempo paradoxo, é dicir, algo que non pode ser coñecido senón tan só re-coñecido pola razón e que pon xustamente a razón no seu límite. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime. He discusses the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation, and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the degree in which nature has a purpose, with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment. The work (...) profoundly influenced the artists, writers, and philosophers of the classical and romantic period, including Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In addition, it has remained a landmark work in fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, analytical aesthetics, and contemporary critical theory. Today it remains an essential work of philosophy, and required reading for all with an interest in aesthetics. (shrink)

In this rich and resonant work, Soren Kierkegaard reflects poetically and philosophically on the biblical story of God's command to Abraham, that he sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of faith. Was Abraham's proposed action morally and religiously justified or murder? Is there an absolute duty to God? Was Abraham justified in remaining silent? In pondering these questions, Kierkegaard presents faith as a paradox that cannot be understood by reason and conventional morality, and he challenges the universalist ethics and (...) immanental philosophy of modern German idealism, especially as represented by Kant and Hegel. This volume presents the first new English translation for twenty years, by Sylvia Walsh, together with an introduction by C. Stephen Evans which examines the ethical and religious issues raised by the text. (shrink)

'beauty has purport and significance only for human beings, for beings at once animal and rational' In the Critique of Judgement Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime, discussing the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the apparent purposiveness of nature (...) with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment. The work profoundly influenced the artists and writers of the classical and romantic period and the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling. It has remained a central point of reference from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche through to phenomenology, hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, analytical aesthetics and contemporary critical theory. J. C. Meredith's classic translation has been revised in accordance with standard modern renderings and provided with a bilingual glossary. This edition also includes the important 'First Introduction' that Kant originally composed for the work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

From the perspective of Cartesian doubt, this article explores the concept of the limitations of reasoning through the use of the Kantian words 'boundary' and 'barrier' in his Critique of Pure Reason. Hegel's critical dialogue with Kant is presented focusing on the limitation that the latter imposed on reason for the acquisition of the true knowledge of philosophical/metaphysical objects. For this purpose, the Hegelian position is presented from its discussion on the second chapter of the first section of the The (...) Doctrine of Being and references are made to conceptual elements of the Phenomenology of Spirit. (shrink)

This article develops an interpretation of Hegel that aims to show how a proper understanding of the nature of speculative sentences might achieve what Kant set out to do: to vindicate our most fundamental claims to knowledge as actual knowledge, rather than mere acts of believing. To this end, it develops a conception of speculative geographies (or “maps”) as an interpretive tool and introduces an Hegelian-inspired distinction between empirical, generic, and speculative sentences. On this reading, Kant’s employment of the “boundary (...) concept” of a noumenon is bound to fail as it needs to employ a contrast between our human point of view and that of an omniscient God – which turns out to be an aperspectival “view from nowhere” and thus an incoherent notion. The artcile ends by suggesting ways in which Hegel’s logical analysis can help us to better comprehend the reflective ascent necessary to make our conceptual differentiations and typical ways of understanding intelligible to ourselves. (shrink)

In his late work Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Immanuel Kant struggles to answer a straightforward, yet surprisingly difficult, question: how is radical conversion--a complete reorientation of a person's most deeply held values--possible? In this book, Ryan S. Kemp and Christopher Iacovetti examine how this question gets taken up by Kant's philosophical heirs: Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Kierkegaard. More than simply developing a novel account of each thinker's position, Kemp and Iacovetti trace how each philosopher formulates his theory (...) in response to tensions in preceding views, culminating in Kierkegaard's claim that radical conversion lies outside a person's control. Kemp and Iacovetti close by examining some of the moral-psychological implications of Kierkegaard's account, particularly the question of how someone might responsibly relate to values that have, by their own admission, been acquired in contingent and accidental fashion. (shrink)

This book traces the genealogy of ideas of reason, self and sexuality in the West, opening the way to a richer and more diverse understanding of sexual experience. Western philosophy and religion have distorted and continue to distort our experience of sex and love through three far-reaching constellations of reason, self and sexuality. Thinkers like Plato, Aquinas and Kant helped to fashion an ascetic ideal of reason hostile to bodily pleasures and sexual diversity. By contrast, philosophical hedonism advocates a less (...) demanding conception of rationality and defends sexual pleasure. But this approach of thinkers like Hume, Bentham, La Mettrie and de Sade is still one-sided and limiting. A third constellation, Romanticism avoids the limitations of both forms of rationalism, but in the name of a religion of love and passion that ultimately threatens the integrity of the self. In Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought, a richer understanding of sexual experience is traced to a dissident philosophical tradition. In their different ways Montaigne, Spinoza, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Marcuse and Foucault contribute to a more holistic, multi-layered and open conception of reason, sexuality and the self. This book will be essential reading for all students of philosophy and gender studies. (shrink)

