"Immanuel Kant," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 804-06, reprinted by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press. Reprinted in International Encyclopedia of Ethics.

Three encyclopedia entries: "Immigration," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 715-17, reprinted by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press. "Immanuel Kant," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 804-06, reprinted by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press. "Kantian Ethics," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 806-08, reprinted by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press.

"A very fine piece of work, essential reading for anyone concerned with Kant, Aristotelian ethics, practical reason, and more generally, the foundations of moral value and justification.... The examples are a real strength, insightful and very well-chosen."--Anthony Cunningham, St. John's University "The issues Harris has taken on are among the most important in contemporary moral thinking, and he has handled them systematically, innovatively, wisely, with wit and good sense."--J. K. Swindler, Wittenberg University.

Harry van der Linden's review of: Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant. By Sharon Anderson-Gold. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 138. ISBN 0-7914-4819-3 $50.50; 0-7914-4820-7 $17.95.

This study argues for three main theses: (1) Immanuel Kant’s ethics is a social ethics; (2) the basic premises of his social ethics point to a socialist ethics; and (3) this socialist ethics constitutes a suitable platform for criticizing and improving Karl Marx’s view of morality. -/- Some crucial aspects of Kant’s social ethics are that we must promote the “realm of ends” as a moral society of co-legislators who assist each other in the pursuit of their individual ends, (...) which requires in turn that we seek the realization of the republican state and peace between the nations. Thus, hope for progress, as supported by the enthusiasm engendered among the spectators of the French Revolution, becomes pivotal to Kant’s ethics as well as other moral feelings such as moral indignation and solidarity with the victims of oppression. -/- Kant views the moral society in the final instance as an “inner” unification of good wills. In a decisive elaboration of Kant, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen argues that all our social institutions, and notably economic enterprises, must instantiate the “realm of ends,” leading him to support cooperative socialism in Wilhelmine Germany. In his own words, Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism” (1896). -/- There are important evaluative similarities between Kantian socialist ethics and Marx, such as a condemnation of capitalism as a system of servitude and an understanding of the ideal society as a cooperative society, but only Marx contends that the ideal society does not set a moral task and that there is a dialectic operative in human history that inevitably leads to communist society. This dogmatic Hegelian understanding of history must be replaced by Kantian regulative understanding of progress in support of revolutionary praxis as moral praxis. -/- We need a “Kantianization” of Marx, as Cohen and other neo-Kantian socialists also proclaimed in the three decades leading up to World War I. This study concludes with “A Historical Note on Kantian Ethical Socialism,” addressing, among others, Cohen, Karl Vorländer, Eduard Bernstein, and Kurt Eisner and the Munich Revolution of 1918. Their voices were largely silenced by the rise of fascism, and this study hopes to show that their voices still need to be heard. -/- Awarded the 1985 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy. (shrink)

The central project of the Critique of Pure Reason is to answer two sets of questions: What can we know and how can we know it? and What can't we know and why can't we know it? The essays in this collection are intended to help students read the Critique of Pure Reason with a greater understanding of its central themes and arguments, and with some awareness of important lines of criticism of those themes and arguments.

This study argues that the early philosophy of Semyon Liudvigovich Frank (1877–1950) exhibits significant intellectual correlations with nineteenth century German Idealist philosophy. The idealists in question are Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796–1879), G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) and F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854). It will be suggested that the critical tension of Frank’s early philosophy is precisely a tension between his Hegelian and Schellingian tendencies. The paper will first introduce Frank’s theory of a “personal absolute”, exploring its surprising parallels with the religious philosophy of (...) I. H. Fichte. The analysis then addresses the self-dispersal of Hegel’s absolute, before finally turning to Schelling’s immediate intuition of subject-object identity. (shrink)

The book examines the life and times of five philosophers who were prominent in history: John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, George Wilhelm Hegel, John Dewey, and Immanual Mournier.

Although both books discussed in this review essay address problems with relevance to our present day and its dilemmas, they have different chronological scopes and employ different methods of interpretation. Robertson focuses exclusively on the era of the “Enlightenment” (c. 1680–1790), eschewing overt “presentism” to treat a wide range of authors and works as they addressed one another in the context of the events and developments of the period, mainly in Britain, France, and Germany. Friedman's aim, emphasizing the role of (...) “religious” thought, is to explore the roots of present-day “thinking” about economics as a “science” and debates about economic policy. His book, beginning its coverage in Western Europe in the later 17th century and, following a “history of ideas” approach, gives pride of place to Adam Smith's ideas in the formulation of a “coherent” economic theory, and then in a linear account, centered on America, describes the key steps that he argues led from Smith to the present. This review essay, concentrating on what each book has to say about the Enlightenment, juxtaposes their accounts of the era and offers critical judgment of their differing treatments of its character and accomplishments. (shrink)

Baynes's two main objectives are to show that Kant, Rawls, and Habermas share the view that "the idea of an agreement among free and equal persons [i. e., autonomous persons]... constitutes the normative ground of social criticism", and that this "constructivist" view is more adequately developed and defended with each successive theorist. The study, however, goes beyond these aims and can often fruitfully be read as a comparative study of Rawls and Habermas.

