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Kant's Lectures on Ethics
by Lara Denis Oliver SensenThis is the first book devoted to an examination of Kant's lectures on ethics, which provide a unique and revealing perspective on the development of his views. In fifteen newly commissioned essays, leading Kant scholars discuss four sets of student notes reflecting different periods of Kant's career: those taken by Herder (1762–4), Collins (mid-1770s), Mrongovius (1784–5) and Vigilantius (1793–4). The essays cover a diverse range of topics, from the relation between Kant's lectures and the Baumgarten textbooks, to obligation, virtue, love, the highest good, freedom, the categorical imperative, moral motivation and religion. Together they will provide the reader with a deeper and fuller understanding of the evolution of Kant's moral thought. The volume will be of interest to a range of readers in Kant studies, ethics, political philosophy, religious studies and the history of ideas.
Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics: A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides)
by Courtney D. FugateKant divided his course of lectures on metaphysics into six parts: a section entitled 'prolegomena' followed by chapters on ontology, cosmology, empirical psychology, rational psychology, and natural theology. This volume's ten chapters, written by leading Kant scholars, constitute the most comprehensive and informed analysis of his metaphysics lectures to date. The book provides balanced coverage of the lecture transcripts from Kant's course by following his general structure, with at least one chapter devoted to major themes from each of its parts. As well as examining what the lecture transcripts can tell us about the content, context, and development of Kant's thought on a range of key topics - from his conception of transcendental philosophy to his critical theism - the contributors to this volume also offer expert discussion and insight on how to make responsible use of these key primary materials from the Kantian corpus.
Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: Volume I
by Paton, H JFirst published in 2002. This is Volume II of four of a series on Kant's and is concerned with his Metaphysic of Experience (Vol I), a commentary of the first half of the Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft. Written in 1936, this is a detailed commentary of the work with particular attention to passage where the language is most difficult, and especially in such passages as the Transcendental Deduction and the argument of the Analogies.
Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: Volume II
by H. J. PatonFirst published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science: A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides)
by Michael Bennett McNultyIn his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant accounts for the possibility of an acting-at-a-distance gravitational force, demonstrates the infinite divisibility of matter, and derives analogues to Newtonian laws of motion. The work is his major statement in philosophy of science, and was especially influential in German-speaking countries in the nineteenth century. However, this complex text has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. The chapters of this Critical Guide clarify the accounts of matter, motion, the mathematization of nature, space, and natural laws exhibited in the Metaphysical Foundations; elucidate the relationship between its metaphysics of nature and Kant's critical philosophy; and describe the historical context for Kant's account of natural science. The volume will be an invaluable resource for understanding one of Kant's most difficult works, and will set the agenda for future scholarship on Kant's philosophy of science.
Kant's Observations and Remarks
by Susan Meld Shell Richard VelkleyKant's Observations of 1764 and Remarks of 1764-1765 (a set of fragments written in the margins of his copy of the Observations) document a crucial turning point in his life and thought. Both reveal the growing importance for him of ethics, anthropology and politics, but with an important difference. The Observations attempts to observe human nature directly. The Remarks, by contrast, reveals a revolution in Kant's thinking, largely inspired by Rousseau, who 'turned him around' by disclosing to Kant the idea of a 'state of freedom' (modelled on the state of nature) as a touchstone for his thinking. This and related thoughts anticipate such famous later doctrines as the categorical imperative. This collection of essays by leading Kant scholars illuminates the many and varied topics within these two rich works, including the emerging relations between theory and practice, ethics and anthropology, men and women, philosophy, history and the 'rights of man'.
Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy
by Jennifer MenschBecause it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which scholars have long considered as separate from his rigorous theoretical philosophy--until now. In Kant's Organicism, Jennifer Mensch draws a crucial link between these spheres by showing how the concept of epigenesis--a radical theory of biological formation--lies at the heart of Kant's conception of reason. As Mensch argues, epigenesis was not simply a metaphor for Kant but centrally guided his critical philosophy, especially the relationship between reason and the categories of the understanding. Offsetting a study of Kant's highly technical theory of cognition with a mixture of intellectual history and biography, she situates the epigenesis of reason within broader investigations into theories of generation, genealogy, and classification, and against later writers and thinkers such as Goethe and Darwin. Distilling vast amounts of research on the scientific literature of the time into a concise and readable book, Mensch offers one of the most refreshing looks not only at Kant's famous first Critique but at the history of philosophy and the life sciences as well.
Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy
by Jennifer MenschBecause it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which scholars have long considered as separate from his rigorous theoretical philosophy—until now. In Kant’s Organicism, Jennifer Mensch draws a crucial link between these spheres by showing how the concept of epigenesis—a radical theory of biological formation—lies at the heart of Kant’s conception of reason. As Mensch argues, epigenesis was not simply a metaphor for Kant but centrally guided his critical philosophy, especially the relationship between reason and the categories of the understanding. Offsetting a study of Kant’s highly technical theory of cognition with a mixture of intellectual history and biography, she situates the epigenesis of reason within broader investigations into theories of generation, genealogy, and classification, and against later writers and thinkers such as Goethe and Darwin. Distilling vast amounts of research on the scientific literature of the time into a concise and readable book, Mensch offers one of the most refreshing looks not only at Kant’s famous first Critique but at the history of philosophy and the life sciences as well.
Kant's Philosophical Revolution: A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason
by Yirmiyahu YovelA short, clear, and authoritative guide to one of the most important and difficult works of modern philosophyPerhaps the most influential work of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is also one of the hardest to read, since it brims with complex arguments, difficult ideas, and tortuous sentences. A philosophical revolutionary, Kant had to invent a language to express his new ideas, and he wrote quickly. It's little wonder that the Critique was misunderstood from the start, or that Kant was compelled to revise it in a second edition, or that it still presents great challenges to the reader. In this short, accessible book, eminent philosopher and Kant expert Yirmiyahu Yovel helps readers find their way through the web of Kant's classic by providing a clear and authoritative summary of the entire work. The distillation of decades of studying and teaching Kant, Yovel's "systematic explication" untangles the ideas and arguments of the Critique in the order in which Kant presents them. This guide provides helpful explanations of difficult issues such as the difference between general and transcendental logic, the variants of Transcendental Deduction, and the constitutive role of the "I think." Yovel underscores the central importance of Kant's insistence on the finitude of reason and succinctly describes how the Critique's key ideas are related to Kant's other writings. The result is an invaluable guide for philosophers and students.
Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics: Modern Essays (Synthese Library)
by Carl Posy Ofra RechterThe late 1960s saw the emergence of new philosophical interest in Kant's philosophy of mathematics, and since then this interest has developed into a major and dynamic field of study. In this state-of-the-art survey of contemporary scholarship on Kant's mathematical thinking, Carl Posy and Ofra Rechter gather leading authors who approach it from multiple perspectives, engaging with topics including geometry, arithmetic, logic, and metaphysics. Their essays offer fine-grained analysis of Kant's philosophy of mathematics in the context of his Critical philosophy, and also show sensitivity to its historical background. The volume will be important for readers seeking a comprehensive picture of the current scholarship about the development of Kant's philosophy of mathematics, its place in his overall philosophy, and the Kantian themes that influenced mathematics and its philosophy after Kant.
Kant's Power of Imagination (Elements in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant)
by Rolf-Peter HorstmannThis Element is a study of how the power of imagination is, according to Kant, supposed to contribute to cognition. It is meant to be an immanent and a reconstructive endeavor, relying solely on Kant's own resources when he tries to determine what material, faculties, and operations are necessary for cognition of objects. The main discourse is divided into two sections. The first deals with Kant's views concerning the power of imagination as outlined in the A- and B- edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The second focuses on the power of imagination in the first part of the Critique of Judgment.
