Pub Date : 2023-03-30DOI: 10.1017/S1369415423000079
Samuel Kerstein
Abstract According to Kant’s ethics, at least on one common interpretation, persons have a special worth or dignity that demands respect. But personhood is not coextensive with human life; for example, individuals can live in severe dementia after losing the capacities constitutive of personhood. Some philosophers, including David Velleman and Dennis Cooley, have suggested that individuals living after the loss of their personhood might offend against the Kantian dignity the individuals once possessed. Cooley has even argued that it is morally required on Kantian grounds for those who realize that they will lose their personhood as a result of dementia (e.g. Alzheimer’s) to hasten their deaths (e.g. commit suicide). This article specifies circumstances in which post-personhood living might indeed involve an affront to the Kantian dignity of a person who once was. However, the article contends, Kant implies that it is neither morally required nor even morally permissible for someone in an early stage of Alzheimer’s to hasten their death to avoid such an affront, even if they have autonomously chosen to do so. The article adds an ethical perspective to debate on physician-assisted dying, in particular on the moral permissibility of the soon-to-be-demented ending their lives.
{"title":"Dignity, Dementia and Death","authors":"Samuel Kerstein","doi":"10.1017/S1369415423000079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415423000079","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract According to Kant’s ethics, at least on one common interpretation, persons have a special worth or dignity that demands respect. But personhood is not coextensive with human life; for example, individuals can live in severe dementia after losing the capacities constitutive of personhood. Some philosophers, including David Velleman and Dennis Cooley, have suggested that individuals living after the loss of their personhood might offend against the Kantian dignity the individuals once possessed. Cooley has even argued that it is morally required on Kantian grounds for those who realize that they will lose their personhood as a result of dementia (e.g. Alzheimer’s) to hasten their deaths (e.g. commit suicide). This article specifies circumstances in which post-personhood living might indeed involve an affront to the Kantian dignity of a person who once was. However, the article contends, Kant implies that it is neither morally required nor even morally permissible for someone in an early stage of Alzheimer’s to hasten their death to avoid such an affront, even if they have autonomously chosen to do so. The article adds an ethical perspective to debate on physician-assisted dying, in particular on the moral permissibility of the soon-to-be-demented ending their lives.","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47115707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1017/S1369415423000055
P. Romero
{"title":"Macarena Marey , Voluntad omnilateral y finitud de la Tierra: Una lectura de la filosofía política de Kant. Adrogué: Editorial La Cebra, 2021. Pp. 335. ISBN 9789873621918 (pbk) €20.00","authors":"P. Romero","doi":"10.1017/S1369415423000055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415423000055","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48125276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-24DOI: 10.1017/S1369415423000067
S. Tsuda
study is the political potential of the idea of popular sovereignty, as a means to ameliorate – and, ultimately, to eradicate – the injustices of a system of nation-states that negates the active and fully omnilateral participation of diverse political communities around the world. For Marey, Kant’s commitment to an omnilateral will should not be reduced to an ideal mark of all political authority; rather it should be assumed as the normative criterion against which we must evaluate, contest and transform the injustices of our existing practices and institutions. For these reasons, the book represents an important contribution to ongoing debates in Kantian studies, as well as to problems beyond Kant. The book leaves us with the hope of a kind of ‘political ethics’, one that is based on our unavoidable interaction as free agents in a shared and finite earth.
{"title":"J. Colin McQuillan (ed.), Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. viii + 364. ISBN 9781538146255 (hbk) £100.00","authors":"S. Tsuda","doi":"10.1017/S1369415423000067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415423000067","url":null,"abstract":"study is the political potential of the idea of popular sovereignty, as a means to ameliorate – and, ultimately, to eradicate – the injustices of a system of nation-states that negates the active and fully omnilateral participation of diverse political communities around the world. For Marey, Kant’s commitment to an omnilateral will should not be reduced to an ideal mark of all political authority; rather it should be assumed as the normative criterion against which we must evaluate, contest and transform the injustices of our existing practices and institutions. For these reasons, the book represents an important contribution to ongoing debates in Kantian studies, as well as to problems beyond Kant. The book leaves us with the hope of a kind of ‘political ethics’, one that is based on our unavoidable interaction as free agents in a shared and finite earth.","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46880666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1017/S1369415423000031
Lisa Shabel
Dyck and others have already pointed out; but if Baumgarten is one of the Pietist critics of Wolffian rationalism, it is also the case that he is not a complete Leibnizian. Nuzzo, for one, is careful to draw attention to the differences between Baumgarten and Leibniz, but for the most part Baumgarten’s departures from Leibniz are less attended to than those from Wolff. That said, this collection does succeed in stripping Baumgarten of the label of a mere ‘member of the Wolffian school’, which has long been appended to him. The picture of Baumgarten that emerges from this collection is of a much more innovative, even lively thinker, in part as a result of his immersion in the competing intellectual traditions of his day. Thus this collection constitutes an important contribution to the ongoing Baumgarten renaissance.