In this book’s first half, Ryan S. Kemp and Christopher Iacovetti argue that the history of post-Kantian idealism “can be productively read as a sustained attempt to explain how radical value transformation occurs” —and thus as a sustained attempt to solve a problem posed by Kant’s inconclusive ruminations, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, regarding the nature and possibility of radical moral conversion. The book’s second half then recounts Kierkegaard’s contribution to this debate—a debate which Kemp and Iacovetti (...) take Kierkegaard to have effectively settled, and to have done so, moreover, in such a way as to have established that “the modern ethical project is, by its own standards, untenable.” My review offers a rough recounting of the book’s overarching historical narrative, calling attention, along the way, to some of the authors’ more noteworthy claims. I then conclude by pointing out some possible problems with the approach that Kemp and Iacovetti have taken to conceptually framing their material. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel's Account of Faith Kierkegaard's Criticism: The Separation of Faith and Knowledge Critical Evaluation Abbreviations of Hegel's Primary Texts Abbreviations of Works by Kierkegaard.

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a key element of the system of philosophy which Kant introduced with his Critique of Pure Reason, and a work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought. It represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion that would be grounded in moral reason and would meet the needs of ethical life. It includes sharply critical and boldly constructive discussions on topics (...) not often treated by philosophers, including such traditional theological concepts as original sin and the salvation or 'justification' of a sinner, and the idea of the proper role of a church. This new edition includes slightly revised translations, a revised introduction with expanded discussion of certain key themes in the work, and up-to-date guidance on further reading. (shrink)

Este artigo propõe relacionar as filosofias da história de Kant e de Hegel às bases do pensamento de Foucault, em História da loucura na idade clássica. Buscamos reconhecer, não indícios de uma história cosmopolita ou universal, mas em que medida o pensamento crítico e a filosofia como ciência das essências puras comparecem na inteligibilidade histórica de Foucault. A reunião de uma diversidade de experiências sob o conceito de desatino , fio condutor da obra, sugere uma proximidade com a tradição. Por (...) outro lado, a falta de um critério intrínseco, o qual justifique a referência de tal multiplicidade à alcunha da loucura, faz com que o fio condutor se restrinja a um aspecto negativo e que, positivamente, Foucault estabeleça para seu trabalho um primado empírico, na forma de uma constelação de imagens. O procedimento de História da loucura, que, junto ao interesse pela desrazão, inaugura o privilégio dado pelo filósofo francês à análise das descontinuidades nos leva a reconhecer a razão com base nos casos que solapam aos seus limites, às essências por ela própria discernidas, e com base nas práticas por ela promovidas e justificadas. This article proposes to relate Kant's and Hegel's philosophy of history to the basis of Foucault's History of Madness in the Classical Age. We are not attempting to recognize the presence of a cosmopolitan or universal history, but trying to understand how critical thinking and philosophy as the science of pure essences appear in Foucault's historical intelligibility. The challenge of bringing together a diversity of experiences under the concept of unreason , which is the common thread of the book, suggests an attachment to tradition. However, the absence of an intrinsic criterion justifying the reference of that multiplicity to madness motivates a negative aspect to that concept and, positively, makes Foucault establish for his work an empirical primacy, in the form of a constellation of images. The procedure of the History of Madness that, with its interest in unreason, inaugurates the privilege given by the French philosopher to the analysis of discontinuities, leads us to recognize reason based on cases that escape its limits and the essences discerned by itself. (shrink)

A Monumental Figure of Western Thought Wrestles with the Question of God Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. Kant's teachings on religion were unorthodox in that they were based on rationality rather than revelation. Though logically proving God's existence might be impossible, it is morally reasonable to "act as if there be a God." His strictly (...) rational approach was considered so scandalous that the King of Prussia forbid him to teach or write further on religious subjects, which Kant obeyed until the king's death. A work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion grounded in moral reason and meeting the needs of an ethical life. (shrink)

One of the cornerstone books of Western philosophy, Critique of Pure Reason is Kant's seminal treatise, where he seeks to define the nature of reason itself and builds his own unique system of philosophical thought with an approach known as transcendental idealism. He argues that human knowledge is limited by the capacity for perception and attempts a logical designation of two varieties of knowledge: a posteriori, the knowledge acquired through experience; and a priori, knowledge not derived through experience. This accurate (...) translation by J. M. D. Meiklejohn offers a simple and direct rendering of Kant's work that is suitable for readers at all levels. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant was one of the leading lights of 18th-century philosophy; his work provided the foundations for later revolutionary thinkers such as Hegel and Marx. This work contains the keystone of his critical philosophy - the basis of human knowledge and truth.

