Defending Kant’s Antinomy of Practical Reason

2021 ◽  
pp. 423-432
Author(s):  
Christopher Benzenberg
Keyword(s):  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Itmam Aulia Rakhman

Ath-Thusi uses Aristotle's understanding of the practical reason of the theory of surgery. According to Ath-Thusi, the cause of deviation is anything excessive. Thus, the unbalanced state of the soul is caused by the advantages, disadvantages, or morbidity of the mind. Diversity in a society is a necessity, a household, as the smallest community of a complex society and full of differences, it is certainly necessary to be based on the building of togetherness and mutual respect between one another. This article will describe the creative ideas of Khawajah Nashiruddin Ath-Thusi related to the philosophy of the household in order to answer the present-day problematic of the family.


Author(s):  
Harvey Siegel

This chapter offers a reply to Stefaan Cuypers’ explication and critique of the views of rationality and critical thinking laid out in the previous chapters and in earlier work (see his “Critical Thinking, Autonomy and Practical Reason,” 2004). While Cuypers’ discussion is praiseworthy in several respects, it (1) mistakenly attributes to those views a Humean conception of (practical) reason, and (2) unsuccessfully argues that the positions articulated and defended in those earlier chapters lack the resources required to defend the basic claim that critical thinking is a fundamental educational ideal. Cuypers’ analysis also raises deep issues about the motivational character of reasons; I briefly address this matter as well.


Author(s):  
Michael E. Bratman

In a series of essays—in particular, his 1994 essay “Assure and Threaten”—David Gauthier develops a two-tier pragmatic theory of practical rationality and argues, within that theory, for a distinctive account of the rationality of following through with prior assurances or threats. His discussion suggests that certain kinds of temporally extended agency play a special role in one’s temporally extended life going well. I argue that a related idea about diachronic self-governance helps explain a sense in which an accepted deliberative standard can be self-reinforcing. And this gives us resources to adjust Gauthier’s theory in response to a threat of what Kieran Setiya has called a “fragmentation of practical reason.”


Author(s):  
John Deigh

Bernard Williams’s controversial view about reasons for action is the topic of this essay. The essay explains Williams’s internalist account of reasons for action as an improvement on Donald Davidson’s account. It then corrects Williams’s criticism of externalist accounts of reasons for action by conceding that such accounts are viable as long as they do not imply that the reasons a person has for doing an action can explain his or her doing it. The concession follows from acknowledging the very different program of studying reasons in ethics exemplified in the work of Kurt Baier. Once the correction is made to Williams’s criticism, the essay offers a defense of his view against the criticisms of T. M. Scanlon and Christine Korsgaard.


Author(s):  
Simon Robertson

Nietzsche is one of the most subversive ethical thinkers of the Western canon. This book offers a critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance for contemporary moral philosophy. It develops a charitable but critical reading of his thought, pushing some claims and arguments as far as seems fruitful while rejecting others. But it also uses Nietzsche in dialogue with, so to contribute to, a range of long-standing issues within normative ethics, metaethics, value theory, practical reason, and moral psychology. The book is divided into three principal parts. Part I examines Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that it raises well-motivated challenges to morality’s normative authority and value: his error theory about morality’s categoricity is in a better position than many contemporary versions; and his critique of moral values has bite even against undemanding moral theories, with significant implications not just for rarefied excellent types but also us. Part II turns to moral psychology, attributing to Nietzsche and defending a sentimentalist explanation of action and motivation. Part III considers his non-moral perfectionism, developing models of value and practical normativity that avoid difficulties facing many contemporary accounts and that may therefore be of wider interest. The discussion concludes by considering Nietzsche’s broader significance: as well as calling into question many of moral philosophy’s deepest assumptions, he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.


Author(s):  
Jill Vance Buroker

Kant’s Critical philosophy depends on the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, which he borrowed from Aristotle. But unlike Aristotle Kant claims that theoretical reason is subordinate to practical reason. This raises the possibility that theoretical judging could be a voluntary activity. This chapter investigates Kant’s view of the relation between theoretical judgments and the will. Based on Andrew Chignell’s recent work, it is argued that Kant recognizes the legitimate direct use of the will only in judgments he labels Belief (Glaube). With respect to Knowledge, his position is identical to Descartes’s position on clear and distinct perception. An analysis of Kant’s voluntarism regarding the activities of theoretical reason provides a model for subordinating theoretical reason to practical reason.


Author(s):  
Benj Hellie

Recent neo-Anscombean work in praxeology (aka ‘philosophy of practical reason’), salutarily, shifts focus from an alienated ‘third-person’ viewpoint on practical reason to an embedded ‘first-person’ view: for example, the ‘naive rationalizations’ of Michael Thompson, of form ‘I am A-ing because I am B-ing’, take up the agent’s view, in the thick of action. Less salutary, in its premature abandonment of the first-person view, is an interpretation of these naive rationalizations as asserting explanatory links between facts about organically structured agentive processes in progress, followed closely by an inflationary project in ‘practical metaphysics’. If, instead, praxeologists chase first-personalism all the way down, both fact and explanation vanish (and with them, the possibility of metaphysics): what is characteristically practical is endorsement of nonpropositional imperatival content, chained together not explanatorily, but through limits on intelligibility. A connection to agentive behavior must somehow be reestablished—but this can (and can only) be done ‘transcendentally’.


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