The essays collected in this volume by Paul Guyer, one of the world's foremost Kant scholars, explore Kant's attempt to develop a morality grounded on the intrinsic and unconditional value of the human freedom to set our own ends. When regulated by the principle that the freedom of all is equally valuable, the freedom to set our own ends - what Kant calls "humanity" - becomes what he calls autonomy. These essays explore Kant's strategies for establishing the premise that freedom is the inner worth of the world or the essential end of humankind, as he says, and for deriving the specific duties that fundamental principle of morality generates in the empirical circumstances of human existence. The Virtues of Freedom further investigates Kant's attempts to prove that we are always free to live up to this moral ideal, that is, that we have free will no matter what, as well as his more successful explorations of the ways in which our natural tendencies to be moral - dispositions to the feeling of respect and more specific feelings such as love and self-esteem - can and must be cultivated and educated. Guyer finally examines the various models of human community that Kant develops from his premise that our associations must be based on the value of freedom for all. The contrasts but also similarities of Kant's moral philosophy to that of David Hume but many of his other predecessors and contemporaries, such as Stoics and Epicureans, Pufendorf and Wolff, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith, are also explored.

The essays collected in this volume by Paul Guyer, one of the world's foremost Kant scholars, explore Kant's attempt to develop a morality grounded on the intrinsic and unconditional value of the human freedom to set our own ends. When regulated by the principle that the freedom of all is equally valuable, the freedom to set our own ends - what Kant calls "humanity" - becomes what he calls autonomy. These essays explore Kant's strategies for establishing the premise that freedom is the inner worth of the world or the essential end of humankind, as he says, and for deriving the specific duties that fundamental principle of morality generates in the empirical circumstances of human existence. The Virtues of Freedom further investigates Kant's attempts to prove that we are always free to live up to this moral ideal, that is, that we have free will no matter what, as well as his more successful explorations of the ways in which our natural tendencies to be moral - dispositions to the feeling of respect and more specific feelings such as love and self-esteem - can and must be cultivated and educated. Guyer finally examines the various models of human community that Kant develops from his premise that our associations must be based on the value of freedom for all. The contrasts but also similarities of Kant's moral philosophy to that of David Hume but many of his other predecessors and contemporaries, such as Stoics and Epicureans, Pufendorf and Wolff, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith, are also explored.

There is a general sense that the philosophy of Descartes was a dominant force in early modern thought. Since the work in the nineteenth century of French historians of Cartesian philosophy, however, there has been no fully contextualized comparative examination of the various receptions of Descartes in different portions of early modern Europe. This study addresses the need for a more current understanding of these receptions by considering the different constructions of Descartes's thought that emerged in the Calvinist United Provinces (Netherlands) and Catholic France, the two main centers for early modern Cartesianism, during the period dating from the last decades of his life to the century or so following his death in 1650. It turns out that we must speak not of a single early modern Cartesianism rigidly defined in terms of Descartes's own authorial intentions, but rather of a loose collection of early modern Cartesianisms that involve a range of different positions on various sets of issues. Though more or less rooted in Descartes's somewhat open-ended views, these Cartesianisms evolved in different ways over time in response to different intellectual and social pressures. Chapters of this study are devoted to: the early modern Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of Descartes and the incompatible Cartesian responses to these; conflicting attitudes among early modern Cartesians toward ancient thought and modernity; competing early modern attempts to combine Descartes's views with those of Augustine; the different occasionalist accounts of causation within early modern Cartesianism; and the impact of various forms of early modern Cartesianism on both Dutch medicine and French physics.

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us. Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a philosophical debate about the nature of music. The principal participants-Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Alembert-were responding to the views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who was both a participant and increasingly a subject of controversy. The discussion centered upon three different events occurring roughly simultaneously. The first was Rameau's formulation of the principle of the fundamental bass, which explained the structure of chords and their progression. The second was the writing of the Encyclopedie, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, with articles on music by Rousseau. The third was the "Querelle des Bouffons," over the relative merits of Italian comic opera and French tragic opera. The philosophes, in the typical manner of Enlightenment thinkers, were able to move freely from the broad issues of philosophy and criticism, to the more technical questions of music theory, considering music as both art and science. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness and dealt with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. In the newly revised edition of Music and the French Enlightenment, Cynthia Verba updates this fascinating story with the prolific scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published. Stressing the importance of seeing the philosophes' writings in context of a dynamic dialogue, Verba carefully reconstructs the chain of arguments and rebuttals across which Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot formulated their own evolving positions. A section of key passages in translation presents several texts in English for the first time, recapturing the tenor and tone of the dialogue at hand. In a new epilogue, Verba discusses important trends in new scholarship, tracing how scholars continue to grapple with many of the same fundamental oppositions and competing ideas that were debated by the philosophes in the French Enlightenment.

Aligning Values and Politics argues that empowering individuals for self-actualization is an indispensable tool for attaining freedom; therefore, politics must align with the promotion of self-actualization. Private property rights have in the past helped people to develop skills, but such rights were abused. Once these rights are combined with an ethics of responsibility, the book opens the doors to a nonpartisan analysis of income inequality, inheritance, race relations, abortion and governance. The book argues that the American government is engaged in producing "bread and circuses," inducing people into living vicariously. Using the ideas of Immanuel Kant, the authors claim that we can return to a civil society that values independence rather than entitlements.

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, and political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth. Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hoelderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires. By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism (standing on sharply specified normative commitments at all costs) and waywardness (rejecting all settled commitments). And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are.

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.

Is Kant really the 'bourgeois' philosopher that his advocates and opponents take him to be? In this bold and original re-thinking of Kant, Michael Wayne argues that with his aesthetic turn in the Third Critique, Kant broke significantly from the problematic philosophical structure of the Critique of Pure Reason. Through his philosophy of the aesthetic Kant begins to circumnavigate the dualities in his thought. In so doing he shows us today how the aesthetic is a powerful means for imagining our way past the apparent universality of contemporary capitalism. Here is an unfamiliar Kant: his concepts of beauty and the sublime are reinterpreted as attempts to socialise the aesthetic while Wayne reconstructs the usually hidden genealogy between Kant and important Marxist concepts such as totality, dialectics, mediation and even production. In materialising Kant's philosophy, this book simultaneously offers a Marxist defence of creativity and imagination grounded in our power to think metaphorically and in Kant's concept of reflective judgment. Wayne also critiques aspects of Marxist cultural theory that have not accorded the aesthetic the relative autonomy and specificity which it is due. Discussing such thinkers as Adorno, Bourdieu, Colletti, Eagleton, Lukacs, Ranciere and others, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique presents a new reading of Kant's Third Critique that challenges Marxist and mainstream assessments of Kant alike.

Allen W. Wood presents the first book-length systematic exposition in English of Fichte's most important ethical work, the System of Ethics (1798). He places this work in the context of Fichte's life and career, of his philosophical system as conceived in the later Jena period, and in relation to his philosophy of right or justice and politics. Wood discusses Fichte's defense of freedom of the will, his grounding of the moral principle, theory of moral conscience, transcendental deduction of intersubjectivity, and his conception of free rational communication and the rational society. He develops and emphasizes the social and political radicalism of Fichte's moral and political philosophy, and brings out the philosophical interest of Fichte's positions and arguments for present day philosophy. Fichte's Ethical Thought defends the position that Fichte is a major thinker in the history of ethics, and the most important figure in the history of modern continental philosophy in the past two centuries.

Offering an original perspective on the central project of Descartes' Meditations, this book argues that Descartes' free will theodicy is crucial to his refutation of skepticism. A common thread runs through Descartes' radical First Meditation doubts, his Fourth Meditation discussion of error, and his pious reconciliation of providence and freedom: each involves a clash of perspectives-thinking of God seems to force conclusions diametrically opposed to those we reach when thinking only of ourselves. Descartes fears that a skeptic could exploit this clash of perspectives to argue that Reason is not trustworthy because self-contradictory. To refute the skeptic and vindicate the consistency of Reason, it is not enough for Descartes to demonstrate (in the Third Meditation) that our Creator is perfect; he must also show (in the Fourth) that our errors cannot prove God's imperfection. To do this, Descartes invokes the idea that we err freely. However, prospects initially seem dim for this free will theodicy, because Descartes appears to lack any consistent or coherent understanding of human freedom. In an extremely in-depth analysis spanning four chapters, Ragland argues that despite initial appearances, Descartes consistently offered a coherent understanding of human freedom: for Descartes, freedom is most fundamentally the ability to do the right thing. Since we often do wrong, actual humans must therefore be able to do otherwise-our actions cannot be causally determined by God or our psychology. But freedom is in principle compatible with determinism: while leaving us free, God could have determined us to always do the good (or believe the true). Though this conception of freedom is both consistent and suitable to Descartes' purposes, when he attempts to reconcile it with divine providence, Descartes's strategy fails, running afoul of his infamous doctrine that God created the eternal truths.

This volume offers a fresh view of the work of Thomas Reid, a leading figure in the history of eighteenth-century philosophy. A team of leading experts in the field explore the significance of Reid's thought in his time and ours, focusing in particular on three broad themes: mind, knowledge, and value. Together, they argue that Reid's philosophy is about developing agents in a rich world of objects and values, agents with intellectual and active powers whose regularity is productive. Though such agents are equipped at first with rudimentary abilities, those abilities are responsive. Our powers consist in a fundamental and on-going engagement with the world, a world that calls on us to be flexible, sensitive, astute, and ultimately, practical. Thomas Reid on Mind, Knowledge, and Value represents both the vitality of Reid's work, and the ways in which current philosophers are engaging with his ideas.

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem (refuting a global skepticism regarding the objectivity of experience), it addresses a new problem (the role of a priori concepts or categories stemming from the nature of the understanding in grounding this objectivity), and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. Allison locates four decisive steps in this process: the recognition that sensibility and understanding are distinct and irreducible cognitive powers, which Kant referred to as a 'great light' of 1769; the subsequent realization that, though distinct, these powers only yield cognition when they work together, which is referred to as the 'discursivity thesis' and which led directly to the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments and the problem of the synthetic a priori; the discovery of the necessary unity of apperception as the supreme norm governing discursive cognition; and the recognition, through the influence of Tetens, of the role of the imagination in mediating between sensibility and understanding. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views, two distinctive features of Allison'sreading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary (the 'non-contingency thesis') and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism (the 'non-separability thesis').

Most philosophers have taken the importance of Kant's Critique of Judgement to lie primarily in its contributions to aesthetics and to the philosophy of biology. Hannah Ginsborg, however, sees the Critique of Judgement as representing a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition more generally. The fourteen essays collected here advance a common interpretive project: that of bringing out the philosophical significance of the notion of judgement which figures in the third Critique and showing its importance both to Kant's own theoretical philosophy and to contemporary views of human thought and cognition. To possess the capacity of judgment, on the interpretation presented here, is to respond to the world in a way which involves the recognition of one's responses as normatively appropriate to the objects which cause them. It is through this capacity that we are able not merely to respond discriminatively to objects, as animals do, but to bring them under concepts and so to make claims about them which can be true or false. The Critique of Judgement, on this reading, rejects the traditional dichotomy between the natural and the normative, taking nature itself both human nature and nature outside us to be comprehensible only in normative terms. The essays in this book develop this reading in its own right, and draw on it to address interpretive debates in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology. They also bring out its relevance to contemporary debates about concept-acquisition, the content of perception, and skepticism about rule-following and meaning.

Modern Conspiracy attempts to sketch a new conception of conspiracy theory. Where many commentators have sought to characterize conspiracy theory in terms of the collapse of objectivity and Enlightenment reason, Fleming and Jane trace the important role of conspiracy in the formation of the modern world: the scientific revolution, social contract theory, political sovereignty, religious paranoia and mass communication media. Rather than see in conspiratorial thinking the imminent death of Enlightenment reason, and a regression to a new Dark Age, Modern Conspiracy contends that many characteristic features of conspiracies tap very deeply into the history of the Enlightenment itself: among other things, its vociferous critique of established authorities, and a conception of political sovereignty fuelled by fear of counter-plots. Drawing out the roots of modern conspiratorial thinking leads us to truths less salacious and scandalous than the claims of conspiracy theorists themselves yet ultimately far more salutary: about mass communication; about individual and crowd psychology; and about our conception of and relation to knowledge. Perhaps, ultimately, what conspiracy theory affords us is a renewed opportunity to reflect on our very relationship to the truth itself.

This is the first volume of original commissioned papers on the subject of Newton and empiricism. The chapters, contributed by a leading team of both established and younger international scholars, explore the nature and extent of Newton's relationship to a variety of empiricisms and empiricists. Among the many significant contributions of the volume are a detailed engagement with Newton's optical writings, a careful contextualization of Newton's methods in seventeenth century context, a critical analysis of the ways in which Locke and Hume responded to Newton, and a history of the reception of Newton's methods in astronomy.

Contemporary philosophers frequently assume that Kant never seriously engaged with Spinoza or Spinozism-certainly not before the break of Der Pantheismusstreit, or within the Critique of Pure Reason. Offering an alternative reading of key pre-critical texts and to some of the Critique's most central chapters, Omri Boehm challenges this common assumption. He argues that Kant not only is committed to Spinozism in early essays such as "The One Possible Basis" and "New Elucidation," but also takes up Spinozist metaphysics as Transcendental Realism's most consistent form in the Critique of Pure Reason. The success -- or failure -- of Kant's critical projects must be evaluated in this light. Boehm here examines The Antinomies alongside Spinoza's Substance Monism and his theory of freedom. Similarly, he analyzes the refutation of the Ontological Argument in parallel with Spinoza's Causa-sui. More generally, Boehm places the Critique of Pure Reason's separation of Thought from Being and Is from Ought in dialogue with the Ethics' collapse of Being, Is and Ought into Thought.

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.

In this book, Jeanine Grenberg argues that everything important about Kant's moral philosophy emerges from careful reflection upon the common human moral experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. Through careful readings of both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, Grenberg shows that Kant, typically thought to be an overly technical moral philosopher, in fact is a vigorous defender of the common person's first-personal encounter with moral demands. Grenberg uncovers a notion of phenomenological experience in Kant's account of the Fact of Reason, develops a new a reading of the Fact, and grants a moral epistemic role for feeling in grounding Kant's a priori morality. The book thus challenges readings which attribute only a motivational role to feeling; and Fichtean readings which violate Kant's commitments to the limits of reason. This study will be valuable to students and scholars engaged in Kant studies.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) is the most eminent literary figure of the German Enlightenment and a writer of European significance. His range of interest as dramatist, poet, critic, philosopher, theologian, philologist and much else besides was comparable to that of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, with all of whose ideas he engaged. He contributed decisively to the emergence of German as a literary language and was the founder of modern German literature, urging his compatriots to look to England rather than France for literary inspiration. His major plays (including the classic drama on religious tolerance, Nathan the Wise) are still regularly performed. He was a brilliant controversialist, and his philosophical and religious writings profoundly shook traditional assumptions. This book sets his life and work in the context of the intellectual, social, and cultural background of eighteenth-century Europe. It is the first comprehensive account of Lessing's life for over a century, and it serves as a reference work on all aspects of Lessing's life, work, and thought. The German edition, published in 2008, is now regarded as definitive; it was awarded the Hamann Research Prize of the University and city of Munster and the Einhard Prize for Biography of the Einhard Foundation in Seligenstadt. The present English edition has been revised and updated in the light of relevant publications since 2008.

In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment--"society "as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice--was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new "society" as an evolving field of interdependence, "Abandoned to Ourselves" traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau's encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this whole scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau's most famous trope, the "general Will." As "Abandoned to Ourselves" weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory.

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.