This Volume contains seven works of Kant, newly translated and edited, with Introductions. What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? 1786 (Allen Wood) On the miscarriage of all philosophical trials in theodicy. 1791 (George di Giovanni Religion within the boundaries of mere reason. 1793 (George di Giovanni) The end of all things. 1794 (Allen Wood) The conflict of the faculties. 1798 (Mary J. Gregor & Robert Anchor) Preface to Reinhold Bernhard Jackmann's examination of the Kantian Philosophy of Religion. (...) 1800 (Allen W. Wood) Lectures on the philosophical doctrines of religion (1817) (Allen W. Wood -/- . (shrink)

It is commonly claimed that Kant's critical philosophy aims to limit reason's speculative use and its metaphysical pretensions. This paper argues that such claims should be amended in light of a technical distinction between negative limits and positive boundaries that Kant held throughout his career. Kant's only extended discussion of this distinction appears in §§57–60 of the Prolegomena, a division entitled “On pure reason's boundary‐determination”. I examine these sections in detail in order to elucidate the account of the limits and (...) boundaries of the activity of different cognitive faculties in the Critique of Pure Reason. I argue that once we understand a key ambition of the Critique to be the positive determination of the boundary between objects of experience and things in themselves, we gain insight into the essential contribution that Kant's theory of the positive utility of ideas of reason makes to the critical philosophy. (shrink)

A Monumental Figure of Western Thought Wrestles with the Question of God Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. Kant's teachings on religion were unorthodox in that they were based on rationality rather than revelation. Though logically proving God's existence might be impossible, it is morally reasonable to "act as if there be a God." His strictly (...) rational approach was considered so scandalous that the King of Prussia forbid him to teach or write further on religious subjects, which Kant obeyed until the king's death. A work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion grounded in moral reason and meeting the needs of an ethical life. (shrink)

This essay offers an account of Kierkegaard’s view of the limits of thought and of what makes this view distinctive. With primary reference to Philosophical Fragments, and its putative representation of Christianity as unthinkable, I situate Kierkegaard’s engagement with the problem of the limits of thought, especially with respect to the views of Kant and Hegel. I argue that Kierkegaard builds in this regard on Hegel’s critique of Kant but that, against Hegel, he develops a radical distinction between two types (...) of thinking and inquiry: the ‘aesthetic-intellectual’ and the ‘ethico-religious’. I clarify this distinction and show how it guides Kierkegaard’s conception of a form of philosophical practice that involves drawing limits to the proper sphere of disinterested contemplation. With reference to two rival interpretations of Kierkegaard’s approach to the limits of thought—which I call ‘bullet-biting’ and ‘relativizing’—I further show how my ‘disambiguating’ account can better explain how, and why, his work courts a form of self-referential incoherence, in which it appears that certain limits of thought are at once affirmed and violated. (shrink)

Why these lectures? -- Hegel between the ancients and the moderns -- Divisions and topics in philosophy of subjective spirit -- Anthropology : slumbering spirit -- Animal magnetism and clairvoyance -- Dementia -- Phenomenology of spirit -- Reciprocal recognition, spirit, and the concept of right -- Recognition and self-actualization -- Psychology : theoretical spirit -- Spirit for itself : from the found to the posited -- Imagination, sign, memory -- Mechanical memory and transcendental deduction -- Psychology : practical spirit : (...) the synthesis of Kant and Aristotle -- The formalism of the psychology -- Unresolved issues : the unity of the philosophy of spirit -- Notes on the text and translation -- Introduction -- Anthropology -- Natural soul -- The dreaming soul -- Sentience -- Self-feeling -- Habit -- Actual soul -- Phenomenology of spirit -- Consciousness as such -- Self-consciousness -- Reason -- Psychology -- Theoretical spirit -- Intuition -- Representation -- Thought -- Practical spirit. (shrink)

In this essay, Hegel attempted to show how Fichte’s Science of Knowledge was an advance from the position of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, and how Schelling (and incidentally Hegel himself) had made a further advance from the position of Fichte.