{"title":"Carl Posy and Ofra Rechter (eds), Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics, vol. 1. The Critical Philosophy and its Roots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 321. ISBN 9781107042902 (hbk) £75.00","authors":"Lisa Shabel","doi":"10.1017/S1369415423000031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415423000031","url":null,"abstract":"Dyck and others have already pointed out; but if Baumgarten is one of the Pietist critics of Wolffian rationalism, it is also the case that he is not a complete Leibnizian. Nuzzo, for one, is careful to draw attention to the differences between Baumgarten and Leibniz, but for the most part Baumgarten’s departures from Leibniz are less attended to than those from Wolff. That said, this collection does succeed in stripping Baumgarten of the label of a mere ‘member of the Wolffian school’, which has long been appended to him. The picture of Baumgarten that emerges from this collection is of a much more innovative, even lively thinker, in part as a result of his immersion in the competing intellectual traditions of his day. Thus this collection constitutes an important contribution to the ongoing Baumgarten renaissance.","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43373264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-06DOI: 10.1017/S1369415422000498
Kate A. Moran
Abstract Typically, Kant describes maxims that violate the moral law as engaging in a kind of comparative judgement: the person who makes a false promise judges it best – at least subjectively – to deceive her friend. I argue that this is not the only possible account of moral failure for Kant. In particular, when we examine maxims of so-called despondency (Verzagtheit) we find that some maxims are resistant to comparative judgement. I argue that this is true for at least two reasons: first, the despondent agent has a maxim to avoid suffering at all costs; second, this anxious preoccupation with suffering makes the despondent agent prone to failures associated with the imagination and its role in creating an ideal of happiness.
{"title":"Kant on Despondent Moral Failure","authors":"Kate A. Moran","doi":"10.1017/S1369415422000498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415422000498","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Typically, Kant describes maxims that violate the moral law as engaging in a kind of comparative judgement: the person who makes a false promise judges it best – at least subjectively – to deceive her friend. I argue that this is not the only possible account of moral failure for Kant. In particular, when we examine maxims of so-called despondency (Verzagtheit) we find that some maxims are resistant to comparative judgement. I argue that this is true for at least two reasons: first, the despondent agent has a maxim to avoid suffering at all costs; second, this anxious preoccupation with suffering makes the despondent agent prone to failures associated with the imagination and its role in creating an ideal of happiness.","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47926331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-21DOI: 10.1017/S1369415422000541
Nabeel Hamid
Catherine Wilson once described Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement as ‘a long, worried, ambivalent book about evolution, beauty, and living forms’ (2008: 98, n. 63). Her pithy remark might explain a widely acknowledged feature of scholarship on the third Critique, namely its piecemeal character. The apparent ambivalence of Kant’s work – moving as it does across aesthetics and philosophy of art, philosophy of biology and the general theory of science, and even philosophy of religion and the final end of human existence, all the while elaborating his baroque philosophical psychology – has led to a suitably fragmentary body of secondary literature. One interpretative challenge, thus, has been to present a unified reading of the treatise, which would show a single overarching thesis running through its fascinating discussions of beauty, sublimity, art, biology, cognition and religion. Ido Geiger’s new monograph takes up this challenge, but with qualifications. Rejecting ‘collaged’ readings of the third Critique (p. 50), he offers a partial remedy to the problem of its unity. The remedy is partial inasmuch as the thesis Geiger sets out to defend – that the principle of purposiveness is a transcendental condition of empirical cognition – only addresses one of the questions Kant identifies as his concern and, indeed, not the principal question. Geiger’s account deals with the narrower of the two ‘transition’ problems Kant raises in the Introductions: the transition from an account of the universal, transcendental laws of nature to an account of its particular, empirical laws. In Geiger’s preferred formulation, this problem amounts to articulating ‘the transcendental conditions of a particular empirical experience and knowledge of nature’, as opposed to the general conditions of experience laid out in the first Critique’s Analytic of Principles (p. 10). The account presented here sets aside, however, the central problem of the third Critique: that of bridging the ‘incalculable gulf’ between nature and freedom, or between the respective claims of epistemic and moral rationality, with which Kant aims to bring the critical enterprise