Some years ago Ed Freeman and William Evan wrote an article offering a Kantian stakeholder theory of corporate responsibility. Ed was kind enough to allow Tom Beauchamp and me to publish that previously unpublished piece in the second edition of Ethical Theory and Business. That article has appeared in every subsequent edition. But a Kantian theory of stakeholder relationships is not, I believe, a complete Kantian theory of the modem corporation. I believe Ed originally intended to expand (...) that paper into a larger project but Ed’s philosophical interest in pragmatism has distanced him from Kantianism and his writings in stakeholder theory have gone in a different direction. Indeed in this postmodem feminist anti-foundationalist age, Kant is very much out of fashion. Since I am always out of fashion I had no trouble promising Ed I would complete the Kantian piece of the project. This essay is the condensed version and a partial fulfillment of my promise. A Kantian always keeps his promises. (shrink)

This essay develops a Kantian theory of sport which addresses: (1) Kant’s categories of aesthetic judgment (2) a comparable analysis applied to athletic volition; (3) aesthetic cognition and experience and athletic volition and experience; (4) ‘free’ and ‘attached’ beauty; (5) Kant’s theory of teleological judgment; (6) the moral concept of a ‘kingdom of ends’ and sportsmanship; (7) the beautiful and the sublime in sport-experience; (8) respect and religious emotion in sport-experience; (9) the Kantian system and philosophical anthropology; and (...) (10) sport and self-knowledge. (shrink)

Two main foundations have been proposed for the side-constraints that deontologists think make it sometimes wrong to do what will have the best effects. Thomist views agree with consequentialism that the bearers of value are always states of affairs, but hold that alongside the duty to promote good states are stronger duties not to choose against them.1 Kantian views locate the relevant values in persons, saying it is respect for persons rather than for any state that makes it wrong (...) to kill, lie, and so on.2 The central innovation of Stephen Darwall’s Welfare and Rational Care is to extend this Kantian idea from side-constraints to the concept of welfare, or of what is good for a person.3 As a good-to-be-promoted, welfare is usually understood as located in states of affairs. Darwall agrees that a person’s welfare involves her being in certain states, but argues that the value in these states derives from her value as a person. More specifically, his “rational care” theory of welfare equates a person’s welfare with those states it would be rational to want for her insofar as one cared for her for her sake, so an attitude to her is primary and to her states is derivative. Whereas standard theories take the concept of welfare to come first and define care as a desire for that, Darwall reverses this ordering. (shrink)

Kimberlé Crenshaw arrived at her famous phrase “intersectionality” by carefully thinking through speeches and writings given to us by early Black feminists, such as like Sojourner Truth and Anna J. Cooper. In this paper, I expand on this groundbreaking work in two somewhat surprising ways. First, I bring the ideas of these early Black feminists together with important, related proposals from W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir. Second, I relate these works to central ideas in (...) Kant’s practical philosophy in an effort to develop a Kantian theory of intersectionality. In addition to grasping the distinctive, destructive directions of oppressive forces aimed at women, the poor, and minorities, I seek to understand better the new, violently destructive elements found in European modernity, as evidenced both in European colonialization as well as the Holocaust. -/- This book is published under the OA CC-BY 4.0 license. (shrink)

In this article I use Kantian moral philosophy to develop a concept of meaningful work. Specifically, a Kantian would argue that work is meaningful if (1) it is freely entered into, (2) it allows the worker to exercise her autonomy and independence, (3) it enables the worker to develop her rational capacities, (4) it provides a wage sufficient for physical welfare, (5) it supports the moral development of employees and (6) it is not paternalistic. I then provide examples (...) of contemporary management practices that provide meaningful work in this sense. (shrink)