Engaging with Kant’s transcendental logic seems to be a question of mere scholarly historical interest today. It is most commonly regarded a mixture between logic and psychology or epistemology, and by that, not a serious form of logic. Transcendental logic seems to be of no systematical impact on the concept of logic. My paper aims to disclose a different account on the endeavour of Kant’s transcendental logic in particular and of the “Critique of Pure Reason” (CPR) in general. Kant’s fundamental (...) question is in a revolutionary way aiming to ground the character of necessity of knowledge, which means to justify the claim that thinking in accordance with the forms and principles of formal logic does not lead to sheer tautologies or an unsolved contradiction, but to knowledge that is objectively valid. In a first part, I shall demonstrate the necessity and the significance of this new fundamental question of the CPR with respect to its genesis out of pre-Kantian metaphysics. A brief outline of Kant’s answer to this question, with special emphasis on his revolutionary new comprehension of logical form, will be given as well. A second part shall open up a perspective that lies beyond Kant’s standpoint with reference to Nietzsche and eventually to Hegel. I will answer the question: What knowledge do we achieve about being or actuality by means of formal logic? I will argue that Kant shows that formal logic is the logic of all technical-practical conduct but also, at least indirectly, the limitation of the technical-practical knowledge and its legitimate sphere of application. (shrink)

While it has perhaps always accompanied philosophical thought – one immediately thinks of Plato’s Dialogues – the problem of the communication of that thought, and therefore of its capacity to be taught, has acquired a new insistence in the work of post-Kantian thinkers. As evidence of this one could cite Fichte’s repeated efforts to formulate a definitive version of his Wissenschaftslehre, the model of the Bildungsroman that Hegel adopts for his Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (...) and Heidegger’s uncompleted Being and Time. Certainly each of these thinkers, as well as their projects, are quite distinct from the others, but their works are also signposts. It is not a question here of reducing the puzzles and difficulties of these works to some single element, some trace of a philosophical zeitgeist. Rather, it is enough to indicate this preoccupation with the problem of the communicability of thinking in order to raise the question of the modality of such a communication. How has thinking come to be so fundamentally troubled by its own expression? That Kant’s Critical philosophy has precipitated this preoccupation ought to come as no surprise, for it was Kant, most famously in the Critique of Pure Reason, who sought to definitively set the limits of philosophical thinking. In doing so, however, Kant is unable to remain utterly silent about what he himself sets outside the bounds of meaningful thought and speech: things-in-themselves. The mere fact that this meaningless element is an essential component of Kant’s philosophical exposition is an indication of the paradoxical logic of the limit: to postulate a limit is simultaneously to set out its obverse side. In Kant’s case, then, the demarcation of what can be thought carries with it the implicit thinking of what is ruled out of bounds for thought. Beginning with Fichte, the philosophical project of Kant’s successors and inheritors is then largely determined by an effort to incorporate or at least accommodate this alien element within thinking. The initial phase of this effort is marked by a tragic motif, a conjoining of thought with the experience of loss and suffering that is characteristic of Romanticism, that culminates in the dialectic of Hegel’s Absolute Knowing. In Absolute Knowing, thought has not vanquished its limitations, it has instead discovered the resources with which it can perpetually surmount them. This first phase is followed by a reaction or response to this seeming completion and overcoming of the Kantian limitation. Now, the tragic movement of thought comes to be understood as itself limited, and necessarily so according to the logic of the limit that imposes itself upon every gesture of closure. Tragedy thereby gives way to comedy insofar as the limitation that is incorporated as an obstacle to be overcome by tragic thought is shown to be the external condition of that very thought. Finally, if the comic is the fate of the limitations of tragedy, the thought of comedy itself demands a third mode of thinking, one capable of something more than the mere reiteration of the limit between comedy and tragedy that troubles them both. This third form of expression is parody, an expression appropriate to a thinking that repeats and completes the threefold movement of tragic thought while, in this very repetition, creating a limitless domain of thoughtful expression. (shrink)

