Echoes of Dante in Kant

One of the great pleasures of reading and re-reading is encountering conceptual connections between authors and works that you may have never considered in common.  I had one of these experiences recently while reading a short book about Dante.  While working through the author's discussion of Monarchia and its relation to the Purgatorio, I found myself thinking that in some respects Dante's dualistic political philosophy anticipated important elements in Kant's short monograph Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and his essays "What Is Enlightenment?", "The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent," and "Toward Perpetual Peace."

The Loving Tensions of Peter Singer

In reading a conversation between Peter Singer and Alex Voorhoeve, I was struck by a central tension in Prof. Singer's explanation of his ethical views.  It is this.  On the one hand, the Princeton University professor insists that human persons share equal respective value and should be both considered and treated on radically equal terms.  On the other hand, he acknowledges that meaningfulness in human relationships stems from considering and treating human persons on fundamentally different terms. How do we reconcile these ideas and senses?

The Human Status of Frances Kamm

What if you could have a thirty-minute conversation with each of eleven distinguished people about their views on a subject in which you were keenly interested?  What would you think?  If you are like me -- and if that subject was, say, moral philosophy -- you would be a little giddy.  So you can imagine my excitement when I ran across and began to read a recent book by Alex Voorhoeve, Conversations on Ethics (2009).

As a way of processing these conversations, I intend to post some reflections on each, starting now with the conversation that Frances Kamm has with Alex Voorhoeve.  Professor Kamm points to what she believes is the deep structure of morality.  The impetus for this in her life as a philosopher was a graduate seminar taught by Robert Nozick, who earlier in Anarchy, State, and Utopia had introduced the so-called "paradox of deontology."

The paradox of deontology involves this tension.  Assume that, on the one hand, you believe that everyone possesses the same rights against being harmed in a certain way, but then ask, on the other hand, how would you answer this question:  "If you could save Abby and Betty from being harmed in that way by instead harming Calvin, why would you not harm the one to save the two?"

Rorty and Kant on Ethics

The shift from the modern to the postmodern is sometimes described in terms of movement away from foundations, away from an anchor for reality, knowledge, and ethics. Richard Rorty diagnoses a sharp contrast between two constellations of moral views, Kantians and Hegelians. In advancing his theory, Rorty sides with the Hegelians against the Kantians: "If the Hegelians are right, then there are no ahistorical criteria for deciding when it is or is not a responsible act to desert a community, any more than for deciding when to change lovers or professions" ("Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," in Pragmatism [ed. Menand], 330). Rorty's framework oversimplifies Kant's moral philosophy on the "ahistorical" matter, but as a heuristic it captures well an impulse -- namely, to derive ethical criteria from the human condition -- that runs from the Enlightenment, including Kant, to Rorty and beyond.

Emerson and Kant on Enlightenment

Ralph Waldo Emerson's cultivation of self-reliance in his essays both breaks with and continues in some important ways the Enlightenment tradition, particularly that outlined by Immanuel Kant. The breaks are not insignificant, but ultimately Emerson stands more firmly within the basic Enlightenment project than outside of it.

Rousseau and Flaubert on History

What is the role of historical progress, or its effects, in the thinking of two Frenchmen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)?  In my last post, I compared Rousseau to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) on the subject of what Enlightenment is and has done.  In this post, I want to build on that by focusing more specifically on the question of history as it marched from the period of Enlightenment further into the period of modernity.  And I want to explore this within the French borders.  Kant and Rousseau were contemporaries but not countrymen.  The opposite is true of Rousseau and Flaubert, and it may be beneficial to glimpse how successive generations of French writers saw things unfolding.  Before turning to that, however, a refresher on the European context may be helpful.

Was Rousseau an Enlightenment Figure?

I have recently been re-reading some key texts of modernity, which partly explains my blog silence for the last few months.  Among these texts are essays on the Enlightenment by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).  Sometimes the best questions for learning are the most basic ones.  Here are two:

1. What was Kant's understanding of the Enlightenment?
2. Was Rousseau an Enlightenment figure according to Kant's definition?