An Unfamiliar and Positive Law: On Kant and Schiller

2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reed Winegar
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract: A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. Friedrich Schiller advanced a version of this criticism to which Kant publicly responded. Recent commentators have emphasized the role that Kant’s reply assigns to the pleasure that accompanies successful moral action. In contrast, I argue that Kant’s reply relies primarily on the sublime feeling that arises when we merely contemplate the moral law. In fact, the pleasures emphasized by other recent commentators depend on this sublime feeling. These facts illuminate Kant’s views regarding the relationship between morality, freedom, and the development of moral feelings.

Il Cielo Stellato Sopra di Me e la Legge Morale in Me

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (39) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Marco Sgarbi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Mind

«Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me». With these famous words written on paper and inscribed in stone, Immanuel Kant concludes the Critique of Practical Reason. In this paper, I intend to show how this sentence is closely linked with: 1) the kantian doctrine on the sublime and 2) to the foundation of the logic of the irrational in the Critique of Judgement.

Does Kant Permit Grace?

2020 ◽  
pp. 301-320
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Insole
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Traditional Conception ◽  
Divine Grace

This chapter asks whether Kant, in some sense, at least permits us to believe in the possibility of some sort of divine grace, in terms of a supplement to our moral action, or divine assistance. It is established that Kant does permit belief in what could be called a ‘reactive’ divine action, where the human being makes the first moral move in freedom, with God offering some sort of assistance. Kant, though, does not permit belief in proactive divine action, where God would be conceived of as first acting upon us, in a way that helps us to move towards the moral law. This would violate Kant’s demands in relation to freedom. Some commentators have suggested that Kant makes ‘room’ for some sort of concept of divine–human concurrence. This claim is dealt with by showing that, at most, Kant can be said to offer a translation of this concept, into the terms of ‘reactive divine action’, which, from the point of view of the Christian tradition, is tantamount to a denial of concurrence. Kant regards the more traditional conception of concurrence to be an ‘impenetrable mystery’. Kant does allow some space for specific types of mystery, but concurrence, for Kant, is the wrong type of mystery, being useless (and even dangerous) for both theoretical and practical reason.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

scholarly journals The 'spirit' and the 'letter' of the moral law: Text and commentary in the hermeneutics of German idealism, I

2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 143-157
Author(s):  
Vladimir Milisavljevic
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Literal Interpretation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Historical Origins

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on different aspects of the hermeneutical problem in post-Kantian philosophical 'constellation'. In this domain, the problem of the relationship between the text and its commentary is theorized in terms of the antithesis between 'Spirit' and 'Letter', which clearly has religious roots. Therefore, the first part of the paper examines the historical origins of this antithesis, as well as its application in philosophical discussions which developed by the end of the 18th century about the problem of finding the 'true' interpretation to Kant's philosophy. The second part of the text, which is to be published in the next issue of this review, brings the duality of spiritual and literal interpretation into closer connection with the topics of Kant's moral philosophy.

scholarly journals The relation between the beauty and the sublime in Hartmann′s aesthetics

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-167
Author(s):  
Nebojsa Grubor
Keyword(s):  
Basic Assumption ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Values

The text examines the relationship between the beauty and the sublime in Hartmann?s aesthetics. According to the basic assumption of Hartmann?s aesthetics, the sublime, like all other aesthetic values, are subordinated to the beauty. The text shows that the relationship between the beauty and the sublime in Hartmann?s aesthetics is complex and that beauty formally includes the sublime, but that the sublime in terms of fixing aesthetic content is the core of aesthetic issues.

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.

Intellectual Transformations and Elusive Reconciliation

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-244
Author(s):  
Aziz al-Azmeh
Keyword(s):  
Positive Law ◽  
Religious Intellectuals ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realities

This chapter sketches the course and ambiguities of modern intellectual transformations related to issue of religion and secularism. It takes up perceptions of historical backwardness, and various apologetic strategies in which Muslim Reform attempted to navigate the relations between scripture, tradition and the cognitive and political realities and desiderata of the day, and the relation between Muslim jurisprudence and the requirements of positive law. It discusses the adoption and adaptation of positivism and Darwinism, and the conflicts between secular and religious intellectuals over issues at once cognitive and political. It offers an analysis about the relationship between various currents of thought, and the changing realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter analyses the impasses of apologetic modernism.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Philosophy Of Action ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Moral psychology, for purposes of this volume, encompasses issues in metaethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action, including questions concerning the objectivity of morality, the relationship between moral judgment and emotion, the nature of the emotions, free will, and moral responsibility, and the structure of the mind as that is relevant to the possibility of moral action and judgment. Nietzsche’s “naturalism” is introduced and explained, and certain confusions about its meaning are addressed. An overview of the volume follows

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document