The thesis provides a new interpretation of Kant's claims for the epistemological significance of aesthetic judgment. I argue that the harmony of the imagination and the understanding in aesthetic judgment consists in a potentially unending activity of mental modeling, or "exhibiting," of figures corresponding to possible conceptual determinations of the perceptual form of a beautiful object. Since Kant holds just this capacity to exhibit concepts as figures in intuition to be a prerequisite to empirical conception, judgments of taste are based (...) on an activity underlying all cognition. ;I then turn to another area in which Kant claims a close connection between reflection and conception--his analysis of empirical concept formation and application. Kant states that we must presuppose a principle of reflective judgment in order to insure the discoverability of natural regularity. Kant recognizes that transcendental under-determines empirical law, but determining the extent to which Kant thinks this is true is of the utmost importance. Untempered, Kant's broad claims that the principle is necessary for the capacity to form and apply empirical concepts commits him to the un-Kantian position that a reflective principle is constitutive and not merely regulative. I find, however, that the principle is not required for the formation and application of any empirical concepts, but rather for those that purport to correspond to empirically real properties of things. ;Last, I place Kant's theory of reflection in a historical context, considering one Idealist criticism of it--that of Hegel in Faith and Knowledge. I argue that Hegel's Kant critique is best understood as an attempt to overturn the delicate balance Kant sought to strike in according a transcendentally necessary principle merely regulative status. (shrink)

This paper is an account of Kant’s view of the passions, and their place in the structure of moral motivation. The paper lays out the relations Kant sees be­tween feelings, inclinations, affects and passions, by looking at texts in Metaphysics of Morals, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Anthropology, and Lectures on Education. Then it discusses a famous passage in Groundwork about sympathetic inclination, and ends by proposing two ways in which Kant thinks feelings and inclinations enter into moral (...) judgment, and two ways in which this can go wrong. This analysis involves responding to Karl Ameriks on the question of whether Kant is an internalist about moral motivation. (shrink)

This chapter examines Hegel’s conception of philosophical critique in order to shed light on the force and limits of the method that has become known as immanent critique. At least in modern philosophy, it was Kant who first conceived of critique as a form of reflection that draws its criterion from reason itself. As I argue, Hegel is deeply indebted to Kant in this respect. The chapter begins with an analysis of Hegel's seminal essay ‘On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (...) Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular’, published in 1802. After a brief discussion of the Phenomenology, I turn to his Philosophy of Right. These texts make clear, I argue, that the criterion from which immanent critique takes its bearings is necessarily tainted with a particularity that it cannot affirm without losing its force. According to this account, immanent critique comes to refer to a form of reflection that is more complicated and more precarious than Kant and Hegel seem to have assumed. (shrink)

Hegel seeks to overturn Kant's conclusion that our knowledge is restricted, or that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Understanding this Hegelian ambition requires distinguishing two Kantian characterizations of our epistemic limits: First, we can have knowledge only within the "bounds of experience". Second, we cannot have knowledge of objects that would be accessible only to a divine intellectual intuition, even though the faculty of reason requires us to conceive of such objects. Hegel aims to (...) drive a wedge between these two characterizations, showing that we can have knowledge beyond Kant's bounds of experience, yet without need of divine intuition. And attention to such knowledge is supposed to show that we have no legitimate need to even conceive of divine intuition and its objects - and no need to conclude that our own knowledge is restricted by comparison, or that we cannot know things as they are in themselves. I focus here on the initial case Hegel uses to introduce this extended argument strategy: we can have more knowledge of natural kinds and laws than would be allowed by Kant's bounds of experience. (shrink)

The notion of Self plays a significant role in the philosophical speculations of Buddha and Wittgenstein. For the Buddha, ‘Self’ has empirical validity without ultimate reality. However, the Real Self is transcendent. It is the Absolute which is immanent as well as transcendent. It cannot therefore be bound to thought-constructions. The Absolute is Nirvāṇa; it is peaceful, immortal and unproduced which is unspeakable and can only be realised through immediate spiritual experience. To deal with Nirvāṇa rigourously, Buddha upholds a negative (...) method of describing it as final. He prefers to subscribe to the philosophy of silence, for the bliss of Nirvāṇa is beyond empirical reality. Some striking affinities with such Buddhist notion of Self can be found in Wittgensteinian philosophy of Self. For Wittgenstein, the ‘Self’ comes into being through one’s own world. The Self or the metaphysical subject does not belong to the world; rather it is the limit of the world. The metaphysical Self is different from the empirical Self or ego with which psychology deals. The psychological self pertains to and explains the worldly state-of-affair. Besides, the philosophical Self or I is not the human being, the human body or the human soul with psychological properties, but the boundary (not a part) of the world. Self or I is not the name of a person. It therefore is inexplicable. Since it is unspeakable, we must be silent about it, for whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein finally submits that this is all that really matters in human life. A comparative study of the two great philosophers suggests that the Buddhist philosophy of Self apparently echoes in the Wittgensteinian philosophy of Self. (shrink)

