The Internality of Moral Faith in Kant’s Religion

Kant Yearbook ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Addison Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Potential Solution ◽  
Empirical Psychology ◽  
Initial Analysis ◽  
The Face ◽  
Moral Faith

AbstractWood (1970) convincingly argues that Kant’s notion of moral faith is a response to a “dialectical perplexity” or antinomy. Specifically, moral faith is a response to the threat of moral despair. In line with this suggestion, I make the case that moral faith is the resolution of a crisis about how to go on with one’s life in the face of the threat of moral despair. If this is right, then we have a potential solution to two related anxieties: (1) why the matter of our moral faith or despair deserves to be a topic of practical philosophy instead of empirical psychology, and (2) how despair could be a real threat even though Kant holds that rational beings could never truly lack faith. But, to fully see how these concerns can be answered, we must go beyond Wood’s initial analysis. I first argue that Kant’s philosophy suggests two kinds of moral faith: external and internal. I then argue that internal moral faith is analogous to self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit) in the second Critique’s practical antinomy. Together, these arguments suggest that moral faith is a response to a real threat of moral despair, and that both dialectically require one another within practical reason.

Confession, the New Psychology, and Birth Control, 1920–60

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey
Keyword(s):  
Birth Control ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Psychological Benefits ◽  
Empirical Psychology ◽  
The Face ◽  
Catholic Tradition

The chapter addresses challenges from empirical psychology and psychiatry that called into question some of the inherited conceptions of sin and guilt. Those relatively new sciences caused some in the Catholic tradition to oppose the psychological approaches as a threat to the confessional tradition and others to reconsider confession in the face of the emerging sciences and to emphasize the benefits of the new psychology for understanding neuroses and mental illnesses that confessors periodically encountered in the confessional. Some, too, underlined the therapeutic and psychological benefits of auricular confession that were consistent with the new sciences. The moral issue of birth control also arose for Catholics in the early 1930s when Pope Pius XI condemned the use of all artificial means of birth regulation. Anecdotal and statistical evidence seems to indicated that significant numbers of childbearing Catholics practiced birth control and a few ceased going to confession because of it.

An Agnostic Moralist

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
Henry Sidgwick
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Potential Solution ◽  
Moral Argument ◽  
Full Rationality

Henry Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason is a problem confronting the ethical enterprise. It’s the tension between one’s own happiness and the happiness of others; or between rational self-love and rational benevolence. Sidgwick thought each impulse was equally legitimate, yet on occasion they encounter an intractable tension. The full rationality of morality requires the resolution of this dualism, but Sidgwick didn’t see such a rapprochement as forthcoming. The only potential solution he could see is a theistic one, according to which a providential God ensures their harmony, but Sidgwick himself refused to follow this path. Nevertheless, his writings include the seeds for such a moral argument, predicated on the full rationality of morality.

Die Institutionalisierung des Nichtinstitutionellen

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben Hartwig
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Argumentation Theory ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Legal Argumentation

The volume examines the relation between law, reason, and discourse in Robert Alexy’s legal philosophy. The examination follows Alexy’s own description of his greater project. In his “Theorie der juristischen Argumentation” [Theory of Legal Argumentation] of 1978, Alexy speaks of the Kantian idea of designing a “Code of Practical Reason”. Today, Alexy is prepared to rest his entire case on the idea of an “Institutionalization of Reason”. The work undertakes the reconstruction of the concept of practical reason underlying this idea. To this end, it examines both the roots that go back to Kant’s practical philosophy, as well as the system represented by Alexys’s legal philosophy, which has grown over a period of more than 40 years. At its center is the thesis of the necessity of a realization of reason through rational practical discourse in law – in short, Alexy’s attempt to institutionalize the non-institutional.

Delusions of Virtue: Kant on Self-Conceit

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Moran
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Philosophy

AbstractLittle extended attention has been given to Kant’s notion of self-conceit (Eigendünkel), though it appears throughout his theoretical and practical philosophy. Authors who discuss self-conceit often describe it as a kind of imperiousness or arrogance in which the conceited agent seeks to impose selfish principles upon others, or sees others as worthless. I argue that these features of self-conceit are symptoms of a deeper and more thoroughgoing failure. Self-conceit is best described as the tendency to insist upon one’s own theoretical or practical conclusions at any cost, while still wanting to appear – to oneself or to others – as though one is abiding by the constraints of theoretical or practical reason. Self-conceit is thus less centrally the tendency to impose one’s will or inclinations upon others, and more centrally the tendency to reconstruct evidence and rationalize so that one may be convinced of one’s own virtue. While the conceited agent may ultimately impose her judgement upon others, she does so in order to preserve her delusion of virtue.

