Introduction to Part II

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-214
Author(s):  
Helga Varden
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
History Education ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Complex Idea ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
Personal Ethics ◽  
The Universe

It is our capacity to act truly freely that makes it possible for us to be morally responsible for our actions. It is what sets us apart from all other living creatures we have encountered so far in the universe and enables us to be autonomous, self-governing through practical reason. In turn, understanding Kant’s conception of freedom requires us to pay close attention to his distinction between internal freedom (virtue or first-personal ethics) and external freedom (right or justice). It is this complex idea of human freedom that informs all Kant’s practical works, regardless of whether the work in question focuses on ethics (virtue), religion, politics, right (justice), history, education, or anthropology—just as it centrally informs the structure of and theory presented in this book. ...

Kant's Justification of Ethics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Ware
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Metaphysics Of Morals ◽  
Moral Normativity ◽  
Moral Requirements

Kant’s arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law continue to inspire work in contemporary moral philosophy. Many prominent ethicists invoke Kant, directly or indirectly, in their efforts to derive the authority of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. But many commentators have detected a deep rift between the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, leaving Kant’s project of justification exposed to conflicting assessments and interpretations. In this major re-reading of Kant, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant’s mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the moral law’s primacy. Using both close analysis and historical contextualization, Owen Ware overturns a paradigmatic way of reading Kant’s arguments for morality and freedom, situating them within Kant’s critical methodology at large. The result is a novel understanding of Kant that challenges much of what goes under the banner of Kantian arguments for moral normativity today.

A Naturalistic Intrinsic Value Theodicy

2019 ◽  
pp. 236-258
Author(s):  
Scott A. Davison
Keyword(s):  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Survival ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Intrinsic Values ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe

The theodicy explored in Chapter 13 is naturalistic in the sense that it does not appeal to the existence of good things or events or processes that cannot be studied using the natural sciences. More specifically, unlike most of the theodicies that are typically discussed in the literature, this one does not involve any claims about human survival of death, the existence of a soul, libertarian human freedom, or divine intervention, miraculous or otherwise. The theodicy explored here involves the following claims: Everything that exists is intrinsically valuable to some degree; the universe as a whole is a thing of immense intrinsic value; the immense intrinsic value of the universe as a whole provides God with a justifying reason for creating it; the evil in the world is offset by the intrinsic values of the creatures affected together with the intrinsic value of the world that comes from its regularity.

Diversifying Method

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-261
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
General Scientific ◽  
Deterministic Framework

By investigating Kant’s anthropology, this chapter presents him as a thinker who was firmly committed to a conception of the human being as shaped by its situatedness in the empirical world of history and culture. However, due to Kant’s own methodological constraints, he could recognize this situatedness only if approached through a deterministic framework that traces the causes and effects of the laws of nature. Human freedom here becomes almost unrecognizable, which makes it necessary for us to acknowledge the systematic nature of Kant’s general “scientific” enterprise. This enterprise employs different methodological strategies and disciplines that all in their own way clarify what it means to be human: a creature that is able to know and understand, but also able to act freely. Kant’s anthropology appeals to us in our capacity to act, thereby performing a function his theoretical sciences fail to cover.

Barth and Modern Moral Philosophy

2019 ◽  
pp. 516-531
Author(s):  
Derek Alan Woodard-Lehman
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Rational Form ◽  
Social Form ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Ethics ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

This chapter argues against the familiar consensus that Barth’s relationship to modern moral philosophy is oppositional. It demonstrates that Barth appropriates the central insights of his philosophical predecessors and incorporates them into his ethics, even as he anticipates one of the most fruitful developments in contemporary moral philosophy: Stephen Darwall’s ‘second-personal ethics’. Rather than casting autonomy as sin, he recasts obedience to the Word of God as a form of autonomy. Barth incorporates the rational form of Kantian self-legislation and the social form of Hegelian mutual recognition into his account of subjective reception of revelation. Because Barth does not separate the sovereignty of revelation from the sociality of the church’s interpretation of Scripture and confession of faith, we—Barth’s readers—must not separate his account of hearing the Word of God from his account of hearing the divine command. In fact, we should take his account of the subjective reception of revelation as his most fulsome and winsome account of practical reason.

God and the Good

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-154
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Insole
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
External Object ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Good Will ◽  
The Will

This chapter studies Kant’s dramatic rupture, both with his own earlier position about the highest created good, and with any theological or philosophical tradition that he would have received (from scholastic or Lutheran sources). The unconditioned, that which is all-sufficient for practical reason and the will, is not, as it would be for traditional Christian theology, loving and knowing God. Pivotal here is Kant’s rejection of any ‘external object’ for the will and practical reason. Rather, the unconditioned, for Kant, is the will itself, in its activity of rational willing, or, as Kant puts it, the ‘good will’. Kant is convinced that only in this way is genuine human freedom protected.

scholarly journals Ontologi Eksistensialisme: Antara Religiusitas dan Non-Religiusitas

