This book studies Hume's scepticism and its roots, context, and role in the philosopher's life. It relates how Hume wrote his philosophy in a time of tumult, as the millennia-old metaphysical tradition that placed humans and their cognitive abilities in an ontological framework collapsed and gave way to one that placed the autonomy of the individual in its center. It then discusses the birth of modernity that Descartes inaugurated and Kant completed with his Copernican revolution that moved philosophy from Being to the Self. It shows how modernity gave rise to a new kind of scepticism, involving doubt not just about the adequacy of our knowledge but about the very existence of a world independent of the self. The book then examines how Hume faced the sceptical implications and how his empiricism added yet another sceptical theme with the main question being how argument can legitimize key concepts of human understanding instinctively used in making sense of our perceptions. Placing it firmly in a historical context, the book shows how Hume was influenced by Pyrrhonian scepticism and how this becomes clear in Hume's acceptance of the weakness of reason and in his emphasis on the practical role of philosophy. As the book argues, rather than serving as the foundation of science, in Hume's hand, philosophy became a guide to a joyful, happy life, to a documentary of common life and to moderately educated, entertaining conversation. This way Hume stands in strong opposition to the (early) modern mainstream.

This book situates John Locke's philosophy of knowledge and his political theory within his engagement in British monetary debates of the 17th and 18th century. Anchored in extensive archival research, George Caffentzis offers the most expansive reading of Locke's economic thought to date, contextualizing it within the expansion of capitalist accumulation on a world scale and the universality of money as a medium of exchange. Updated with a new introduction by Paul Rekret, a new foreword by Harry Cleaver and new material by the author, Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government continues to make a significant intervention in contemporary debates around the history of capitalism, colonialism and philosophy.

The first modern English edition of diverse Enlightenment-era writings by Prussian monarch Frederick the Great Frederick II of Prussia (1712-1786), best known as Frederick the Great, was a prolific writer of philosophical discourses, poems, epics, satires, and more, while maintaining extensive correspondence with prominent intellectuals, Voltaire among them. This edition of selected writings, the first to make a wide range of Frederick's most important ideas available to a modern English readership, moves beyond traditional attempts to see his work only in light of his political aims. In these pages, we can finally appreciate Frederick's influential contributions to the European Enlightenment-and his unusual role as a monarch who was also a published author. In addition to Frederick's major opus, the Anti-Machiavel, the works presented here include essays, prefaces, reviews, and dialogues. The subjects discussed run the gamut from ethics to religion to political theory. Accompanied by critical annotations, the texts show that we can understand Frederick's views of kingship and the state only if we engage with a broad spectrum of his thought, including his attitudes toward morality and self-love. By contextualizing his arguments and impact on Enlightenment beliefs, this volume considers how we can reconcile Frederick's innovative public musings with his absolutist rule. Avi Lifschitz provides a robust and detailed introduction that discusses Frederick's life and work against the backdrop of eighteenth-century history and politics. With its unparalleled scope and cross-disciplinary appeal, Frederick the Great's Philosophical Writings firmly establishes one monarch's multifaceted relevance for generations of readers and scholars to come.

The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great is the first study to analyse comprehensively the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (reigned 1762-1796) and to argue that they constitute a masterpiece of eighteenth-century epistolary writing. In this book, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev traces Catherine's development as a letter-writer, her networking strategies, and her image-making, demonstrating the centrality of ideas, literary experimentation, and manipulation of material form evident in Catherine's epistolary practice. Through this, Rubin-Detlev illustrates how Catherine's letters reveal her full engagement with the Enlightenment and further show how creatively she absorbed and responded to the ideas of her century. The letter was not merely a means by which the empress promoted Russia and its leader as European powers; it was a literary genre through which Catherine expressed her identity as a member of the social, political, and intellectual elite of her century.