"The growing interest in human rights has recently brought the question of their philosophical foundation to the foreground. Theorists of human rights often assume that their ideal can be traced to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his view of humans as ends in themselves. Yet, few have attempted to explore exactly how human rights should be understood in a Kantian framework. The scholars in this have gathered to fill this gap. Divided in three parts, firstly the Kantian (...) notion of human rights is explored, with particular emphasis on how it applies to levels of government beyond the state. The second part explores the scope of human rights, including the contentious questions of whether it includes welfare rights and freedom of speech across borders. The topic of the final section is human rights institutions, with a special focus on the legitimacy of international human rights courts. Human rights have become a force to reckon with in international politics. This book, written by an international team of specialists on Kant and human rights, contributes to understanding a major political development of our times"--. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s theory of imagination is a surprisingly fruitful nexus of explanation for the prima facie disparate characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially the sub-spectrum best characterized by the Sensory Integration (SI) and Intense World (IW) theories of ASD. According to the psychological theories that underpin these approaches to autism, upstream effects of sensory processing atypicalities explain a cascade of downstream effects that have been characterized in the diagnostic triad, e.g., poor sensory integration contributes to weak central (...) coherence, which in turn contributes to difficulty participating in a back and forth conversation. To see why Kant’s theory of imagination might be useful, consider that ASD is neither a sensory disorder nor an intellectual disorder per se. Cognitive dysfunction is a common comorbidity of ASD, not a characteristic of it. If we exclude sense and intellect, what’s left? According to Kant, imagination is a synthesizing faculty that mediates between sense and understanding. It does so by transforming intuition from the canonic and vital senses. The uses of imagination include our spatially formative, temporally associative, and communicatively affinitive production, where affinitive production includes sympathy and fantasy. Imagination is thus the faculty of sensory integration, embodied subjectivity, empathy, mindreading, and social cooperation. The wide range of how autism presents and how it is experienced can thus be understood in terms of the atypical development of specific functions of imagination. Kant’s theory of imagination provides a new perspective on how to organize our understanding of autism at the psychological level, one that makes sense of how some of the disparate characteristic phenomena of autism are systematically related and which might lead to novel predictions, research targets, or intervention recommendations. (shrink)

Is there any interesting sense in which we can speak of an act as 'evil', in contrast to simply "morally bad' or "immoral"? In ordinary language, we typically judge actions as evil that somehow differ significantly, in terms of degree or intensity, from commonplace wrongdoing. If taken to an extreme, however, this view simply reduces the difference between evil and immoral acts to a mere quantitative analysis. At worst, it leads to a wholly trivial account of evil as just those (...) actions we tend to regard as "really bad". In this paper, I outline a distinctively Kantian theory of evil that instead defends a fundamental qualitative difference between evil and more ordinary immoral actions, locating the main distinction in terms of the structure of the agent's will itself Broadly understood, this strategy endorses a Kantian account of "evil as dehumanization" in which a "material" -- as opposed to purely "formal" -- difference exists between the respective maxims of the immoral and the evil agent. In such instances, unlike typical cases of Kantian immoral actions, direct violation of another person's humanity qua human somehow comprises a necessary part of the "material object" of an evil agent's will. (shrink)

Kant says that ideas have to be linked with sense experience to be meaningful. Rational ideas can be so linked via the "symbolical process" which is a process of creating a similarity (in rules of application) between an idea and its symbol. In this process the imagination goes beyond a concept (which is already linked with sense experience) to another concept in order to say something about the latter. This turns out to be the metaphorical process. For in every metaphor (...) there is an idea that receives expression in another, The latter already meaningful (i.E., Having a literal meaning). (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s aesthetic theory yields a fruitful theory of art criticism and that this theory presents an alternative both to the existing theories of his time and to contemporary theories. In this regard, my dissertation offers an examination of a neglected area in Kant scholarship since it is standardly assumed that a theory of criticism flies in the face of some of Kant’s most central aesthetic tenets, such as his rejection of aesthetic testimony and general objective (...) principles of taste. If art criticism is an enterprise of providing evaluations of artworks supported by reasons, then it is hard to see what the Kantian art critic can do for us. If I cannot defer to the critic’s judgment that she loved Blade Runner and there are no feasible general principles linking the depiction of futuristic cityscapes, or the accompaniment of a haunting minimalist soundtrack to the goodness of a film, then it does not seem to matter whether the critic communicates to me her evaluation of Blade Runner or supports her evaluation with descriptions of Blade Runner scenes. Nevertheless, the assumption that these Kantian tenets preclude the possibility of art criticism is mistaken and it is my aim to show how this can be. The project has two phases. In the first phase I develop a new interpretation of Kant’s theory of artistic beauty. In the second phase I make use of this interpretation to put forward a Kantian account of art criticism. Central to my interpretation is the notion that judgments of perfection, e.g., Blade Runner is an excellent neo-noir science fiction film, inform our aesthetic evaluations and receive support from descriptions of non-aesthetic properties of the film. It is precisely this underappreciated role of judgments of perception that I exploit in making room for Kantian art criticism. (shrink)