Kant's Prolegomena: A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides)
by Peter ThielkeThe Prolegomena is often dismissed as Kant's failed attempt to popularize his philosophy, but as the essays collected here show, there is much to be gained from a careful study of the work. The essays explore the distinctive features of the Prolegomena, including Kant's discussion of philosophical methodology, his critical idealism, the nature of experience, his engagement with Hume, the nature of the self, the relation between geometry and physics, and what we cognize about God. Newly commissioned for this volume, the essays as a whole offer sophisticated and innovative interpretations of the Prolegomena, and cast Kant's critical philosophy in a new light.
Kant's Reform of Metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason Reconsidered
by Karin de BoerScholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light.
Kant's Solution for Verification in Metaphysics (Routledge Library Editions: Kant #3)
by D. P. DryerFirst published in 1966. Professor Dryer has furnished a highly illuminating account of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by unfolding its central argument. Kant’s Solution for Verification in Metaphysics brings out the light which Kant has to throw on central topics of philosophy. It takes its place as an indispensable guide to every student of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's Theory Of Moral Motivation
by Daniel GuevaraThis book offers an account of Kant's theory of moral motivation that comprehends the most challenging and controversial aspects of Kant's theory of the will and human moral motivational psychology. It argues for a new approach to the question about the purity of the Kantian moral motive.
Kant's Theory of Conscience (Elements in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant)
by Samuel KahnThe main body of this Element, about Kant's theory of conscience, is divided into two sections. The first focuses on exegesis of Kant's ethics. One of the overarching theses of this section of the Element is that, although many of Kant's claims about conscience are prima facie inconsistent, a close examination of context generally can dissolve apparent contradictions. The second section of the Element focuses on philosophical issues in Kantian ethics. One of the overarching theses of this section of the Element is that many positions traditionally associated with Kantian ethics, including the denial of moral luck, the nonaccidental rightness condition, and the guise of the objectively good, are at variance with Kant's ethics.
Kant's Theory of Knowledge
by Harold PrichardThe problem of the Critique may be stated in outline and approximately in Kant's own words as follows. Human reason is called upon to consider certain questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer. These questions relate to God, freedom of the will, and immortality. And the name for the subject which has to deal with these questions is metaphysics. At one time metaphysics was regarded as the queen of all the sciences, and the importance of its aim justified the title. At first the subject, propounding as it did a dogmatic system, exercised a despotic sway. But its subsequent failure brought it into disrepute. It has constantly been compelled to retrace its steps; there has been fundamental disagreement among philosophers, and no philosopher has successfully refuted his critics. Consequently the current attitude to the subject is one of weariness and indifference. Yet humanity cannot really be indifferent to such problems; even those who profess indifference inevitably make metaphysical assertions; and the current attitude is a sign not of levity but of a refusal to put up with the illusory knowledge offered by contemporary philosophy. Now the objects of metaphysics, God, freedom, and immortality, are not objects of experience in the sense in which a tree or a stone is an object of experience. Hence our views about them cannot be due to experience; they must somehow be apprehended by pure reason, i. e. by thinking and without appeal to experience.
Kant's Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of One Central Argument in the 'Critique of Pure Reason' (Routledge Library Editions: Kant #1)
by Graham BirdFirst published in 1962. Kant’s philosophical works, and especially the Critique of Pure Reason, have had some influence on recent British philosophy. But the complexities of Kant’s arguments, and the unfamiliarity of his vocabulary, inhibit understanding of his point of view. In Kant’s Theory of Knowledge an attempt is made to relate Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason to contemporary issues by expressing them in a more modern idiom. The selection of issues discussed is intended to present a continuous argument, of an epistemological kind, which runs centrally through the Critique. The argument deals with essentially with the problems, raised in the Transcendental Analytic, about the status of categories. It deals with certain preliminary assumptions made in setting these problems, and discusses the way in which the various sections of the Analytic contribute to their solution. It also deals with Kant’s criticisms of traditional metaphysics, and ends with an account of his effort in the Third Antinomy to resolve the conflict between freedom and causality, and so to effect a transition of knowledge to moral philosophy.
