Katerina Deligiorgi

(2017) 'Interest and Agency', in Gabriel, Markus and Rasmussen, Anders Moe (eds.) German Idealism Today. De Guyter Verlag. Abstract: Undeterred by Kant’s cautionary advice, contemporary defenders of free will advance substantive metaphysical theses in support of their views. This is perhaps unsurprising given the mixed reception of Kant’s solution of the conflict between freedom and natural necessity, which is supposed to vindicate reason’s withdrawal from speculation. Kant argues that neither libertarians nor determinists can win, because they deal with concepts of unrestricted scope, and proposes instead to regiment the reference conditions of each concept and to specify the domain, ‘world’, proper to each. However, the precise character of this solution, its conceptual and metaphysical commitments, continues to be a matter of controversy among Kant scholars. In particular, there is ever-renewed concern about the incipient dualism of the position. Although I will be examining some of this material, my primary aim in this paper is not to make a contribution to the interpretative debate about the antinomy. Rather, I want to draw on two lessons from Kant’s treatment of the antinomy to argue for the importance of a certain way of putting the problem of human freedom.

Does Hegel have anything to contribute to moral philosophy? If moral philosophy presupposes the soundness of what he calls the 'standpoint of morality [Moralität]' (PR §137), then Hegel's contribution is likely to be negative. As is well known, he argues that morality fails to provide us with substantive answers to questions about what is good or morally required and tends to gives us a distorted, subject-centred view of our practical lives; moral concerns are best addressed from the 'standpoint of ethical life [Sittlichkeit]' (ibid.). Hegel's criticism of morality has had a decisive influence in the reception of his thought. By general acknowledgement, while his writings support a broadly neo-Aristotelian ethics of self-actualization, his views on moral philosophy are exhausted by his criticisms of Kant, whom he treats as paradigmatic exponent of the standpoint of morality. My aim in this essay is to correct this received view and show that Hegel offers a positive argument about the nature of moral willing.

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyThe aim of this book, set out in the first chapter, is to offer an account of rational action that can accommodate both a model of rationality that is performance‐based and one that is agent‐based. On the former model, rationality is measured in terms of successful performance and amounts to fitness of the performance to the task at hand, so the performance is rational if it does the job it was supposed to do; on the latter, it is a feature of the deliberative processes that determine the choice of the action by the agent, so the action is rational if it is ‘the outcome of considered deliberation’. The proposed reconciliation is effected through the notion of expert opinion, which is authoritative because it is expert, and is accepted because it is authoritative. Fisch and Benbaji seek to show that...

Roman Sexualities. Edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) x + 348 pp. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 19: History of Political Ideas—Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity. Edited with an introduction by Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997) 281 pp. $34.95 cloth.Managing Knowledge: Experts, Agencies and Organizations. By Steven Albert and Keith Bradley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xi + 215 pp. £40.00 cloth, £14.95 paper.Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. By Richard Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). x + 176 pp. $54.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender. By S. H. Rigby. Manchester Medieval Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) xii + 205 pp. £35.00 cloth, £12.99 paper.Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra. By C.G. Jung, ed. James L. Jarrett, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) xxviii + 393 pp. $17.95, £10.95 paper.Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. By Bernadette J. Brooten (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) xxii + 412pp. £34.95, $27.95 cloth.Political Communication Today. By Duncan Watts (Manchester: Manchester University Press) x + 228 pp. £40.00 cloth, £10.99 paper.A Primer on German Enlightenment. By Sabine Roehr (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995) xi + 282 pp. £36.95 cloth.Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. By André Vauchez. Trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) xxvii + 645 pp. £65.00, $95.00 cloth.

Autonomy in bioethics is coming under sustained criticism from a variety of perspectives. The criticisms, which target personal or individual autonomy, are largely justified. Moral conceptions of autonomy, such as Kant’s, on the other hand, cannot simply be applied in bioethical situations without moralizing care provision and recipience. The discussion concludes with a proposal for re-thinking autonomy by focusing on what different agents count as reasons for choosing one rather than another course of action, thus recognising their involvement in the decision process.

Interpretations of Hegel’s social and political thought tend to present Hegel as critic of modern individualism and defender of institutionalism or proto-communitarianism. Yet Hegel has praise for the historically emancipatory role of individualism and gives a positive role to individuals in his discussion of ethics and the state. Drawing on Hegel’s analysis of the category of ‘individual’ in his Logic, this chapter shows that Hegel criticizes the conception of ‘individual’ as a simple and argues instead that it is a term in need of specification or completion. Hegel’s revisionary logic of the category of ‘individual’ is both interesting in itself and useful as an interpretative tool, because it shows the consistency of his various statements about individuals in his practical philosophy.

Tom Hanauer's thoughtful discussion of my article “The Pleasures of Contra-purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human” puts pressure on two important issues concerning the affective phenomenology of the sublime. My aim in that article was to present an analysis of the sublime that does not suffer from the problems identified by Jane Forsey in “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”. I argued that Kant's notion of reflective judgment can help with this task, because it allows us to capture the experience of failure that characterizes the sublime without committing us to ontologically transcendent items. In a significant departure from Kant, however, my account does not require references to our moral vocation to explain the pleasure we take in the sublime; the pleasure comes from getting the right measure of our agency. For Hanauer, trouble for my analysis comes both from the discursive presentation of the sublime, its focus on judgment, and from the removal of references to our moral vocation.

Serious doubts have been raised about the coherence of theories of the sublime and the usefulness of the concept. By contrast, the sublime is increasingly studied as a key function in Kant's moral psychology and in his ethics. This article combines methodological conservatism, approaching the topic from within Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgment, with reconstruction of a conception of human agency that is tenable on Kantian grounds. I argue that a coherent theory of the sublime is possible and useful, and the experience of the sublime is significant for our self-conception as agents. However, the chief interest in the sublime is not moral