Abstract

In this book, Dennis Vanden Auweele explores the tension between pessimism and optimism in Kant's ethics and philosophy of religion. Going against a long tradition of interpretation that groups Kant together with other classic philosophers of hope, he aims to highlight the latent pessimism in Kant's works, and show that the full-blown pessimism of post-Kantian philosophers such as Schopenhauer can be read as the attempt to "think Kant's project through to its natural end". What Vanden Auweele means by 'pessimism' is not the Schopenhaurean view that it would have been better not to exist, but the view that "human nature does not navigate toward the good, that autonomy has but a relatively meager...