Thoughts have content; for instance, the content of the thought that Plato is a great philosopher is that a certain person, Plato, has a certain property, the property of being a great philosopher. In thinking this thought, I become related in a certain manner to this person, Plato, and to the property of being a great philosopher. In this dissertation, I begin to develop a theory of how such relations come to obtain. ;In chapter 1, I examine and ultimately reject (...) the two approaches to intentionality most popular today: eliminativism and reductionistic physicalism. In chapter 2, I begin to present my own theory of intentionality, the starting point of which is the familiar idea that experience is a necessary condition for thought. In motivating this familiar idea, I explain the sense in which experience can be said to have a qualitative character, and I describe those specific aspects of qualitative character that figure in my subsequent account of how we succeed in forming concepts of material objects. Finally, I end the chapter by presenting the principal challenge for my theory: given that experience is a necessary condition for concept formation, how do we succeed in forming concepts of things other than our experiences? ;In chapter 3 I begin to meet this challenge. I oppose empiricism by arguing that the content of our concepts derives from two sources: experience, and the syntactic features of our thought. In chapter 4 I explain how by referring to phenomenal features with two-place rather than one-place predicates, we can form concepts of objects that exist independently of experience . In chapter 5 I defend naive realism. The account of demonstrative thought I present in chapter 4 presupposes a kind of naive realist theory of perception, and in chapter 5 I defend this theory against such familiar arguments as the argument from hallucination, the causal argument, and the time-gap argument. (shrink)

abstract In his ‘Suicide Intervention and Non‐Ideal Kantian Theory’ (2002), Michael J. Cholbi argues that nihilism and hopelessness are often motivating factors behind suicide, contrary to Immanuel Kant's prescribed motive of self‐love. In light of this, Cholbi argues that certain paternalistic modes of intervention may not only be effective in preventing suicide, but are ultimately consistent with Kantian morality. This paper addresses certain perceived shortcomings in Cholbi's account of Kantian suicide intervention. Once the psychological complexities of the (...) suicidal person are brought to bear, the suicidal person is found in many cases to be irrational at the time of her death. Because of this, rationalistic intervention strategies may prove ineffective, despite their being consistent with Kantian morality, and despite instances of suicide being non‐ideal circumstances. Cholbi assumes throughout his article that suicidal human beings remain Kantian moral agents. However, because rationality represents a crucial criterion for Kantian moral agency, and because certain human beings who commit suicide are not rational, such human beings are not Kantian moral agents. Because Cholbi's intervention strategies are not applicable to (or effective towards) irrational suicidal people, his account is found incomplete. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of the morality of suicide have tended to focus on its justifiability from an agent’s point of view rather than on the justifiability of attempts by others to intervene so as to prevent it. This paper addresses questions of suicide intervention within a broadly Kantian perspective. In such a perspective, a chief task is to determine the motives underlying most suicidal behaviour. Kant wrongly characterizes this motive as one of self-love or the pursuit of happiness. Psychiatric and (...) scientific evidence suggests that suicide is instead motivated by a nihilistic disenchantment with the possibility of happiness which, at its apex, results in the loss of the individual’s conception of her practical identity. Because of this, methods of intervention that appeal to agents’ happiness, while morally benign, will prove ineffective in forestalling suicide. At the same time, more aggressive methods violate the Kantian concern for autonomy. This apparent dilemma can be resolved by seeing suicide intervention as an action undertaken in non-ideal circumstances, where otherwise unjustified manipulation, coercion, or paternalism are morally permitted. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that there is probably no theory of punishment to be found in Immanuel Kant’s writings, but that “if one selects carefully among the many remarks and insights that Kant has left us about crime and punishment, one might even be able to build such an edifice from the bricks provided.” In this paper, I seek to provide part of a foundation of a Kantian theory of punishment, one which is consistent with many, if not (...) all, of Kant’s own insights on justice. Finally, I assess the plausibility of Kant’s view. (shrink)

Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably expect from a theory of the power of judgment from a Kantian approach to ethics. We reconstruct practical judgments on basis of the self-reflexive capacities of human beings, and argue that for the subject to see (...) himself as committed to prudential goods it is necessarily implied that he understands himself as committed to moral judgment. However, to understand the normativity of understanding oneself as a being with practical commitments at all, the aesthetic judgment is introduced: the power of judgment in its pure form of selfreflexivity. We claim that aesthetic reflection and judgment is conditional on the possibility for human beings to enter the space of reasons, and therewith for practical self-understanding as such. The paper concludes with a preliminary sketch of different conceptual possibilities in fleshing out the role of the power of judgment in its aesthetic employment in developing mixed judgments. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 6, Page 1081-1096, December 2021.

This article examines where Kant stands on the question of the redistribution of wealth and income both nationally and globally. Kant is rightly seen as a radical reformer of the world order from a political standpoint seeking a republican, federative worldwide system; can he also be seen as wanting to bring about an equally dramatic shift from an economic perspective? To answer this question we have first of all to address the question of whether he is an egalitarian or an (...) inegalitarian at the national level. Certainly there are certain social and material inequalities within a civil society Kant is prepared to accept and there are some he is not. This would imply that he would affirm certain inequalities at an international level and that there are others upon which he would recommend action. Thus the question arises as to whether or not it is appropriate for Kantians to regard the current enormous inequalities in wealth and income between individuals living in different parts of the globe as scandalous and in need of change. The paper throughout relates the problem of distributive justice within the state to the problem of distributive justice amongst states, arguing that this approach is warranted by Kant's own method. Particular attention is paid to how Kant's own approach to political philosophy may be deployed to underpin a change to a distinctive type of international distributive justice. (shrink)

The Kantian theory of private law, as Ernest Weinrib and Arthur Ripstein have developed it over the last two decades, is based on a fundamental normative truth, viz., no person is subordinate or superior to another person. Kantians construe any attempt to understand and justify the distribution of the rights-claims and rights-liberties that constitute private law in terms of aggregate welfare and/or distributive justice, as a deep category mistake. This essay outlines a ‘semi-Kantian’ theory of private law, which (...) is like Kant’s in that it understands private law as a means of instituting and protecting private freedom. Yet, semi-Kantians insist that the choice between different private law programs, which respect private freedom equally well, can at times be justified by considerations of aggregate welfare and distributive justice, as well as other considerations that concern the impact on society as a whole. (shrink)