Carazan's dream : Kant's early theory of freedom -- Kant's archimedean moment : remarks in observation concerning the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime -- Rousseau, Count Verri, and the true economy of human nature : lectures on anthropology, 1772-1781 -- The paradox of autonomy -- Moral hesitation in religion within the boundaries of bare reason -- Kant's true politics : Völkerrecht in toward perpetual peace and the metaphysics of morals -- Kant as educator : conflict of the faculties, (...) part one -- Archimedes revisited : honor and history in the conflict of the faculties, part two -- Kant's Jewish problem. (shrink)

Scholarship on Kant's practical philosophy has often overlooked its reception in the early days of post-Kantian philosophy and German Idealism. This volume of new essays illuminates that reception and how it informed the development of practical philosophy between Kant and Hegel. The essays discuss, in addition to Kant, Hegel and Fichte, relatively little-known thinkers such as Pistorius, Ulrich, Maimon, Erhard, E. Reimarus, Reinhold, Jacobi, F. Schlegel, Humboldt, Dalberg, Gentz, Rehberg, and Möser. Issues discussed include the empty formalism objection, the separation (...) between right and morality, freedom and determinism, nihilism, the right to revolution, ideology, and the limits of the liberal state. Taken together, the essays provide an historically informed and philosophically nuanced picture of the development of post-Kantian practical philosophy. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between Kant's and Kierkegaard's treatment of morality and religious faith. In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone Kant invokes Christian categories in an effort to resolve certain contradictions which arise in consequence of the introduction of the notion of radical evil. I initially argue that Kant's Enlightenment confidence in the autonomy of ethical selfhood ultimately entails the subordination of these categories to the demands of rational ethical subjectivity. I then suggest that Kierkegaard's defence of (...) the independence of Christian faith, against the encroachments of Kantian Enlightenment humanism, largely proceeds on a foundation of shared epistemological principles, such that the Kierkegaardian existential individual's paradoxical Christian faith offers no genuine alternative, but rather a radically subjectivized extension of Kant's demythologized version of orthodox Christian principles. (shrink)

Kant's Reason develops a novel interpretation of Kant’s conception of reason and its philosophical significance, focusing on two claims. First, it argues that Kant presents a powerful model for understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason as two manifestations of a unified capacity for theoretical and practical understanding (or “comprehension”). This model allows us to do justice to the deep commonalities between theoretical and practical rationality, without reducing either to the other. In particular, through it, we see why the (...) activities of both theoretical and practical reason are governed by a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, while also seeing why reason is essentially autonomous. At the same time, Kant's Reason also reads Kant as presenting us with a compelling picture of the role that reason (as a capacity or power) should play in a systematic approach to foundational philosophical questions. In doing so, it argues for an account of the fundamental norms that apply to rational beings that treats as fundamental neither substantive reasons or values nor merely structural rationality, but instead a robust conception of reason as a power or capacity — namely, the capacity for theoretical and practical understanding. The result is a form of “rational constitutivism” – one which contrasts both with the forms of “reasons fundamentalism” that are currently fashionable and the forms of “agency-first constitutivism” that have dominated much of Kantian metaethics. In this sense, the aim of the book is to vindicate Kant’s insistence that his philosophy represents nothing more or less than reason’s implicit self-understanding coming to explicit and systematic self-consciousness. (shrink)

Kant is a pivotal thinker in Adorno's intellectual world. Although he wrote monographs on Hegel, Husserl, and Kierkegaard, the closest Adorno came to an extended discussion of Kant are two lecture courses, one concentrating on the _Critique of Pure Reason_ and the other on the _Critique of Practical Reason_. This new volume by Adorno comprises his lectures on the former. Adorno attempts to make Kant's thought comprehensible to students by focusing on what he regards as problematic aspects of Kant's philosophy. (...) Adorno examines Kant's dualism and what he calls the Kantian "block": the contradictions arising from Kant's resistance to the idealism that his successors—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—saw as the inevitable outcome of his ideas. These lectures also provide an accessible introduction to and rationale for Adorno's own philosophy as expounded in _Negative Dialectics_ and his other major writings. Adorno's view of Kant forms an integral part of his own philosophy, since he argues that the way out of the Kantian contradictions is to show the necessity of the dialectical thinking that Kant himself spurned. This in turn enables Adorno to criticize Anglo-Saxon scientistic or positivist thought, as well as the philosophy of existentialism. This book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy and in social and political thought, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the foundations of Adorno's own work. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, debates about Hegel’s Science of Logic have largely turned around the metaphysical or non-metaphysical nature of this work. This debate has certainly issued many important contributions to Hegel scholarship. Yet it presupposes, in my view, a set of oppositions that thwart an adequate assessment of Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant. I hope to show in this paper that Hegel is deeply indebted to Kant, but not to the Kant who is commonly brought into play to argue for the (...) non-metaphysical nature of the Science of Logic. If Kant ’s own Critique of Pure Reason defies oppositions such as that between epistemology and metaphysics, then they cannot be employed to determine the extent to which Hegel’s Logic moves beyond Kant. By focusing instead on the system of pure reason that Kant intended to elaborate, I hope to bring out the ontological thrust of both Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Science of Logic. My paper thus intends to highlight the deep continuity between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Logic, yet without reducing the latter to the kind of epistemology commonly attributed to Kant. (shrink)

