In _Freedom and the End of Reason_, Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant’s philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy’s larger history. He persuasively argues that the whole of Kantianism—not merely the Second Critique—focuses on a “critique of practical reason” and is a response to a problem that Kant saw as intrinsic to reason itself: the teleological problem of its goodness. Reconstructing the influence of Rousseau on Kant’s thought, Velkley demonstrates (...) that the relationship between speculative philosophy and practical philosophy in Kant is far more intimate than generally has been perceived. By stressing a Rousseau-inspired notion of reason as a provider of practical ends, he is able to offer an unusually complete account of Kant’s idea of moral culture. (shrink)

In Being after Rousseau, Richard L. Velkley presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the founder of a modern European tradition of reflection on the relation of philosophy to culture—a reflection that calls both into question.

In this groundbreaking work, Richard L. Velkley examines the complex philosophical relationship between Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss. Velkley argues that both thinkers provide searching analyses of the philosophical tradition’s origins in radical questioning. For Heidegger and Strauss, the recovery of the original premises of philosophy cannot be separated from rethinking the very possibility of genuine philosophizing. Common views of the influence of Heidegger’s thought on Strauss suggest that, after being inspired early on by Heidegger’s dismantling of the philosophical tradition, (...) Strauss took a wholly separate path, spurning modernity and pursuing instead a renewal of Socratic political philosophy. Velkley rejects this reading and maintains that Strauss’s engagement with the challenges posed by Heidegger—as well as by modern philosophy in general—formed a crucial and enduring framework for his lifelong philosophical project. More than an intellectual biography or a mere charting of influence, _Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy_ is a profound consideration of these two philosophers’ reflections on the roots, meaning, and fate of Western rationalism. (shrink)

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON HEGEL’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY has stressed its place in the modern tradition of reflection on autonomy and rights, thus rejecting negative assessments of Hegel as an authoritarian, post-Napoleonic “Prussian” opponent of liberalism as well as revising sympathetic readings of him as a “communitarian” critic of “atomistic” individualism. A group of eminent writers argues that Hegel, deeply indebted to Rousseau and Kant as turning away from early modern “negative freedom,” rethinks their accounts of “positive freedom” of self-determination based on (...) the principles of the general will or moral law, and embeds those accounts in the customary and institutional framework of the modern constitutional-monarchical state. Hegel understands citizenship in this state as realizing the highest aspirations of modernity for universal recognition of the autonomous personality as secured by the rule of law, systems of impartial justice, suffrage rights, and freedoms of religion, publication, teaching, and so on—under the sovereignty of the patriotic state. Furthermore, this scholarly approach to Hegel regards his conception of politically realized freedom as the heart of his whole philosophical endeavor, and it construes the dialectical arguments as providing chiefly the terms for explicating the rational will’s or practical reason’s inherent striving to actualize itself in ethically, politically, and publicly “mediated” forms of recognition. (shrink)

Among modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant has few rivals for his influence over the development of contemporary philosophy as a whole. While the issue of language has become a key fulcrum of continental philosophy since the twentieth century, Kant has been overlooked as a thinker whose breadth of insight has helped to spearhead this advance. The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought remedies this historical gap by gathering new essays by distinguished Kant scholars. The chapters examine the many ways that Kant’s philosophy (...) addresses the nature of language. Although language as a formal structure of thought and expression has always been part of the philosophical tradition, the “linguistic dimension” of these essays speaks to language more broadly as a practice including communication, exchange, and dialogue. (shrink)

Kant's Observations of 1764 and Remarks of 1764–5 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' 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'. (shrink)

In this article I show that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has as its principal aim to demonstrate that the age-old interests of reason in metaphysics are satisfied not through theoretical knowledge but through a practically-oriented system of reason based on critical principles. The central idea of the system is the highest good in the world conceived as a project to be realized by the human species in the course of history. The dogmatic efforts to attain knowledge of the unconditioned (...) in its three forms as the ideas of the soul, the world and God, are replaced by the critical efforts to realize the highest good as supported by postulates of freedom, immortality and a supreme being required by morality. The concluding chapters of the Critique, mostly ignored by commentators, elaborate on the telos of the critical project. They show that Kant regards critical philosophy as bringing to completion the era of speculative philosophy that began in Greek antiquity and beginning a new epoch of practically-oriented reason that truly satisfies the metaphysical interests of reason. (shrink)

The contributors to the volume are Seth Benardete, Michael Gillespie, Leon Kass, Robert B. Pippin, Robert Rethy, John M. Rist, Brian J. Shanley, O. P., Susan ...

KANT ASSERTS THAT "ONTOLOGY IS NOTHING OTHER THAN A TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC," AND HE BOTH CONTINUES AND CRITICIZES A TRADITION IN WHICH LOGIC SERVES AS FOUNDATION FOR ONTOLOGY. TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC IS A META-LOGIC THAT CRITICIZES THE FOUNDATIONAL COMPET.

