Commentators on the work of Immanuel Kant have long held that his later "critical" writings are a radical rejection of his earlier, less celebrated efforts. In this pathbreaking book, Susan Shell demonstrates not only the developmental unity of Kant's individual writings, but also the unity of his work and life experience. Shell argues that the central animating issues of Kant's lifework concerned the perplexing relation of spirit to body. Through an exacting analysis of individual writings, Shell maps the philosophical contours (...) of Kant's early intellectual struggles and their relation to his more mature thought. The paradox of mind in matter and the tensions it generates—between freedom and determinacy, independence and community, ideal and real—are shown to inform the whole of his work. Shell's fresh, penetrating analysis of the precritical works will surely catapult them to new prominence in Kant studies. Shell's critique goes further to consider the context of contemporary intellectual life. She explores the fascinating realm of Kant's sexual and medical idiosyncracies, linking them to the primary concerns of his critical philosophy. She develops a sure-to-be controversial treatment of the connection between Kant's philosophy and his chronic hypochondria, and illuminates previously unforeseen connections in a remarkable convergence of life and thought, with important theoretical and practical implications for modern times. (shrink)

Carazan's dream : Kant's early theory of freedom -- Kant's archimedean moment : remarks in observation concerning the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime -- Rousseau, Count Verri, and the true economy of human nature : lectures on anthropology, 1772-1781 -- The paradox of autonomy -- Moral hesitation in religion within the boundaries of bare reason -- Kant's true politics : Völkerrecht in toward perpetual peace and the metaphysics of morals -- Kant as educator : conflict of the faculties, (...) part one -- Archimedes revisited : honor and history in the conflict of the faculties, part two -- Kant's Jewish problem. (shrink)

This Element examines the entirety of Kant's Critique of Taste with particular emphasis on its political and moral aims. Kant's critical treatment of aesthetic judgment is both an extended theoretical response to influential predecessors and contemporaries, including Rousseau and Herder, and a practical intervention in its own right meant to nudge history forward at a time of civilizational crisis. Attention to these themes helps resolve a number of puzzles, both textual and philosophic, including the normative force and meaning of judgments (...) of taste, and the relation between natural and artful beauty. (shrink)

Kant's Observations of 1764 and Remarks of 1764–5 document a crucial turning point in his life and thought. Both reveal the growing importance for him of ethics, anthropology and politics, but with an important difference. The Observations attempts to observe human nature directly. The Remarks, by contrast, reveals a revolution in Kant's thinking, largely inspired by Rousseau, who 'turned him around' by disclosing to Kant the idea of a 'state of freedom' as a touchstone for his thinking. This and related (...) thoughts anticipate such famous later doctrines as the categorical imperative. This collection of essays by leading Kant scholars illuminates the many and varied topics within these two rich works, including the emerging relations between theory and practice, ethics and anthropology, men and women, philosophy, history and the 'rights of man'. (shrink)

Kant's brief ‘Postscript of a Friend’ serves as a peculiar coda to his life work. The last of Kant's writing to be published during his lifetime, it is both a friendly endorsement of Christian Gottlieb Mielcke's newly competed Lithuanian–German and German–Lithuanian Dictionary and a plea in Kant's own name for the preservation of minority languages, Lithuanian in particular. This support for minority languages has no visible precedent in his earlier writings, in which national, civic and linguistic identities and associated loyalties (...) tend to overlap. Indeed, Kant's understanding of the commonwealth as nation-state seems predicated on the fact or myth of ethnic and linguistic unity and homogeneity. The same apparent lack of precedent also applies to the Nachschrift's singling out as a people of peculiar civic merit of the Lithuanians, who are not otherwise mentioned in any of Kant's published or unpublished writings. The work thus raises an obvious question: why does Kant devote his last published work to a topic and cause in which he does not seem to have taken much earlier interest? (shrink)