Sex, Love, and Gender is the first volume to present a comprehensive philosophical theory that brings together all of Kant's practical philosophy — found across his works on ethics, justice, anthropology, history, and religion — and provide a critique of emotionally healthy and morally permissible sexual, loving, gendered being. By rethinking Kant's work on human nature and making space for sex, love, and gender within his moral accounts of freedom, the book shows how, despite his austere and even anti-sex, cisist, (...) sexist, and heterosexist reputation, Kant's writings on happiness and virtue (Part I) and right (Part II) in fact yield fertile philosophical ground on which we can explore specific contemporary issues such as abortion, sexual orientation, sexual or gendered identity, marriage, trade in sexual services, and sex- or gender-based oppression. Indeed, Kant's philosophy provides us with resources to appreciate and value the diversity of human ways of loving and the existential importance of our embodied, social selves. Structured on a thematic basis, with introductions to assist those new to Kant's philosophy, this book will be a valuable resource for anyone who cares about these issues and wants to make sense of them. -/- Alternatively: Sex, Love, and Gender identifies a set of possibilities that define human beings’ sexuality. These sets come with their own concepts, which specify how the possibilities are realized and what effects they have on our lives lived together. Partly the task is descriptive. The description has to be plausible. Plausibility comes from the phenomenology (and not the other way around). Partly the task is normative. The normative content also has to be plausible. Plausibility here comes from vindicating the principles that underwrite the possibilities that define human beings’ sexualities and sexual experiences and behaviors lived by human beings and from the philosophical explanations and conclusions that follow. Overall plausibility, then, comes from discursive analysis of alternatives, from a priori argument, and, in the evaluative case, from showing how the Kantian account of a good life fits with reasonable conceptions of goodness consistent with the phenomenology of human lives. Although this exploration leads us, as we will see, to most corners of Kant’s practical philosophy, including his metaethics and metaphysics, the main focus is on an account of human sex, love, and gender explored explicitly with respect to happiness and ethics (virtue) and justice (right). It is because of this focus that the book is divided into two parts: Part 1 (“Human Sexuality and Virtue”) and Part 2 (“Human Sexuality and Right”). (shrink)

Review of: Varden, Helga, Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, 337 p. ISBN: 978-0198812838.

In this essay I argue that a broadly Kantian strategy for demonstrating and explaining the existence, semantic structure, and psychological function of essentially non-conceptual content can also provide an intelligible and defensible bottom-up theory of the foundations of rationality in minded animals. Otherwise put, if I am correct, then essentially non-conceptual content constitutes the semantic and psychological substructure, or matrix, out of which the categorically normative a priori superstructure of epistemic rationality and practical rationality - Sellars's "logical space of (...) reasons" - grows. (shrink)

Consider the claims that representations of physical laws are intersubjective, and that they ultimately provide the foundation for all other intersubjective knowledge. Those claims, as well as the deeper philosophical commitments that justify them, constitute rare points of agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer and their positivist rival, Ernst Mach. This is surprising, since Natorp and Cassirer are both often at pains to distinguish their theories of natural scientific knowledge from positivist views like Mach’s, (...) and often from Mach’s views in particular. Thus the very fact of this agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians and their positivist stalking horse points to a deep current of ideas that runs beneath the whole of the post-Kantian intellectual context they shared. (shrink)