Benardete reads Aristotle as Socratic dialectician writing in treatise form. The sciences of various subject matters appear at first separate (like Platonic eide) but they contain diverging accounts of being, nature, and the soul, which demand to be put together by the reader. De Anima abstracts from the soul as such in order to treat the soul “precisely.” This places limits on the unfolding of problems in phantasia and the heterogeneity of mind and being. As prelude to first philosophy, De (...) Anima raises but does not answer the question: how are the being of thinking and the being of beings related? (shrink)

Several of these essays--all but one-elucidate some aspect of Kant's new notion of "objectivity," that notion crucial to the transcendental foundation of universal and necessary knowledge intended to supersede the conflict of earlier "realisms" and "idealisms." And among these essays, all but one looks favorably upon Kant's effort. In the case of Moltke Gram's essay, a defense of Kant's refutations of idealism includes an argument for the consistency of the versions in the A and B editions of the Critique, and (...) a denial that the refutations require proofs of things in themselves; Kant succeeds in proving the existence of objects external to us. In the argument of the Fourth Paralogism, transcendentality is the key to the victory of objectivity: "If you say with Kant that all perceptual objects are transcendentally ideal, you are saying that perceptual objects which are spatial are as immediately available as mental objects", or that objects as causes of effects in our sensory apparatus are not merely inferred from their effects. Direct awareness of objects, albeit only phenomenal, distinguishes "empirical realism" from inference-making "empirical idealism". (shrink)

Fifty years ago John Dewey asked: "What is freedom and why is it prized?" Charles Sherover raises that question again and answers it with the help of the theoretical traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism, and British idealism, which he relates to the traditions of civic-spirited republicanism from Greek antiquity to the American Founding. His ambitious presentation of a "systematically developed public philosophy" confronts a world experiencing an "accommodation with the universal appeal of freedom," yet one still lacking theoretical clarity (...) about the grounds of that appeal and the character of the institutions that respond to it. Sherover's is a timely and novel defense of liberalism that exposes weaknesses in contemporary liberal thought and practice, attempts to define a new way between the libertarian, Kantian contractarian, and communitarian alternatives that dominate discussion today, draws learnedly on a wide range of sources in the Western heritage of political and moral reflection in this effort, and grounds its critical and positive discussions in an original theory of freedom that employs a Heideggerian analysis of the finite temporal horizon of human existence, with its dual character of dependence on a determinate past and openness to an indeterminate future. (shrink)

Rousseau asserted that "all my ideas fit together, but I can hardly present them simultaneously"; when defending his writings against the charge of contradictoriness, he complained that it was not he, but rather his readers, who could not think systematically. Melzer's admirable effort to support Rousseau's self-description as a systematic philosopher discredits the common view of Rousseau as a confused visionary rebelling against "system" of all kinds. His book is indispensable to forming a just estimation of Rousseau as a seminal (...) philosophical writer of the Western tradition, one to whom Kant, Fichte, and Hegel acknowledged deep indebtedness. Failure to appreciate the unity of Rousseau's thought has been partly due, Melzer notes, to the unsystematic style of Rousseau's writings, none of which presents the "system" as a whole, but which nonetheless are "inseparable... and explain themselves each by the others." Interpreters have so often regarded Rousseau's thought as incoherent and contradictory because they have been misled by the apparent independence of each writing, thus "mistaking fragments for completed wholes". (shrink)

This essay proposes a very important general account of Kant's critical philosophy. Avowing her debts to recent scholarship stressing themes of practical reason, freedom, history, and teleology as central to Kant's philosophical project, Neiman goes further than previous writers in elaborating the critical definition of "reason." Her principal claims are that: Kant's chief concern is to reconceive the nature of reason as the source of regulative ideas giving purpose and structure to all human activity, rather than as cognitive ; insisting (...) on the regulative nature of reason permits Kant to grasp the unity of the theoretical and the practical, or of metaphysics and ethics ; reason as regulative proposes projects for thinking about the world as a systematic whole of connections uniting while transcending the given objects of experience ; reason's capacity for transcending the given toward never-fully realized wholes shows that it is a faculty of ends and that as such its essence is freedom ; to say that practical reason has "primacy" over theoretical reason is not to say that morality provides an extension of knowledge denied to theory, but that the essence of all reason is practical, and therefore that speculative accounts of its goals and foundations are necessarily false ; the synthesis of objects by the understanding is subordinated to reason as the power of end-determination, since no science arises from the- understanding alone, and only reason can direct the understanding toward a unified system of empirical laws ; earlier philosophy mistakenly supposes that reason's desire to seek the unconditioned has a theoretical basis and satisfaction, whereas both are actually practical. (shrink)