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30Preface to Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason by Georg Friedrich MeierIn Lawrence Pasternack & Pablo Muchnik (eds.), Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason by Georg Friedrich Meier, Bloomsbury Academic. 2016.The aim of Kant’s Sources in Translation is to retrieve the rich intellectual world that influenced Kant’s philosophical development. In its first stage, the series makes available the most important textbooks Kant used throughout his long teaching career. Many of these textbooks are in Latin or in German and remain inaccessible to Anglophone readers. Lacking this material, however, it is difficult to appreciate Kant’s originality and process of philosophical maturation, for readers are unable t…Read more
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26Preface to Preparation for Natural Theology by Johann August EberhardIn Lawrence Pasternack & Pablo Muchnik (eds.), Preparation for Natural Theology, Bloomsbury Academic. 2016.In this paper, I develop a quasi-transcendental argument to justify Kant’s infamous claim “man is evil by nature.” The cornerstone of my reconstruction lies in drawing a systematic distinction between the seemingly identical concepts of “evil disposition” (böseGesinnung) and “propensity to evil” (Hang zumBösen). The former, I argue, Kant reserves to describe the fundamental moral outlook of a single individual; the latter, the moral orientation of the whole species. Moreover, the appellative “e…Read more
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26Immediate Experience, Mystical ‘Encounters’ and the ‘Voice’ of God: Palmquist’s Critical Mysticism and Kant’s Theory of ExperienceKantian Review 26 (1): 129-135. 2021.In this brief commentary, I focus on Part II of Kant and Mysticism, where Stephen Palmquist explores the space for mystical experience in Kant. In particular, I focus on what Palmquist calls ‘immediate experience’ or ‘encounters’; what he calls the ‘supervening’ of religious experience on ordinary experience; and moral conscience as the ‘voice’ of God.
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24Allen W. Wood, Kant and Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, Pp. 270, ISBN 9781108422345 (hbk) $89.99Kantian Review 26 (2): 357-361. 2021.
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19The Ethical Community in Kant’s Pure Rational System of Religion: Comments on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in HistoryPhilosophia 49 (5): 1901-1916. 2021.This commentary on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History will address three points of interpretation related to Kant’s conception of the ethical community/commonwealth. First, I will raise a number of concerns related to Rossi’s use of Kant’s concept of the highest good. Second, I will examine the relevance of the overall project of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to his discussion of the ethical community, a matter that Rossi does not take up. Third, I will challenge …Read more
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17What is Wrong with the Recent Semiological Interpretation of Kant’s ReligionKantian Review 27 (1): 91-99. 2022.In this article, I challenge the semiological interpretation of Kant’s Religion, particularly as advanced in recent years by James DiCenso and Allen Wood. As I here argue, their interpretations are neither compatible with broader aspects of Kant’s positive philosophy of religion, nor with how Kant himself describes the project of the Religion. Kant wrote the Religion in order to explore the compatibility between his theologically affirmative pure rational system of religion and Christian doctrin…Read more
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16Intrinslc value and overridingness in kant’s groundworkSouthwest Philosophy Review 18 (1): 113-121. 2002.
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7Throughout his career, Kant engaged with many of the fundamental questions in philosophy of religion: arguments for the existence of God, the soul, the problem of evil, and the relationship between moral belief and practice. _Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason_ is his major work on the subject. This book offers a complete and internally cohesive interpretation of _Religion_. In contrast to more reductive interpretations, as well as those that characterize _Religion_ as internally inco…Read more
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5Kant’s Doctrinal Belief in GodIn Oliver Thorndike (ed.), Rethinking Kant: Volume 3, Cambridge Scholars Press. 2011.In the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant endorses both a Moral Belief in God as well as what he there calls Doctrinal Belief. The former mode of belief is well known and can be found throughout the Kantian Corpus. The latter, however, is far more obscure and thus far has not been carefully studied. Doctrinal Belief only appears explicitly in the Canon, but is related to a number of issues in the Transcendental Dialectic as well as the Critique of Judgment. This paper will provide an…Read more
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2Baumgarten and Kant on Rational Theology: Deism, Theism, and the Role of AnalogyIn Courtney D. Fugate (ed.), Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2019.In both his published works and lecture notes Kant distinguishes between Transcendental and Natural Theology, associating the former with Deism and the latter with Theism. The purpose of this paper is to explore these distinctions, particularly as they are shaped by Kant’s engagement with Baumgarten’s Philosophical Theology.
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2Rational Faith and the Pantheism Controversy: Kant's "Orientation" Essay and the Evolution of his Moral ArgumentIn Daniel O. Dahlstrom (ed.), Kant and His German Contemporaries: Volume 2, Aesthetics, History, Politics, and Religion, Cambridge University Press. 2018.In this chapter we explore the importance of the Pantheism Controversy for the evolution of Kant’s so-called “Moral Argument” for the Highest Good and its postulates. After an initial discussion of the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, we move on to the relationship between faith and reason in the Pantheism Controversy, Kant’s response to the Controversy in his 1786 “Orientation” Essay, Thomas Wizenmann’s criticisms of that essay, and finally to the Critique of Practical Reason. We argue t…Read more
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1Kant on Faith: Religious Assent and the Limits to KnowledgeIn Matthew Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Kant Handbook, Palgrave. forthcoming.
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1Kant’s Touchstone of Communication and the Public Use of ReasonSociety and Politics 8 (1): 78-91. 2014.Nearly all of the work that has been done on Kant’s conception of public reason has focused on its socio-political significance. John Rawls, Onora O’Neill and others have explored its relevance to a well ordered democracy, to pluralism, to toleration, and so on. However, the relevance of public reason for Kant is not limited to the socio-political. Kant repeatedly appeals to the “touchstone of communication” in relation to the normative side of his epistemology. The purpose of this paper is …Read more
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Kant on Knowledge, Opinion, and the Threshold for AssentIn Pablo Muchnik Oliver Thorndike (ed.), Rethinking Kant Volume 4, Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 55-74. 2015.The purpose of this short paper is to lay the foundations for a more comprehensive analysis of Kant's Normative Epistemology. In particular, this paper will examine the claims made regarding the threshold between knowledge and opinion, the scope of content germane to the latter, and more broadly, the place of opinion within Kant’s general taxonomy of propositional attitudes. We shall begin with an overview of the knowledge-belief-opinion triad and its governing nomenclature. We shall then turn t…Read more
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Kant's moral arguement and the problem of evil : authentic theodicyand the sincerity of faithIn Ina Goy (ed.), Kant on Proofs for God's Existence, De Gruyter. 2023.
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"Kant's Fourfold Critique of the Ontological Argument: Conceptual Containment, Predication, and the Portents of Free Logic"In Graham Oppy (ed.), The Ontological Argument (Cambridge Classic Philosophical Arguments Series), Cambridge University Press. 2018.
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Hope for divine aid in Kant's religionIn Katerina Mihaylova & Anna Ezekiel (eds.), Hope and the Kantian Legacy: New Contributions to the History of Optimism, Bloomsbury Academic. 2023.
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Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Religion |
Immanuel Kant |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Religion |
Meta-Ethics |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Immanuel Kant |
PhilPapers Editorships
Kant: Philosophy of Religion |