The essay examines Kant’s Enlightenment conception of metaphysics as a science to be kept free of ideological prejudice and extrarational cognitive resources and to be established under the conditions of public, intersubjectively valid discourse. I analyze Kant’s self-interpretation of his transcendental philosophy as “metaphysics of metaphysics” and argue for the extensional partial identity of the critique of metaphysics and the metaphysics so rendered possible. In particular, I identify the “future metaphysics” envisioned by Kant as the “metaphysics of nature in general” (...) or the “physiology of pure reason,” which was projected by Kant but never carried out by himself and is not to be confused with the “metaphysics of material nature” presented by Kant in his Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science. I further show how in Kant the “restriction” of the understanding and its pure concepts to sensible intuition is counterbalanced by the “bounding” of sensibility and its formal conditions to the appearances, at the exclusion of the “empty space” of the non-sensory. In drawing on Kant’s distinction between “limit” and “boundary”, I establish the precise position of critical metaphysics “on the boundary” of the world of sense and the world of the understanding. In concluding, I argue that for Kant a “future metaphysics that will be possible as science” is restricted to transcendental philosophy, at the exclusion of the theoretical cognition of the supersensible, which is thereby delegated forever to the object domain of practically based rational but non-scientific belief or faith. (shrink)

There is a long history of interpreting Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as setting forth an irrationalist position on the relationship of faith to ethics–a position that declares faith actually opposed to the demands of ethics. One question has emerged at the forefront of the debate over this interpretation: is the ethics to which Johannes de Silentio opposes faith Kantian or Hegelian? I argue that the Kant/Hegel debate is irrelevant for determining whether Kierkegaard is an ethical irrationalist. To make the case (...) for my thesis, I will take a step back and give a general reading of Fear and Trembling. (shrink)