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-103
Author(s):  
Lukman Fajariyah
Keyword(s):  
Research Method ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Long Span ◽  
Mulla Sadra ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Qualitative Descriptive ◽  
Small Parts ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Descriptive Method

The discussion on the field of ontology in philosophical studies always has its own uniqueness. Ontology as a science that discusses the nature of all things stimulates humans to always think and reflect so that in the long span of ontology studies many figures will play a role in that field. Characters who contribute to thinking about nature have their own characteristics. This is represented by figures Mulla Sadra and Jean Paul Sartre. This paper intends to explore the thoughts of Mulla Shadra and Jean Paul Sartre regarding ontology studies by using a comparative approach, where researchers compare or compare the two thoughts of these figures in revealing differences and similarities. The research method used in this paper is a qualitative-descriptive method to clearly describe the object. The findings in this paper are; First, Sadra's existential ontology emphasizes more on the aspect of religiosity in which all the existences in the universe are small parts of God's existence, meaning that all existence depends on its source, namely God. Meanwhile, Secondly, Sartre's existential ontology places more emphasis on human freedom as the main actor in life. According to him, the existence of humans with their freedom is absolute without interference from God (non-religious/atheist), even humans create their own functions and goals.

scholarly journals Rebecca West, the Forgotten Vorticist?

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-497
Author(s):  
Chris Mourant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Vortex Motion ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Highly Active ◽  
The Universe

The inclusion of Rebecca West's short story ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ in the first issue of BLAST (1914) has much to tell us about the intellectual debts the Vorticist movement owed to West and to the feminist periodical culture with which she was associated. West composed her story in 1912–13, years when she was highly active as both contributor to and literary editor of Dora Marsden's The Freewoman (1911–12) and The New Freewoman (1913). In this article, I examine how the ‘energy’ promoted across BLAST aligned with feminist political conceptions of energy in Marsden's journals, and how these ideas were also shaped by early twentieth-century understandings of the universe, including theories of vortex motion, the ether, electromagnetism and thermodynamics. By paying close attention to the theme and metaphor of energy in ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, this article traces patterns of influence between West, Marsden, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis that reveal intersections between avant-guerre feminism and the Vorticist avant-garde.

scholarly journals 自然生命的倫理思慮

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-33
Author(s):  
Guowen ZHOU
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Digital Commons ◽  
Spiritual Well Being ◽  
Life Philosophy ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Natural Life

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.以老莊的道家思想為憑鑒，切入對自然之物的生命倫理審視，萬物的發端離不開生命之道，生命的兩重價值在於健康與自由。理解生命之端倪在於合乎自然，它不僅善待自然界中的有機物與無機物，而且有效地遵循自然界的生命規律。對人類生命與自然生命的關係的認識是在交互超越主義的框架下進行，它們之間無所不在、無時不在的互動提供了一種視域融合式的自然辨證法觀念。在一個更寬廣的生命倫理學層面，我們必須把生命主體的範圍由人類推廣至自然界的所有生物，它們的生命不僅與人類一樣擁有內在價值，而且也應該被賦予道德權利。對自然生命的倫理審視，是對人類在生命倫理學的生態系統層面所提出的要求。自然生命保護的倫理原則，基本上可歸類為：健康原則、權利原則、自主原則、公正原則、關懷原則與尊重原則。Daoism is a life philosophy that concerns living in line with the rules and patterns of nature. It is ecocentric instead of anthropocentric. In other words, Daoism sees the universe as an organic whole in which there is an intrinsic interconnectedness between the natural world (including animals) and human beings. The two values emphasized by Daoism are health and freedom, both of which are linked to the Daoist conception of nature and naturalness. The Daoist idea of naturalness (ziran) is based on the cosmological view that all things come from the Dao and that all things transform according to its pattern.This essay examines the Daoist ethics of “natural life” and how it is understood within the bigger picture of an ecosystem shared by all living things. The author contends that the principle of health—the physical and spiritual well-being of a person—and the principle of human freedom should be associated with the ecological concerns of today.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 544 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 216-218
Author(s):  
John Brunero
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Social Rule ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Moral Requirements

This concluding chapter sums up the main claims defended in the book, and explains how those claims relate to some of the sources of philosophical interest in means–ends coherence mentioned in the introduction. Although means–ends coherence can’t be traced to some social rule or convention, it can be explained in terms of the constitutive aims of the very attitudes the requirement governs. These constitutive aims—given how we’re understanding them in terms of sthe success conditions of the relevant attitudes—would not raise the same metaphysical, epistemological, and motivational worries that led antirealists like Mackie to doubt that moral requirements are part of the fabric of the universe. Matters would be different if we understood means–ends coherence such that we ought not be means–ends incoherent in the same sense in which we ought not intentionally cause human suffering for fun—in that both would be contrary to the “ought” of practical reason. Then it would be unclear why skepticism about the latter claim about what we ought not do wouldn’t also involve us in skepticism about the former.

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