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) defines sympathy as a series of shifts in perspective by which one sees from a different point of view. British and French novels published over the following century redefine sympathy through narrative form-shifting perspectives or 'stories within stories' in which one character adopts the voice and perspective of another. Fiction follows Smith's emphasis on sympathy's shifting perspectives, but this formal echo coincides with a challenge. For Smith and other Enlightenment philosophers, the experience of sympathy relies on human resemblance. In novels, by contrast, characters who are separated by nationality, race, or species experience a version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate such differences. Encounters between these characters produce shifts in perspective or framed tales as one character sympathizes with another and begins to tell her story, echoing Smith's definition of sympathy in their form while challenging Enlightenment philosophy's insistence on human resemblance. Works of sentimental and gothic fiction published between 1750 and 1850 generate a novelistic version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narrative forms (epistolary fiction, embedded tales) and new publication practices (the anthology, the novelistic extract). Second-hand stories transform the vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple perspectives associated with the declining genre of epistolary fiction into the narrative levels and shifting speakers of nineteenth-century frame tales. Vicarious Narratives argues that fiction redefines sympathy as the struggle to overcome difference through the active engagement with narrative-by listening to, re-telling, and transcribing the stories of others.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

Publie deux ans avant la mort de Voltaire, le "Commentaire historique sur les oeuvres de l'auteur de La Henriade" presente l'image qu'il souhaite laisser a la posterite. Cette edition restitue la trentaine de 'lettres veritables' jusqu'ici retranchees et deplacees dans la correspondance par toutes les editions posthumes. Ce volume contient le texte de Voltaire, base sur l'edition princeps de 1776, presente avec variantes et enrichi d'une annotation preparee par une equipe internationale de specialistes. Collaborateurs: David Adams, Alice Breathe, Logan Connors, Marie-Helene Cotoni, Nicholas Cronk, Stephanie Gehanne-Gavoty, Linda Gil, Russell Goulbourne, Basil Guy, John R. Iverson, David McCallam, Myrtille Mericam-Bourdet, Christophe Paillard, John Renwick, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, Ruggero Sciuto, Katie Scott, Catriona Seth, Gerhardt Stenger, Christopher Todd, Bruno Tribout, Thomas Wynn.

Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment comprises fifteen new essays written by a team of international scholars. The collection re-evaluates the characteristics, meaning and impact of the Radical Enlightenment between 1660 and 1825, spanning England, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, France, Germany and the Americas. In addition to dealing with canonical authors and celebrated texts, such as Spinoza and his Tractus theologico-politicus, the authors discuss many less well-known figures and debates from the period. Divided into three parts, this book: Considers the Radical Enlightenment movement as a whole, including its defining features and characteristics and the history of the term itself. Traces the origins and events of the Radical Enlightenment, including in-depth analyses of key figures including Spinoza, Toland, Meslier, and d'Holbach. Examines the outcomes and consequences of the Radical Enlightenment in Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth century. Chapters in this section examine later figures whose ideas can be traced to the Radical Enlightenment, and examine the role of the period in the emergence of egalitarianism. This collection of essays is the first stand-alone collection of studies in English on the Radical Enlightenment. It is a timely and comprehensive overview of current research in the field which also presents new studies and research on the Radical Enlightenment.

A compelling alternative account of the history of knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment Until now the history of knowledge has largely been about formal and documented accumulation, concentrating on systems, collections, academies, and institutions. The central narrative has been one of advancement, refinement, and expansion. Martin Mulsow tells a different story. Knowledge can be lost: manuscripts are burned, oral learning dies with its bearers, new ideas are suppressed by censors. Knowledge Lost is a history of efforts, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, to counter such loss. It describes how critics of ruling political and religious regimes developed tactics to preserve their views; how they buried their ideas in footnotes and allusions; how they circulated their tracts and treatises in handwritten copies; and how they commissioned younger scholars to spread their writings after death. Filled with exciting stories, Knowledge Lost follows the trail of precarious knowledge through a series of richly detailed episodes. It deals not with the major themes of metaphysics and epistemology, but rather with interpretations of the Bible, Orientalism, and such marginal zones as magic. And it focuses not on the usual major thinkers, but rather on forgotten or half-forgotten members of the "knowledge underclass," such as Pietro della Vecchia, a libertine painter and intellectual; Charles-Cesar Baudelot, an antiquarian and numismatist; and Johann Christoph Wolf, a pastor, Hebrew scholar, and witness to the persecution of heretics. Offering a fascinating new approach to the intellectual history of early modern Europe, Knowledge Lost is also an ambitious attempt to rethink the very concept of knowledge.