This paper considers how Kierkegaard self-reflexively portrays the tension between the boundary limit of discursive reason and mythic imagination in his classic analysis of Abrahamic faith. Following some reflections on the nature and philosophical implications of that tension, I examine its salient delineation in the Prelude of Fear and Trembling. Through four non-canonical renderings of the biblical Aqedah myth featured in the Prelude, Kierkegaard depicts the limits of ethical reasoning in the drama of Johannes de Silentio’s struggle to figure-forth Abraham’s (...) “movements” in ethically intelligible terms. I conclude that, as dramatized by Kierkegaard, the tension between mythemic figuration and discursively articulated critical reasoning sets in relief one of the formative aporiai of modern Western culture, namely the conflictive interplay of vision and discourse. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel ReconsideredStephen N. DunningJon Stewart. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xix + 695. Cloth, $55.00.It is rare to find a scholarly book that treats its topic exhaustively. But Jon Stewart's 658-page Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, despite its author's disclaimers, comes close. It is an impressive attempt to demolish what Stewart calls "the standard view," using a three-part (...) argument: that Hegel exerted a substantial positive influence on the young Kierkegaard; [End Page 500] that Kierkegaard was never the radical critic of Hegel claimed by the "standard view"; and that most Kierkegaard scholars (especially Niels Thulstrup in Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980]) have been led astray on these matters by their ignorance of Kierkegaard's philosophical milieu and their ideological bias.Hegel's positive influence on Kierkegaard is presented in chapters devoted respectively to The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, and Sickness Unto Death. Stewart employs a contextual method, limiting himself to passages in Kierkegaard's texts that have clearly been influenced by passages in or characteristics of Hegel's works. He easily shows Hegelian influence on the dialectical structure of the argument in The Concept of Irony, on the contrast between the ancient and "modern" Antigones in Part One of Either/Or, on the concepts of mediation and romantic love presented in Part Two, and on the dialectical structure of the section on "The Forms of This Sickness (Despair)" in The Sickness Unto Death.The claim that Kierkegaard was never a strong critic of Hegel turns on Stewart's careful contextual analysis of the major Danish Hegelians and anti-Hegelians contemporary with Kierkegaard. Thanks to Bruce Kirmmse's Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), many scholars will be familiar with Heiberg and Martensen, and also the anti-Hegelian Bishop Mynster, but few will have examined the Hegelianism of Adler and the criticisms of Sibbern and Møller. Stewart argues that the texts of Kierkegaard's "middle period," which appear to attack Hegel directly, are really an attack on the Danish Hegelians—especially Heiberg, Martensen and Adler. He claims that "Hegel" often served as a code name for one of these Hegelians, and that such secret codes were commonly used, just like pseudonyms, to avoid giving offence in the small town of Copenhagen.Stewart's criticism of other scholars is based upon both his analyses of the selected passages in Kierkegaard's works and his discussion of the Danish Hegelians. It is true that many scholars have portrayed Kierkegaard as one-dimensionally anti-Hegelian, and some may have done it for the ideological reasons imputed to them by Stewart. But it is not clear that Thulstrup, for example, deserves to be dismissed as a scholar. He clearly admitted that Kierkegaard had read sections of Hegel's major works "intensively," and he also observed that Kierkegaard was provoked to his anti-Hegelianism by the influence of Hegel on Martensen (whom Thulstrup mentions often, as also Heiberg and Mynster). Stewart implies that Thulstrup had little understanding of Hegel and no interest in the Danish Hegelians, but his discussion of Thulstrup's work is too selective to be persuasive.Stewart also seems to have been a bit hasty in concluding that recent scholarship on the Hegel-Kierkegaard relation blindly follows Thulstrup and the "standard view." In different ways, Robert Perkins, Merold Westphal and I have all written on aspects of Kierkegaard's thought that show Hegelian influences. Stewart lists us in his Bibliography and even cites my book as one of several that investigates Hegelian influences on The Sickness Unto Death, but he never discusses the arguments we present, even though they clearly strengthen his claim about Hegel's positive influence on Kierkegaard. Indeed, the only American book on "Hegel and Kierkegaard" he takes seriously is Mark C. Taylor's Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel & Kierkegaard (Berkeley, 1980), which is a creative philosophical project that does not attempt to be a study of their historical relationship. Stewart writes that much scholarship suffers from using a "text-immanent" (628) method of analysis that ignores the relevant historical... (shrink)

The thoroughly contemporary question of the relationship between emotion and reason was debated with such complexity by the philosophers of the 17th century that their concepts remain a source of inspiration for today’s research about the emotionality of the mind. The analyses of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and many other thinkers collected in this volume offer new insights into the diversity and significance of philosophical reflections about emotions during the early modern era. A focus is placed on affective (...) components in learning processes and the boundaries between emotions and reason. (shrink)

This paper considers how Kierkegaard self-reflexively portrays the tension between the boundary limit of discursive reason and mythic imagination in his classic analysis of Abrahamic faith. Following some reflections on the nature and philosophical implications of that tension, I examine its salient delineation in the Prelude of Fear and Trembling. Through four non-canonical renderings of the biblical Aqedah myth featured in the Prelude, Kierkegaard depicts the limits of ethical reasoning in the drama of Johannes de Silentio’s struggle to figure-forth Abraham’s (...) “movements” in ethically intelligible terms. I conclude that, as dramatized by Kierkegaard, the tension between mythemic figuration and discursively articulated critical reasoning sets in relief one of the formative aporiai of modern Western culture, namely the conflictive interplay of vision and discourse. (shrink)

In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to our (...) autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves, in others or in God. Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages; he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open. (shrink)

Aside from bioethics, the main theme of Ronald Green's lifework has been an exploration of the relation between religion and morality, with special emphasis on the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard. This essay summarizes and assesses his work on this theme by examining, in turn, four of his relevant books. Religious Reason (1978) introduced a new method of comparative religion based on Kant's model of a rational religion. Religion and Moral Reason (1988) expanded on this project, clarifying that (...) religious traditions cannot be reduced to their moral grounding. Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (1992) offered bold new evidence that Kant, not Hegel, was the philosopher whose ideas primarily shaped Kierkegaard's overtly religious philosophy ; both philosophers focused on the problem of how to understand the relation between moral reasoning and historical religion. And Kant and Kierkegaard on Time and Eternity (2011) republished ten essays that explore various aspects of this theme in greater depth. I argue that throughout these works Green defends a " paradox of inwardness " : principles or ideals that are by their nature essentially inward end up requiring outward manifestation in order to be confirmed or fully justified as real. (shrink)