The following remarks are intended to help clarify Kant's position on international right and, specifically, the so-called ‘right of war’. They are part of a more general study of Kant's politics; but I also make them here in the hope that Kant's view of international law can furnish us with some much-needed practical help and guidance. More specifically, I will try to show that Kant is less averse to the use of force, including resort to pre-emptive war, and far more (...) attuned to possibilities for political catastrophe, than he is often taken to be. A greater appreciation for Kant's actual position can, I hope, make a small contribution toward mending the growing rift between so-called ‘Kantians’ who underrate the need for force, and self-styled ‘Hobbesians’ who underestimate the power of moral principle. (shrink)

Kant’s thought from the 1750s onward can usefully be understood as a series of efforts to overcome the challenge posed in Machiavelli’s Prince: namely, to reconcile our idea of justice with what is actually possible given human nature as it is, rather than as reason tells us that it “should” be. Especially following his reading of Rousseau, this effort took the form of successive translations of the metaphysical concept of a world into the juridical language of world-citizenship, which transformed a (...) rational and physical cosmology into moral and historical cosmopolitanism. The thought of both Hobbes and Rousseau proved instrumental to those efforts. Initially, Kant thought human history oscillated between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of civil order—i.e., between orders that guarantee, respectively, security and freedom. In his later works, Kant suggested that history progressed from Hobbes to Rousseau, but he hesitated to declare that a transformation from prudence-based security to virtue-based civil independence was completable even in principle. Speaking generally, Kant sought to reconcile a kind of historical providentialism with the sovereign authority of reason. This reconciliation blurs the distinction between, on the one hand, the metaphysical and/or religious and, on the other hand, the secular—a distinction on which Michael Rosen’s perspicuous intellectual history tends to focus. That this earliest version of Kant’s rational providentialism makes reward of effort morally central also suggests that it is ultimately even more important to Kant than the punitive theme on which Rosen himself focusses. (shrink)

A rightful condition, according to Kant, requires both a law to limit the freedom of each and a ruler to enforce that limit, a ruler who cannot himself be subject to the law’s enforcement without ceasing to perform his primary function. Kant placed his hopes, circa 1784, in a future ruler who combined worldly experience, a ‘correct conception’ of a possible constitution, and, above all, the good will to accept it. Subsequent historical events, along with the ‘completion’ in 1790 of (...) Kant’s own critical system, suggested a new basis for confidence in civil progress no longer ultimately dependent on the ‘good will’ of rulers, while also making new demands on citizens themselves. I share the view of many others that Kant came to prefer the people’s actual consent to the laws over the merely hypothetical consent that he endorsed in the works of the mid-1780s. My reading of the Metaphysics of Morals Part One differs in treating the work not only as a theoretical treatise but also, and necessarily, a practical intervention in historical time. The resulting reading yields an internally coherent argument favouring representative democracy of a peculiar kind – one whose ‘organic’ character has not been fully appreciated. (shrink)

This book presents the first full translation of the correspondence of Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger, showing for each the development of key and influential ideas, along with seven interpretative essays by leading Strauss scholars. During the early to mid-1930’s, Leo Strauss carried on an intense, and sometimes deeply personal, correspondence with one of the leading intellectual lights among Heidegger’s circle of recent students and younger associates. A fellow traveler in the effort to “return to Plato” and reject neo-Kantian conventions (...) of the day, Krüger was also a serious student of Rudolf Bultmann and the neo-orthodox movement in which Strauss also took an early interest. During the most intense years of their correspondence, each underwent significant intellectual development: in Krüger’s case, through a penetrating series of studies of Kant and Descartes, respectively, ultimately leading to Krüger’s conversion to Catholicism; and, in Strauss’s case, through the complex stages of what he subsequently called his “reorientation,” involving what he for the first time calls “political philosophy.” Readers interested in tracing the development of Strauss’s thoughts regarding a theological alternative that he found helpfully challenging—if not ultimately compelling—will find this correspondence to be an accessible point of entry. (shrink)

Unlike that of most liberal thinkers, Kant's theory of punishment is unabashedly retributive. For classical liberals punishment is justified only by the harms it can prevent, not by any allegedly intrinsic good served by making the guilty suffer. Here Hobbes' blunt insistence that the aim of punishment ‘is not a revenge, but terror’ is prototypical in substance, if not in style. Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Bentham and Beccaria, for all their differences, agree that punishment must look to future good rather than (...) to avenging past wrongs. This attitude on the part of classic liberalism toward retribution is not surprising, given its association with the kind of theocratic politics liberalism arose to combat. (shrink)

One of the persistent puzzles of Strauss scholarship is the absence in any of his published works of a thematic treatment of Immanuel Kant (The sole exception is his early dissertation on Jacobi, which includes an extensive treatment of Kant from the perspective of Jacobi’s critique. See Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis (1921)). This absence is all the more striking given Kant’s importance in shaping the intellectual milieu in which the younger Strauss was educated and (...) against which he, along with many of his early intellectual companions, including Gerhard Krüger, Jacob Klein, Gerschom Scholem, and others, rebelled more or less explicitly. And it gives the two seminars that he dedicated to Kant, in 1958 and 1967, respectively (an additional seminar, given in the early 1950s, was evidently not recorded), (with the sole exception of his early dissertation on Jacobi) special importance for anyone wishing to better grasp Strauss’s understanding and appraisal of Kant’s thought, including the meaning of that relative public silence. (shrink)

Between 1928 through the mid-1930s, Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger carried on a philosophically intense exchange, until the war and related events cut the correspondence short. A series of debilitating strokes in the early 1950s prematurely ended Krüger’s intellectual career, foreclosing the possibility of further serious engagement after the war. By that time, however, their respective intellectual paths, which had once closely coincided, had diverged. Still, a series of late exchanges concerning Krüger’s 1969 Festschrift, to which Strauss contributed, testifies to (...) their enduring mutual attachment. (shrink)

If there is one generally acknowledged “take away” from the election of Trump, it may well be that the old divisions between right and left no longer hold. Trump supporters were seemingly moved less by traditional conservative appeals to free markets and small government than by anger against perceived condescension and indifference on the part of the cultural elite to their own deeply held moral beliefs and sense of personal dignity. Kant offers both insight into and potential remedies for the (...) dilemmas growing out of our present situation. This is particularly true in matters of economic policy and civic engagement, where “top down” solutions have often left their would-be beneficiaries feeling ever more powerless and disrespected. By addressing these concerns in the name of common citizenship, Kant’s thought helps restore the meaning of the core constitutional principles of freedom, equality, and civic dignity that Trump’s presidency increasingly puts in question. (shrink)

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of (...) MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)

The innkeeper’s sign recalls another “inn,” mentioned by Kant in a work published the previous year - the inn [Karavenserair; Wirthshausr] as emblem of the world, where “each man must be content at every turn-in in life’s journey to be soon pushed out by a successor.”. Kant there suggests that such an image of this world is what remains if one lacks hope that man in this world constantly progresses. If our world is to be better than a hostelry for (...) nomads the idea of perpetual peace must somehow be our orienting signal. Philosophy may critically secure itself a worldly home; but mankind generally finds itself, at best, perpetually moving in the right direction. Constant progress implies constant approach, and with it, a perpetually deferred arrival. Kant’s title, like the ambiguous signpost it replaces, advertises a repose at once attractive and repellent, promising a rest that draws us on while also putting us on guard. (shrink)

Creating the Kingdom of Ends consists of thirteen essays published between 1983 and 1993 and centered, according to the author, around two themes: Kant’s Formula of Humanity understood as a theory of value, and Kant’s doctrine of the two standpoints understood as a view of the world as open to our remaking. The resulting readings, often brilliant in their clarity and force, sketch the outlines of a moral theory more concretely situated and congruent with common sense than that with which (...) Kant is frequently taxed. (shrink)