In most Western societies, guilt is widely regarded as a vital moral emotion. In addition to playing a central role in moral development and progress, many take the capacity to feel guilt as a defining feature of morality itself: no truly moral person escapes the pang of guilt when she has done something wrong. But proponents of guilt's importance face important challenges, such as distinguishing healthy from pathological forms of guilt, and accounting for the fact that not all cultures value guilt in the same way, if at all. In this volume, philosophers and psychologists come together to think more systematically about the nature and value of guilt. The book begins with chapters on the biological origins and psychological nature of guilt and moves on to discuss the culturally enriched conceptions of guilt and its value that we find in various eastern and western philosophic traditions. In addition, numerous chapters discuss healthy or morally valuable forms guilt and their pathological or irrational shadows.

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned--in today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically-driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it--for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment, but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. Its primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, it could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheist, individualist, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving everywhere from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment offers a spectral view of the age of lights.

In light of the fact that Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was one of the most influential philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is remarkable that there has never been an edition of his correspondence. Hutcheson's epistolary offerings include letters published in journals in England, Ireland, and the Netherlands. These letters and occasional writings exhibit his polemical skills in controversy, his differences with Presbyterian orthodoxy, his preoccupation with religious and intellectual liberty, and his loyalty and lasting affection for his friends. Hutcheson engaged in extensive public polemics, not least to defend his major works but also to promote other causes. These incidental writings provide valuable insight into Hutcheson's more substantial treatises. His private correspondence and such documents as his will and the declaration he made upon becoming a professor at the University of Glasgow give the reader an impression of Hutcheson's personality and his various life experiences.

After the demise of German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism flourished as the defining philosophical movement of Continental Europe from the 1860s until the Weimar Republic. This collection of new essays by distinguished scholars offers a fresh examination of the many and enduring contributions that Neo-Kantianism has made to a diverse range of philosophical subjects. The essays discuss classical figures and themes, including the Marburg and Southwestern Schools, Cohen, Cassirer, Rickert, and Natorp's psychology. In addition they examine lesser-known topics, including the Neo-Kantian influence on theory of law, Husserlian phenomenology, Simmel's study of Rembrandt, Cassirer's philosophy of science, Cohen's philosophy of religion in relation to Rawls and Habermas, and Rickert's theory of number. This rich exploration of a major philosophical movement will interest scholars and upper-level students of Kant, twentieth-century philosophy, continental philosophy, sociology, and psychology.

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

Ce livre historique peut contenir de nombreuses coquilles et du texte manquant. Les acheteurs peuvent generalement telecharger une copie gratuite scannee du livre original (sans les coquilles) aupres de l'editeur. Non reference. Non illustre. 1772 edition. Extrait: ...peches des morts, afin d'at tirer la benediction de Drfcu fur les vivans. 3. Qu'il n'etait point encor question de resurrection dans ces tems-la, qu'il est reconnu que cette question ne fut agitee chez les Juifs que du tems de Gamaliel, un peu avant les predications de J E s u s-C H R I S T. ( Voyez le Talmud tome 2. ) 40. Que la loi des Juifs consistant dans le Decalogue, le Levitique & le Deuteronome, 11'ayant jamais parle ni de l'immortalite de Neuvieme partie, N l'ame, ni des tourmens de l'enser; il etaie impossible a plus forte raison qu'elle eut ja, mais annonce un purgatoire. f." Les heretiques & les incredules font les derniers efforts pour demontrer u leur maniere que tous les livres des Maccabees font evidemment apocryphes. Voici leurs pretendues preuves.. Les Juifs n'ont jamais reconnu les livres des Maccabees pour canoniques, pourquoi les recon naitrions-n ous?, Origene declare formellement que rhistoire bes Maccabees est a rejetter. St. Jerome juge ees livres indignes de croyance. Le concile de Laodicee tenu en 367 11e les admit point parmi les livres canoniques; les Athanase, les Cyrilles, les Hilaire, les rejettent. Les raisons pour traiter ces livres de romans, & de tres mauvais romans, font les suivantes. L'auteur ignorant commence par la faussete la plus reconnue de tout le monde. Il Liv. L dit, Alexandre appella les jeunes nobles qui ch. 2. v. avaient ete nourris avec lui des leur enfance, 1' il ijftr partagea son royaume tandis quil vivait...

Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, which is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which has been very well recognized by the scholarship in the twentieth century and which has contributed to the false notion that early modern philosophy emerged as a reaction to Aristotelianism, the present research examines the continuity, the original developments and the impact of Aristotelian doctrines and terminology in logic and epistemology as the background for the rise of empiricism.Without the Aristotelian tradition, without its doctrines, and without its conceptual elaborations, British empiricism would never have been born. The book emphasizes that philosophy is not defined only by the 'great names', but also by minor authors, who determine the intellectual milieu from which the canonical names emerge. It considers every single published work of logic between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, being acquainted with a number of surviving manuscripts and being well-informed about the best existing scholarship in the field.

In Kant's Human Being, Robert B. Louden continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in his highly acclaimed book, Kant's Impure Ethics. Drawing on a wide variety of both published and unpublished works spanning all periods of Kant's extensive writing career, Louden here focuses on Kant's under-appreciated empirical work on human nature, with particular attention to the connections between this body of work and his much-discussed ethical theory. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question, "What is the human being" is philosophy's most fundamental question, one that encompasses all others. Louden analyzes and evaluates Kant's own answer to his question, showing how it differs from other accounts of human nature. This collection of twelve essays is divided into three parts. In Part One (Human Virtues), Louden explores the nature and role of virtue in Kant's ethical theory, showing how the conception of human nature behind Kant's virtue theory results in a virtue ethics that is decidedly different from more familiar Aristotelian virtue ethics programs. In Part Two (Ethics and Anthropology), he uncovers the dominant moral message in Kant's anthropological investigations, drawing new connections between Kant's work on human nature and his ethics. Finally, in Part Three (Extensions of Anthropology), Louden explores specific aspects of Kant's theory of human nature developed outside of his anthropology lectures, in his works on religion, geography, education ,and aesthetics, and shows how these writings substantially amplify his account of human beings. Kant's Human Being offers a detailed and multifaceted investigation of the question that Kant held to be the most important of all, and will be of interest not only to philosophers but also to all who are concerned with the study of human nature.

The Eighteenth century is one of the most important periods in the history of Western philosophy, witnessing philosophical, scientific, and social and political change on a vast scale. In spite of this, there are few single volume overviews of the philosophy of the period as a whole. The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy is an authoritative survey and assessment of this momentous period, covering major thinkers, topics and movements in Eighteenth century philosophy. Beginning with a substantial introduction by Aaron Garrett, the thirty-five specially commissioned chapters by an outstanding team of international contributors are organised into seven clear parts: Context and Movements Metaphysics and Understanding Mind, Soul, and Perception Morals and Aesthetics Politics and Society Philosophy in relation to the Arts and Sciences Major Figures. Major topics and themes are explored and discussed, ranging from materialism, free will and personal identity; to the emotions, the social contract, aesthetics, and the sciences, including mathematics and biology. The final section examines in more detail three figures central to the period: Hume, Rousseau and Kant. As such The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy is essential reading for all students of the period, both in philosophy and related disciplines such as politics, literature, history and religious studies.

An intellectual biography of the renowned and influential observer of the "era of tyrannies" Elie Halevy (1870-1937) was one of the most respected and influential intellectuals of the French Third Republic. In this densely contextualized biography, K. Steven Vincent describes how Halevy, best remembered as the historian of British Utilitarianism and nineteenth-century English history, was also a persistent, acute, and increasingly anxious observer of society in a period defined by industrialization and imperialism and by what Halevy famously called the "era of tyrannies." Vincent distinguishes three broad phases in the development of Halevy's thought. In the first, Halevy brought his version of neo-Kantianism to debates with sociologists and philosophers and to his study of English Utilitarianism. He forged ties with Xavier Leon, Leon Brunschvicg, and Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier), life-long intellectual interlocutors. Together they founded the Revue de metaphysique et de morale, a continuing venue for Halevy's reflections. The Dreyfus Affair, Vincent argues, caused Halevy to shift his focus from philosophy to history and from metaphysics to politics. He became a philosopher-historian, less interested in abstract neo-Kantianism and more in real-world action, less given to rarified debates over truth and more to investigation of how theories and their applications were situated within broader political, economic, and cultural movements. World War I and its destabilizing effects provoked the third phase, Vincent explains. As he watched reason recede before rabid nationalism and a pox of political enthusiasms, Halevy sounded the alarm about liberal democracy's vulnerabilities. Vincent situates Halevy on the unsteady and narrowing middle ground between state socialism and fascism, showing how he defended liberalism while, at the same time, appreciating socialists' analyses of capitalism's negative impact and their calls for reform and greater economic equality. Through his analysis of Halevy's life and works, Vincent illuminates the complexity of the Third Republic's philosophical, historical, and political thought and concludes with an incisive summary of the distinctive nature of French liberalism.