Kant's Theory of Labour (Elements in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant)
by Jordan PascoeThis Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency of women and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state.
Kant's Theory of Virtue
by Anne Margaret BaxleyAnne Margaret Baxley offers a systematic interpretation of Kant's theory of virtue, whose most distinctive features have not been properly understood. She explores the rich moral psychology in Kant's later and less widely read works on ethics, and argues that the key to understanding his account of virtue is the concept of autocracy, a form of moral self-government in which reason rules over sensibility. Although certain aspects of Kant's theory bear comparison to more familiar Aristotelian claims about virtue, Baxley contends that its most important aspects combine to produce something different - a distinctively modern, egalitarian conception of virtue which is an important and overlooked alternative to the more traditional Greek views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics.
Kant's Theory of the Self (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy)
by Arthur MelnickThe self for Kant is something real, and yet is neither appearance nor thing in itself, but rather has some third status. Appearances for Kant arise in space and time where these are respectively forms of outer and inner attending (intuition). Melnick explains the "third status" by identifying the self with intellectual action that does not arise in the progression of attending (and so is not appearance), but accompanies and unifies inner attending. As so accompanying, it progresses with that attending and is therefore temporal--not a thing in itself. According to Melnick, the distinction between the self or the subject and its thoughts is a distinction wholly within intellectual action; only such a non-entitative view of the self is consistent with Kant’s transcendental idealism. As Melnick demonstrates in this volume, this conception of the self clarifies all of Kant’s main discussions of this issue in the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.
Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism
by Kenneth R. WestphalThis book is the first detailed study of Kant's method of 'transcendental reflection' and its use in the Critique of Pure Reason to identify our basic human cognitive capacities, and to justify Kant's transcendental proofs of the necessary a priori conditions for the possibility of self-conscious human experience. Kenneth Westphal, in a closely argued internal critique of Kant's analysis, shows that if we take Kant's project seriously in its own terms, the result is not transcendental idealism but (unqualified) realism regarding physical objects. Westphal attends to neglected topics - Kant's analyses of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, the 'lifelessness of matter', fallibilism, the semantics of cognitive reference, four externalist aspects of Kant's views, and the importance of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations for the Critique of Pure Reason - that illuminate Kant's enterprise in new and valuable ways. His book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant's theoretical philosophy.
Kant's Treatment of Causality (Routledge Revivals)
by Alfred C EwingFirst published in 1924, this book examines one of the main philosophical debates of the period. Focusing on Kant’s proof of causality, A.C. Ewing promotes its validity not only for the physical but also for the "psychological" sphere. The subject is of importance, for the problem of causality for Kant constituted the crucial test of his philosophy, the most significant of the Kantian categories. The author believes that Kant’s statement of his proof, while too much bound up with other parts of his particular system of philosophy, may be restated "in a form which it can stand by itself and make a good claim for acceptance on all schools of thought".
Kant's Tribunal of Reason: Legal Metaphor and Normativity in the Critique of Pure Reason
by Sofie MøllerKant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Møller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity.
Kant, Critique and Politics
by Kimberly HutchingsWhy does the ghost of Kant continue to haunt contemporary critical theory? Kant, Critique and Politics examines the influence of Kantian critique on the work of such major and diverse theorists as Habermas, Arendt, Foucault and Lyotard. It offers an entirely new reading of Kant, challenging the orthodox distinctions between modernist and postmodernist theorizing, by illuminating how Kant's influence continues to structure critical debate.This is the first book to offer both a systematic reading of Kant and to contextualise his work in the light of the continental tradition. It will be central to political philosophers and students of international relations and feminist theory.