Harry G. Frankfurt begins his inquiry by asking, “What is it about human beings that makes it possible for us to take ourselves seriously?” Based on The Tanner Lectures in Moral Philosophy, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right delves into this provocative and original question. The author maintains that taking ourselves seriously presupposes an inward-directed, reflexive oversight that enables us to focus our attention directly upon ourselves, and “[it] means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just (...) as we come. We want our thoughts, our feelings, our choices, and our behavior to make sense. We are not satisfied to think that our ideas are formed haphazardly, or that our actions are driven by transient and opaque impulses or by mindless decisions. We need to direct ourselves—or at any rate to believe that we are directing ourselves—in thoughtful conformity to stable and appropriate norms. We want to get things right.” The essays delineate two features that have a critical role to play in this: our rationality, and our ability to love. Frankfurt incisively explores the roles of reason and of love in our active lives, and considers the relation between these two motivating forces of our actions. The argument is that the authority of practical reason is less fundamental than the authority of love. Love, as the author defines it, is a volitional matter, that is, it consists in what we are actually committed to caring about. Frankfurt adds that “The object of love can be almost anything—a life, a quality of experience, a person, a group, a moral ideal, a nonmoral ideal, a tradition, whatever.” However, these objects and ideals are difficult to comprehend and often in conflict with each other. Moral principles play an important supporting role in this process as they help us develop and elucidate a vision that inspires our love. The first section of the book consists of the two lectures, which are entitled “Taking Ourselves Seriously” and “Getting It Right.” The second section consists of comments in response by Christine M. Korsgaard, Michael E. Bratman, and Meir Dan-Cohen. The book includes a preface by Debra Satz. (shrink)

I reply to my critics in respect of my work on expertise. I define the 'core' of the multidisciplinary 'expertise studies'. I argue that those who have taken the work seriously could resolve their problems by paying more attention to the core. Each could have made good use of an aspect of the core.

Philip Kitcher’s The Main Enterprise of the World is extraordinarily wide-ranging and ambitious, developing and arguing for a unified account of education.

Debating Education puts two leading scholars in conversation with each other on the subject of education-specifically, what role, if any, markets should play in policy reform. The authors focus on the nature, function, and legitimate scope of voluntary exchange as a form of social relation, and how education raises concerns that are not at issue when it comes to trading relationships between consenting adults.

Kant führt in dem Werk einen neuartigen, später ›ontotheologisch‹ genannten Gottesbeweis, den er anschließend für die Verbesserung der Physikotheologie fruchtbar macht.

Kant's account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases in the two European traditions of philosophy that feed into modern cognitive psychology, the holism of Leibniz and the analytic reductionism of Locke, are used to develop a new theory of human nature in terms of developmental interactions between initially separate cognitive domains. More recent illustrations of this separation/interaction are found in debates over 'emergence' in modern science and theories of consciousness. Shifting from competitive (...) epistemologies to a resulting ontology of human nature, the cognitive development of mind through childhood can itself be understood as multiple but necessarily incomplete fusions between person knowing and a thing/tool knowing , based here on a Vygotskian model of their reciprocal internalizations, and leading into our ostensibly differentiated and humanly unique multiple adult intelligences. A consequence is that human consciousness, while based on these selective and necessarily partial domain integrations, as in the separate directionalities of spirituality and science/technology, is fundamentally and permanently unbalanced. Kant's sublime and Rudolf Otto's related analysis of numinous-uncanny feeling exemplify the inner dynamism of this intrinsic unbalance, constituting the species specific form of the perpetual orientation to novelty that drives us forward toward the very best and very worst of the human condition. (shrink)

These essays explore the parameters of Wagner's rich literary and architectural creations.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This paper examines the work of one of Russia’s greatest philosophers, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), from the perspective of natural theology and attempts to distil the original natural theological arguments which we find in his work. Solovyov’s arguments are rarely presented in clarity or with a detailed critical analysis. The current paper thus hopes to offer some amendment to this unfortunate deficiency in the secondary literature. It will become evident that Solovyov’s relation to natural theology contained two distinct layers. There is, (...) on the one hand, the external polemical and publicist layer of discourse, where Solovyov rejects natural theology outright. On the other hand, there is the deeper metaphysical layer, where Solovyov’s own arguments, hidden within his elaborate metaphysical structures, can themselves be considered as a form of natural theology. The paper will conclude that, despite the overall failure of his arguments, Solovyov can still provide inspiration for Orthodox theologians by attempting a form of natural theology within an Orthodox context. (shrink)

Focusing on Hegel's political philosophy, this text demonstrates the unifying role played by the doctrine of the collective historical social consciousness.