Kant's 'practical philosophy' comprehends a diverse group of his writings on ethics, politics, law, religion, and the philosophy of history and culture. Kristi E. Sweet demonstrates the unity and interdependence of these writings by showing how they take as their animating principle the human desire for what Kant calls the unconditioned - understood in the context of his practical thought as human freedom. She traces the relationship between this desire for freedom and the multiple forms of finitude that confront human beings in different aspects of practical life, and stresses the interdependence of the pursuit of individual moral goodness and the formation of community through the state, religion, culture and history. This study of Kant's approach to practical life discovers that doing our duty, itself the realization of our individual freedom, requires that we set for ourselves and pursue a whole constellation of social, political and other communal ends.

A solid grasp of the main themes and arguments of the seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes is essential for understanding modern thought, and a necessary entree to the work of the Empiricists and Immanuel Kant. It is also crucial to the study of contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. This new edition of Georges Dicker's commentary on Descartes's masterpiece, Meditations on First Philosophy, features a new chapter on the Fourth Meditation and improved treatments of the famous cogito ergo sum and the notorious problem of the Cartesian Circle, among numerous other improvements and updates. Clear and accessible, it serves as an introduction to Descartes's ideas for undergraduates and as a sophisticated companion to his Meditations for advanced readers. The volume provides a thorough discussion of several basic issues of epistemology and metaphysics elicited from the main themes and arguments of the Meditations. It also delves into the work's historical background and critical reception. Dicker offers his own assessments of the Cartesian Doubt, the cogito, the causal and ontological proofs of God's existence, Cartesian freedom and theodicy, Cartesian Dualism, and Descartes's views about the existence and nature of the material world. The commentary also incorporates a wealth of recent Descartes scholarship, and inculcates - but does not presuppose - knowledge of the methods of contemporary analytic philosophy.

While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual content of his philological investigations, which have often been criticised as being Eurocentric and philologically spurious. China is a case in point. In his magnum opus New Science, Vico portrays China as backward and philosophically primitive compared to Europe. In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel Canaris shows that scholars have been beguiled by Vico's value judgements of China without considering the function of these value judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism. Through close examination of Vico's sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment.

Peter Anstey presents a thorough and innovative study of John Locke's views on the method and content of natural philosophy. Focusing on Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, but also drawing extensively from his other writings and manuscript remains, Anstey argues that Locke was an advocate of the Experimental Philosophy: the new approach to natural philosophy championed by Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society who were opposed to speculative philosophy. On the question of method, Anstey shows how Locke's pessimism about the prospects for a demonstrative science of nature led him, in the Essay, to promote Francis Bacon's method of natural history, and to downplay the value of hypotheses and analogical reasoning in science. But, according to Anstey, Locke never abandoned the ideal of a demonstrative natural philosophy, for he believed that if we could discover the primary qualities of the tiny corpuscles that constitute material bodies, we could then establish a kind of corpuscular metric that would allow us a genuine science of nature. It was only after the publication of the Essay, however, that Locke came to realize that Newton's Principia provided a model for the role of demonstrative reasoning in science based on principles established upon observation, and this led him to make significant revisions to his views in the 1690s. On the content of Locke's natural philosophy, it is argued that even though Locke adhered to the Experimental Philosophy, he was not averse to speculation about the corpuscular nature of matter. Anstey takes us into new terrain and new interpretations of Locke's thought in his explorations of his mercurialist transmutational chymistry, his theory of generation by seminal principles, and his conventionalism about species.

Kant s "Critique of Pure Reason" is so outstanding among modern philosophical works, that it can be termed "the" foundation of modern philosophy. Schopenhauer termed it "the most important book ever to have been written in Europe." Otfried Hoffe guides the reader through the "Critique" one step at a time, expounding Kant s thoughts, submitting them to an interpretation and drawing a summary conclusion, placing the work and its topics within the context of its modern successors. A "critical" interpretation of Kant s text reveals that he had something to say on many discussions that are said to have originated after his death. Reducing his argumentation to its central tenets, it can be made stronger and applicable to current problems. Kant s eventual concern, however, even when writing theoretical philosophy, lay with the practical. Elaborating this concern and its connection to Kant s theoretical philosophy is a prime tenet of this book."