to a close (CPJ, 5: 175). Readers expecting an interpretation of the third Critique as a unified whole guided by that task, as advertised in the front matter of the book, will be disappointed. Geiger openly admits this limitation, stating plainly in his introduction that such a reading is not on offer – notably, the sections on the sublime and on fine art as well as the Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment are excluded from his account, as is Kant’s intriguing and, for the main transition problem, crucial discussion in the Methodology of Teleological Judgment of physicoand ethico-theology. In brief, with regard to the unity of the third Critique, Geiger’s reading avoids being a collage only by passing over what is arguably the book’s central concern. That said, with respect to his specific objective, Geiger presents a compell
{"title":"Ido Geiger, Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World: A Transcendental Reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022 Pp. xiv + 225 ISBN 9781108834261 (hbk) £75.00","authors":"Nabeel Hamid","doi":"10.1017/S1369415422000541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415422000541","url":null,"abstract":"Catherine Wilson once described Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement as ‘a long, worried, ambivalent book about evolution, beauty, and living forms’ (2008: 98, n. 63). Her pithy remark might explain a widely acknowledged feature of scholarship on the third Critique, namely its piecemeal character. The apparent ambivalence of Kant’s work – moving as it does across aesthetics and philosophy of art, philosophy of biology and the general theory of science, and even philosophy of religion and the final end of human existence, all the while elaborating his baroque philosophical psychology – has led to a suitably fragmentary body of secondary literature. One interpretative challenge, thus, has been to present a unified reading of the treatise, which would show a single overarching thesis running through its fascinating discussions of beauty, sublimity, art, biology, cognition and religion. Ido Geiger’s new monograph takes up this challenge, but with qualifications. Rejecting ‘collaged’ readings of the third Critique (p. 50), he offers a partial remedy to the problem of its unity. The remedy is partial inasmuch as the thesis Geiger sets out to defend – that the principle of purposiveness is a transcendental condition of empirical cognition – only addresses one of the questions Kant identifies as his concern and, indeed, not the principal question. Geiger’s account deals with the narrower of the two ‘transition’ problems Kant raises in the Introductions: the transition from an account of the universal, transcendental laws of nature to an account of its particular, empirical laws. In Geiger’s preferred formulation, this problem amounts to articulating ‘the transcendental conditions of a particular empirical experience and knowledge of nature’, as opposed to the general conditions of experience laid out in the first Critique’s Analytic of Principles (p. 10). The account presented here sets aside, however, the central problem of the third Critique: that of bridging the ‘incalculable gulf’ between nature and freedom, or between the respective claims of epistemic and moral rationality, with which Kant aims to bring the critical enterprise to a close (CPJ, 5: 175). Readers expecting an interpretation of the third Critique as a unified whole guided by that task, as advertised in the front matter of the book, will be disappointed. Geiger openly admits this limitation, stating plainly in his introduction that such a reading is not on offer – notably, the sections on the sublime and on fine art as well as the Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment are excluded from his account, as is Kant’s intriguing and, for the main transition problem, crucial discussion in the Methodology of Teleological Judgment of physicoand ethico-theology. In brief, with regard to the unity of the third Critique, Geiger’s reading avoids being a collage only by passing over what is arguably the book’s central concern. That said, with respect to his specific objective, Geiger presents a compell","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46112916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-21DOI: 10.1017/s1369415422000553
Reed Winegar
{"title":"Rudolf A. Makkreel, Kant’s Worldview: How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021 Pp. xii + 284 ISBN 9780810144316 (hbk) $99.95","authors":"Reed Winegar","doi":"10.1017/s1369415422000553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1369415422000553","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46810911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-21DOI: 10.1017/s1369415422000565
J. Shorter-Bourhanou
{"title":"Jimmy Yab, Kant and the Politics of Racism: Towards Kant’s Racialised Form of Cosmopolitan Right Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 Pp. vii + 285 ISBN 978-3030691004 (hbk) €109.99","authors":"J. Shorter-Bourhanou","doi":"10.1017/s1369415422000565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1369415422000565","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54140,"journal":{"name":"Kantian Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42076314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：