-
51Comments on GuyerInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (5). 2007.Paul Guyer's paper "Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant's Moral Philosophy" raises a set of issues about how Kantian ethics should be understood in relation to present day "philosophical naturalism" that are very much in need of discussion. The paper itself is challenging, even in some respects iconoclastic, and provides a highly welcome provocation to raise in new ways some basic questions about what Kantian ethics is and what it ought to be. Guyer offers us an admirably informed an…Read more
-
6The antinomies of pure reasonIn Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
-
Punishment, Retribution, and the Coercive Enforcement of RightIn Lara Denis (ed.), Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
-
79Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical PhilosophyPhilosophical Review 106 (4): 601. 1997.In his reading of Kant’s moral philosophy and its grounding in freedom of the will, Allison is best know for giving an exclusively “practical” reading to doctrines about noumenal agency, so that they are taken to have none of the outlandish metaphysical implications often thought to be associated with the Kantian conception of freedom. The central feature of Allison’s interpretation is that Kant operates with a theory of agency in which, from the agent’s standpoint, reasons do not act as causes,…Read more
-
27Kant's practical philosophyIn Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge companion to German idealism, Cambridge University Press. pp. 57--75. 2000.
-
59Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (edited book)Yale University Press. 2002.Immanuel Kant’s _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals _is_ _one of the most important texts in the history of ethics. In it Kant searches for the supreme principle of morality and argues for a conception of the moral life that has made this work a continuing source of controversy and an object of reinterpretation for over two centuries. This new edition of Kant’s work provides a fresh translation that is uniquely faithful to the German original and more fully annotated than any previous tran…Read more
-
96Exploitation*: ALLEN W. WOODSocial Philosophy and Policy 12 (2): 136-158. 1995.It is commonly thought that exploitation is unjust; some think it is part of the very meaning of the word ‘exploitation’ that it is unjust. Those who think this will suppose that the just society has to be one in which people do not exploit one another, at least on a large scale. I will argue that exploitation is not unjust by definition, and that a society might be fundamentally just while nevertheless being pervasively exploitative. I do think that exploitation is nearly always a bad thing, an…Read more
-
631The Marxian critique of justicePhilosophy and Public Affairs 1 (3): 244-282. 1972.When we read Karl M&IX,S descriptions of the capitalist mode of production in Capital amd other writings, all our instincts tell us that these are descriptions of an unjust social system. Marx describes a. society in which one small class of persons lives in comfort and idleness while another class, in ever-increasing numbers, lives in want and vvrctchedncss, laboring to produce thc Wealth enjoyed by the fixst. Marx speaks constantly of capitalist "exploitation" of the worker, and refers to the …Read more
-
40Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (review)Review of Metaphysics 56 (3): 633-635. 2003.
-
53Kant's CompatibilismIn Self and nature in Kant's philosophy, Cornell University Press. pp. 73--101. 1984.
-
MarxIn Ted Honderich (ed.), The philosophers: introducing great western thinkers, Oxford University Press. 1995.
-
82Historical materialism and functional explanationInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 29 (1-4). 1986.This paper is a critical examination of one central theme in Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx; Elster's defense of ?methodological individualism? in social science and his related critique of Marx's use of ?functional explanation?. The paper does not quarrel with Elster's claim that the particular instances of functional explanation advanced by Marx are defective; what it criticizes is Elster's attempt to raise principled, philosophical objections to this type of explanation in the social scien…Read more
-
250Kant's moral religionCornell University Press. 1970.Kant's Moral Religion argues that Kant's doctrine of religious belief if consistent with his best critical thinking and, in fact, that the "moral arguments"--along with the faith they justify--are an integral part of Kant's critical thinking.
-
107Allen W.Wood Stanford University Fichte’s overall aim in the Second Chapter of the System of Ethics is to derive the applicability of the moral principle he has deduced in the First Chapter. That principle was: To determine one’s freedom solely in accordance with the concept of selfdetermination.1 To show that this principle can be applied is to derive its application from the conditions of free agency in which we find ourselves. In the section of the Second Chapter that will concern us, Fichte …Read more
-
181Kant’s Ethical ThoughtCambridge University Press. 1999.This is a major new study of Kant's ethics that will transform the way students and scholars approach the subject in future. Allen Wood argues that Kant's ethical vision is grounded in the idea of the dignity of the rational nature of every human being. Undergoing both natural competitiveness and social antagonism the human species, according to Kant, develops the rational capacity to struggle against its impulses towards a human community in which the ends of all are to harmonize and coincide. …Read more
-
49Does Hegel Have an Ethics?The Monist 74 (3): 358-385. 1991.Kierkegaard complained that Hegel’s system, for all its pretensions to completeness, was lacking an ethics. Even readers more sympathetic to Hegel have often agreed with this, saying that Hegel intended to replace ethics with some form of empirical social science.
-
66Thomas E. Hill, Jr., "Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (2): 314. 1994.
-
357Allen Wood “What is the human being?” Kant sometimes treated this question as the most fundamental question of all philosophy: “The field of philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense can be brought down to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 1. What ought I to do? 1. What may I hope? 1. What is the human being? Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this to anthropology, becaus…Read more
-
8815. Ideology, False Consciousness, and Social IllusionIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 345-363. 1988.
-
76Kant's rational theologyCornell University Press. 1978.This book explores Kant's views on the concept of God and on the attempt to demonstrate God's existence as a means of understanding Kant's work as a whole and of achieving a proper appreciation of the contents of Kant's moral faith.
-
16Enlightenment, revolution and romanticism: the Genesis of modern German political thought, 1790–1800History of European Ideas 17 (6): 804-806. 1993.
Stanford, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |