This 1788 work, based on belief in the immortality of the soul, established Kant as a vindicator of the truth of Christianity. It offers the most complete statement of his theory of free will.
The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, and his second work in moral theory after the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Its systematic account of the authority of moral principles grounded in human autonomy unfolds Kant's considered views on morality and provides the keystone to his philosophical system. The essays in this volume shed light on the principal arguments of the second Critique and explore their relation to Kant's critical philosophy as a whole. They examine the genesis of the Critique, Kant's approach to the authority of the moral law given as a 'fact of reason', the metaphysics of free agency, the account of respect for morality as the moral motive, and questions raised by the 'primacy of practical reason' and the idea of the 'postulates'. Engaging and critical, this volume will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars of Kant and to moral theorists alike.
One of the cornerstone books of Western philosophy, here is Kant's seminal treatise, where he seeks to define the nature of reason itself and builds his own unique system of philosophical thought with an approach known as transcendental idealism. He argues that human knowledge is limited by the capacity for perception.
The Kerygma of the Wilderness Traditions in the Hebrew Bible examines biblical writers' use of the wilderness traditions in the books of Exodus and Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Prophets, and the Writings to express their beliefs in God and their understandings of the community's relationship to God. Kerygma is the proclamation of God's actions with the purpose of affirming faith/or appealing to an obedient response from the community. The experiences of the wilderness community, who rebelled and refused to live according to God's purposes, serve as a polemic against disbelief in God and the refusal to embrace Israel's religious heritage. In the Writings, more than in the Prophets, the wilderness traditions are remembered with a notable resemblance to the traditions in Exodus and Numbers, which reflects a heightened interest in the ancient traditions in the closing turbulent period of Israelite history. Recollections of Israel's beginnings in the wilderness address problems associated with faith, obedience, and ultimately, the nature of the Israelite community.
In a short chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason entitled “On the Typic of the Pure Practical Power of Judgment,” Kant addresses a crucial problem facing his theory of moral judgment: How can we represent the supersensible moral law so as to apply it to actions in the sensible world? Despite its importance to Kant's project, previous studies of the Typic have been fragmentary, disparate, and contradictory. This book provides a detailed commentary on the Typic, elucidating how it enables moral judgment by means of the law of nature, which serves as the 'type', or analogue, of the moral law. In addition, the book situates the Typic, both historically and conceptually, within Kant's theory of symbolic representation. While many commentators have assimilated the Typic to the aesthetic notion of 'symbolic hypotyposis' in the third Critique, the author contends that it has greater continuities with the theoretical notion of 'symbolic anthropomorphism' in the Prolegomena. As the first comprehensive, book-length study of the Typic that critically engages with the secondary literature, this monograph fills an important gap in the research on Kant's ethics and aesthetics and provides a starting point for further inquiry and debate.
This Critical Guide provides succinct and in-depth explorations of cutting-edge debates concerning the philosophical significance of Kant's revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason.
This Element surveys the place of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant's overall philosophical project and describes and analyzes the main arguments of the work. It also surveys the developments in Kant's thought that led to the first critique, and provides an account of the genesis of the book during the 'silent decade' of its composition in the 1770s based on Kant's handwritten notes from the period.
A best seller in Italy, Maurizio Ferraris's Goodbye, Kant! delivers a nontechnical, entertaining, and occasionally irreverent overview of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He borrows his title from Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin!, the 2003 film about East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which depicts both relief at the passing of the Soviet era and affection for the ideals it embodied. Ferraris approaches Kant in similar spirits, demonstrating how the structure that Kant elaborates for the understanding of human knowledge can generate nostalgia for lost aspirations, while still leaving room for constructive criticism. Isolating key themes and concerns in the work, Ferraris evaluates Kant's claims relative to what science and philosophy have come to regard as the conditions for knowledge and experience in the intervening two centuries. He remains attentive to the historical context and ideals from which Kant's Critique emerged but also resolute in identifying what he sees as the limits and blind spots in the work. The result is an accessible account of a notoriously difficult book that will both provoke experts and introduce students to the work and to these important philosophical debates about the relations of experience to science.
When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike. This Critique is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into a unified argument. Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century.