Deliberative or discursive models of democracy have recently enjoyed a revival in both political theory and policy practice. Against the picture of democracy as a procedure for aggregating and effectively meeting the given preference of individuals, deliberative theory offers a model of democracy as a forum through which judgements and preferences are formed and altered through reasoned dialogue between free and equal citizens. Much in the recent revival of deliberative democracy, especially that which comes through Habermas and Rawls, has (...) class='Hi'>Kantian roots. Deliberative institutions are embodiments of the free public use of reason that Kant takes to define the enlightenment project. Within the Kantian model the public use of reason is incompatible with the use of rhetoric. While this paper rejects strong rhetorical criticisms of deliberative democracy which render all communication strategic, it argues that rhetorical studies of deliberation have highlighted features of deliberation which point to significant weaknesses in Kantian approaches to it. Two features are of particular importance: the role of testimony and judgements of credibility in deliberation; and the role of appeal to emotions in public discourse. Both from the Kantian perspective are potential sources of heteronomy. However, the appeal to testimony and emotion are features of public deliberation that cannot and should not be eliminated. For those committed to the enlightenment values that underlie the deliberative model of democracy the question is whether these rhetorical features of deliberation are incompatible with those values. The paper argues that they are compatible. It does so by defending an Aristotelian account of rhetoric in public deliberation which denies the Platonic contrast between reasoned discourse and rhetoric which the Kantian model inherits. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. This article represents a reconstructive analysis of the idea of perpetual peace in the works of Immanuel Kant and liberal thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century as the forerunners and representatives of the democratic peace theory. The study examines the process of development and evolution of the concept of perpetual and universal peace in liberal discourse and its difference from the original project of I. Kant. M e (...) t h o d s. Currently, the following methods are used in the work: the principle of abstraction, that is, the rejection of a number of properties, connections and relations of the object or phenomenon under study, which are not essential for solving the assigned problems, to concentrate on its separate elements; the principle of objectivity, that is, taking into account all factors that simplify the process of studying selected objects, phenomena and processes; the principle of unity of theory and practice, taking into account their interdependence. the principle of rational reconstruction, that is, consideration of the history of the development of selected issues within the framework of the rational requirements of scientific discourse. R e s u l t s. In the process of research, tendencies towards the development of the idea of perpetual peace within the framework of liberal humanistic discourse were revealed, which certainly led to changes in the fundamental provisions of the original concept of perpetual peace, endowing it with democratic and market-liberal elements more characteristic of current scientific discourse. C o n c l u s i o n s. The Kantian project of perpetual peace forms the fundamental basis of the liberal democratic peace theory. The idea of a world without war, as well as the mechanism for its establishment and support through the creation of a single political and economic space within the framework of a world federation, served as the ideological basis for the democratic peace theory, however, in the process of its adaptation to the conditions of the new discourse, the original project underwent serious changes in its basis. Using the example of the evolutionary historical process around the "perpetual peace" project, we can trace the general mechanism for the development of scientific knowledge within the framework of a changing discourse, which, on the one hand, adapts a dynamically developing idea to the more current requirements of scientific knowledge, but on the other hand, preserves the main direction of the chosen problematic for preservation integrity of scientific discourse. (shrink)

In his Ruffin Lecture, Bowie attempts to offer a Kantian theory of capitalism, and this strikes me as a constructive and important thing to do. Bowie’s proposal contributes to a new direction in research that I believe is critical: offering alternative interpretations of capitalism, specifically, theories based in moral concepts which are designed to make room for normative inquiry. In contrast, much of the work in business ethics has focused on the application of moral principles or ideas to (...) specific problems in business. These efforts work largely within the accepted meanings of “business” offered by economists, strategists and others, and then try to import moral concepts to identify and analyze various ethical problems. Several recent works in ethics suggest that this approach hasn’t addressed underlying assumptions about ethics and business which tend to make “ethical” approaches either directly conflicting with the logic of “business” or largely irrelevant to it. As such, the “problems” approach to doing ethics doesn’t address the substantial difficulties created by the conceptual terrain to which it was applied. Without more comprehensive and systematic attention to how researchers understand the conceptual underpinnings of capitalism, the contributions of such efforts will be limited and tenuous—that is, they will make projects which attempt to “apply” ethics onto business seem naive or implausible to people outside the community of business ethicists. (shrink)

Kant describes the concept of freedom as "the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason." Kant's theory of freedom thus plays a foundational and unifying role in all aspects of his philosophy and is thus of significant interest to historians of Kant's philosophy. Kant's theory of freedom has also played a significant role in contemporary debates in metaphysics, normative ethics, and metaethics. This volume brings historians of Kant's philosophy into conversation with contemporary (...) metaphysicians and ethicists with the aim of representing the current state of scholarship on Kant's and Kantian accounts of freedom while at the same time opening new avenues of exploration. The Idea of Freedom includes papers by leading scholars on a range of historical and contemporary topics centrally related to the Kantian theory of freedom, including transcendental idealism, determinism, Kant's normative ethical theory, Kant's conception of cognition, Kant's theory of beauty, Kant's conception of logic, and many others. (shrink)

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the nineteenth century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory--including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan--do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy.

hese are replies to my critics at at Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (SGIR) Author-Meets-Critics session, Pacific APA 2021. -/- Published version of the full symposium is available on SGIR Review's homepage.

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the 19th century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory--including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan--do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy. Rather than advocate specific Kantian ideas, the book contends (...) that political progressives should embody Kantian courage--a critical and creative disposition to invent new political theories to address the problems of the age. It illuminates Kant's legacy in contemporary intellectual debates; constructs a dialogue among Anglo-American, Continental, and Islamic political theorists; and shows how progressives may forge alliances across political and religious differences by inventing concepts such as the overlapping consensus, the rhizome, and the space of testimony. The book will interest students of the Enlightenment, contemporary political theorists and philosophers, and a general audience concerned about the future of the relationship between Islam and the West. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The notion of relating to one's own mental states and acts plays a prominent role in present-day philosophy of mind. To a considerable extent, this notion has its roots in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of inner sense. This paper examines German theories of inner sense of the 1770s. It focuses, in particular, on two Göttingen-based thinkers, Christoph Meiners and Michael Hissmann, who provided the first detailed analysis of the "varieties of inner consciousness" (Meiners's phrase). For example, they distinguish between (...) apperception, self-consciousness, and the feeling of personality. The paper analyzes and evaluates Meiners's and Hissmann's account of distinctions such as these. (shrink)

In order for the duty of friendship to be practically possible, and for gratitude and beneficence to be unencumbered virtues, Kant need not have held that human beings are basically good. He need only have understood that they are social beings, with desires for both independence and connection, autonomy and affiliation, and purposes that are not always merely their own. I have argued that because he did not, his moral theory is flawed in three important respects.In Kant's theory, morality is (...) only possible because humans are rational, and necessary because (absent morality) they are self-interested individuals, egoistically motivated, distrustful and isolated. When this view is applied to particular questions of friendship and the virtues, it becomes a distorting medium. It is my contention that a more adequate theory of character would result from the application of Kantian moral principles to a sounder, more social conception of human nature.In conclusion, I wish to make it clear that I am not arguing that human beings are basically good, only that they are essentially social. In his political writings Kant has emphasized the social dimension of reason itself, and I believe he would agree with Thomas Nagel's recent claim about human nature and morality: To say that altruism and morality are possible in virtue of something basic to human nature is not to say that men are basically good. Men are basically complicated; how good they are depends on whether certain conceptions and ways of thinking have achieved dominance, a dominance which is precarious in any case. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 146. (shrink)

Kantian moral theory is construed as the paradigm of deontology, where such an approach to ethics is opposed to consequentialism and perfectionism. However, in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, Kant understands historical progress in terms of the realisation of our rational capacities, to the extent that such emphasis on capability actualisation amounts to a form of moral perfectionism: wars and incessant periods of armed conflict lead rulers to grasp the value of peace, because war and (...) armed conflict prevent human beings from achieving self-realisation. For Kant, in order to enable self-realisation, states must work together to establish a federal union of republican governments. The aim of this chapter is to (i) articulate and defend a perfectionist dimension of Kantian ethics; and (ii) propose that an insightful way of articulating Kantian Cosmopolitanism can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. Following Honneth’s model of diagnostic social philosophy, I argue that armed conflict is best understood in terms of a particularly complex form of social pathology, where the peaceful resolution of such conflict requires a complex form of diagnosis and therapy. Under such an account, leadership involves taking the lead in diagnosing armed conflict as arising from an especially traumatic asymmetrical recognition order, and in proposing genuinely practical therapeutic solutions to resolving conflict by advocating specific progressive transformations to the current asymmetrical recognition order. (shrink)