scholarly journals Practical Reason

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-148
Author(s):  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Andrey Breus
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Analytical Theory ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Interpretative Sociology

Paul Ricœur’s essay “Practical Reason” was initially published in 1979, and later became part of the book Du texte à l’action: essais d’herméneutique II (1986), marking Ricœur’s transition from the general problems of the justification of hermeneutics as a legitimate philosophical discipline to the problems of practical philosophy in a broad sense. Relying on the analytical theory of action, the interpretative sociology of M. Weber, and the Hegelian critique of Kantian ethics, Ricœur seeks to restore the Aristotelian concept of phronesis or “practical wisdom” in the context of modern philosophizing. This turns out to be unexpectedly relevant where neither Kant’s deontology nor the Hegelian Sittlichkeit can adequately express the entirety of human practical experience in a world where ideology and alienation have become inevitable components of social life.

scholarly journals Threshold-Dependent Gene Drives in the Wild: Spread, Controllability, and Ecological Uncertainty

BioScience ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (11) ◽  
pp. 900-907 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory A Backus ◽  
Jason A Delborne
Keyword(s):  
Critical Frequency ◽  
Wild Population ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Gene Drive ◽  
Potential Solution ◽  
Spreading Behavior ◽  
The Face ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Ecological Uncertainty ◽  
Gene Drives

Abstract Gene drive technology could allow the intentional spread of a desired gene throughout an entire wild population in relatively few generations. However, there are major concerns that gene drives could either fail to spread or spread without restraint beyond the targeted population. One potential solution is to use more localized threshold-dependent drives, which only spread when they are released in a population above a critical frequency. However, under certain conditions, small changes in gene drive fitness could lead to divergent outcomes in spreading behavior. In the face of ecological uncertainty, the inability to estimate gene drive fitness in a real-world context could prove problematic because gene drives designed to be localized could spread to fixation in neighboring populations if ecological conditions unexpectedly favor the gene drive. This perspective offers guidance to developers and managers because navigating gene drive spread and controllability could be risky without detailed knowledge of ecological contexts.

Kant's Account of Motivation: A Sartrean Response to Some Hegelian Objections

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (01) ◽  
pp. 86-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sorin Baiasu
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Rational Person ◽  
Good Will ◽  
Habitual Responses ◽  
Acting From Duty

Ethical motivation represents an important aspect of Kant's practical philosophy, one without which much of Kant's distinctive position would be lost. Not surprisingly, it is also one of those aspects of Kantianism to which Hegelian criticism directs its focus with predilection. Central to Kant's account of moral motivation is the distinction between acting merely in accordance with duty and acting from duty. When he introduces this distinction, in the Groundwork, Kant also points to the epistemic difficulties of properly drawing the distinction. A key concept here is, without any doubt, that of duty, and Kant begins with a preliminary definition: the notion of duty is a notion ‘which contains that of a good will though under certain subjective limitations and hindrances’ (G: 4: 397). What this definition tells us is that, although beings which are only governed by practical reason without any admixture of inclinations and sensuous drives, that is, purely rational beings, will also have a good will, such beings do not have duties precisely because they lack the ‘subjective limitations and hindrances’ of sensuous motivating forces, such as desires, passions, habitual responses. If a person spontaneously and necessarily acts as duty requires, then it does not make sense to talk about an obligation for this person to act as duty requires. Such a person must be a purely rational person, since only she can always and necessarily act as (practical) reason requires. By contrast, beings with limitations and hindrances, like us, act spontaneously and necessarily as natural laws require and, hence, it does not make sense to talk about our obligation or duty to observe the laws of nature.

Researching Dance in the Wild: Brazilian Experiences

2007 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 140-155
Author(s):  
Christine Greiner
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expression ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
The Face ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Kinetics Of

The final installment of a continuing series on choreography considering the mutual interrogation of philosophy and dance, the articles propose a tentative ethics of dance as a “practical philosophy” under the influence of Gilles Deleuze read through specific choreographic practices. Gerald Siegmund describes his private experience of Boris Charmatz's choreographic machine as a metaphor for the entrapment of theatre and as generative of new bodily subjectivities. Introducing anthropological applications of cognitive science to the particular strategies of choreographers working in Brazil, Christine Greiner argues for a political conception of self through dance. Examining the kinetics of the face in RoseAnne Spradlin's Survive Cycle, Victoria Anderson Davies meditates on the relationship of facial expression to language, to consciousness, and to movement.

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