Kant's explicit account of the state's responsibility for welfare, in the Rechtslehre, is cryptic and incomplete. Kant does suggest, however, that: provision for those unable to provide for themselves is implicit in the idea of a social contract; and the sovereign, as ‘proprietor of the land’, possesses authority to intervene in civil society to guarantee the necessary conditions for the exercise of their purposive faculties. These elements of Kant's argument seem most plausibly justified by the teleological judgement that the sovereign (...) must strive to realize a ‘rightful condition’ in which members of society are ensured equal opportunity to realize their purposive faculties. In order to secure such a condition, the Kantian sovereign must intervene to guarantee conditions assuring that agents are equal in their ability to pursue their individual ends. Such a Kantian egalitarian policy, Chapter 6 argues, should focus on the equalization of capabilities rather than of: welfare, or resources. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of substantiating the theory of history as a science, undertaken in the second half of the 19th century by representative of the Southwestern school of neo-Kantianism, W. Windelband, who creatively interprets Kant’s legacy. The founder of critical philosophy, Kant, gave scientific status only to various areas of natural science. From the point of view of the Koenigsberg thinker, the field of studying social events, culture and human life cannot be considered a science in the strict (...) sense of the word, since it is limited to the description of social phenomena, and not the construction of laws that explain these processes. The law must correspond to the principle of universality, that is, it must have the ability to organize experience through a universal pure form, and not stem from experience. Windelband proposes to revise Kant’s teachings and develops his own concept of history. He introduces into the theory of knowledge, in addition to nomothetic concepts leading to the discovery of universal laws, ideographic concepts through which the history of cultures and worldviews of individual people are described with their personal ideas about values that are objectified in history. Thus, Windelband formulates a special scientific method for explaining causality in the interpretation of historical events, without resorting to the construction of universal laws. Explaining history using ideographic concepts allows us to rethink the very idea of science in relation to the sphere of freedom in which each person is a unique individual who creates values. (shrink)

It has become typical to read Kant and Merleau-Ponty as offering competing approaches to perceptual experience. Kant is interpreted as an ‘intellectualist’ who regards perception as conceptual ‘all the way out’, while Merleau-Ponty is seen as Kant’s challenger, who argues that perception involves non-conceptual, embodied ‘coping’. In this paper, however, I argue that a closer examination of their views of perception, especially with respect to the notion of ‘schematism’, reveals a great deal of historical and philosophical continuity between them. By (...) analyzing Kant’s theory of schematism, the interpretation of it by the Neo-Kantian Pierre Lachièze-Rey, and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema, we find that aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception are better understood as a development of Kant’s theory of perception. (shrink)

These essays "develop in a more ample and emphatic form the pragmatic perspective of the idealistic position" defended in previous books. The basic question deals with validating the criterion employed in the practice of determining factual truth. The pragmatic thesis is defended along the criterial rather than propositional line. Criterial pragmatism asserts "that a proposition is to be accepted if it conforms to an epistemologically warranted criterion, and that a criterion is warranted if its adoption as a principle of propositional (...) acceptance is maximally success-promoting." It is concerned with validating methodology rather than establishing substantive theses or validating specific criteria for factual knowledge. "Since the rational espousal of a factual truth must be governed by some appropriate criterion of acceptance, and any such criterion is in effect methodological, it follows that in the factual domain practical reason is basic to the theoretical.". (shrink)

This paper develops a new kind of approach to conspiracy theories – a procedural approach. This approach promises to establish that belief in conspiracy theories is rationally criticisable in general. Unlike most philosophical approaches, a procedural approach does not purport to condemn conspiracy theorists directly on the basis of features of their theories. Instead, it focuses on the patterns of thought involved in forming and sustaining belief in such theories. Yet, unlike psychological approaches, a procedural approach (...) provides a rational critique of conspiracist thought patterns. In particular, it criticises these thought patterns for failing to conform to procedures prescribed by reason. The specific procedural approach that I develop takes its cue from the Kantian notion that reason must be used self-critically. I tentatively suggest that conspiracy theorists fail to engage in the relevant sort of self-critique in at least three ways: they do not critically examine their own motivations, they avoid looking at matters from the point of view of others, and they fail to reflect on the limits of human knowledge. (shrink)