Stephen R. Palmquist

Stephen Palmquist is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. We invited him to answer the question "What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our "Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion" series. If we regard this as a philosophical (not a scientific) question, then the first step to answering it is to determine what norms or values define excellent philosophy, in general. Once that is established, we can inquire whether the nature of religion brings with it any special features that make the task of doing excellent philosophy of religion unique. Unlike scientific explanations, excellent philosophical explanations must be multi-perspectival. A question that has only one right answer is not philosophical; instead, it is likely to be about facts. While we philosophers should care (deeply!) about any facts relevant to our inquiries, our peculiar way of interpreting facts means that answering a philosophical question cannot be done in one absolutely "right" way. This does not mean there are no right answers to philosophical questions; rather, there are many. But this does not make any answer equally good; for there would then be no such thing as excellent philosophy. The essentially perspectival nature of all genuinely philosophical questions means that the correctness of each purportedly "right" answer must be assessed in terms of its aptness for the perspective the questioner adopts when posing the question. A single question, such as "Does God exist?" can have many good answers, depending on whether the questioner assumes science, morality, aesthetics, or something else as the context. Each different type of inquiry has different boundary-conditions, so a good answer within each context is bound to differ from those in other contexts. Bad philosophy typically lacks depth: like a cyclops, its approach to answering questions is mono-perspectival. But if good philosophy acknowledges perspectives, what makes philosophy excellent? Good philosophy achieves excellence when it approaches a completeness whereby we begin to understand the range of relevant perspectives from which a given question can be asked, and the distinct boundary-conditions for answering it properly from each relevant perspective. Before applying this definition of excellent philosophy to the specific case at hand, we must pause to consider whether anything distinctive characterizes the range of philosophical topics and questions that typically come under the umbrella of philosophy of religion. In particular, does religion have features that make it especially difficult (or for that matter, easy) to think about philosophically, compared to other philosophical topics? Yes and no.

Before I respond to the four essays that have each offered valuable feedback on my Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s ‘Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason‘ (hereafter CCKR), [1] a meta-critical question calls for an answer: Why was yet another commentary on Kant’s book, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (hereafter RGV), needed in 2015, [2] given the unprecedented fact that each of the three previous years had seen the publication of a commentary on the same book? The short answer is that work on my commentary began several years before James DiCenso (2012), Lawrence Pasternack (2013), or Eddis Miller (2014) embarked on their own versions of such a project. After completing work on Kant’s Critical Religion in 2000 (Palmquist 2000), I initially planned to move directly into full-time work on Kant’s Critical Science, volume three in my planned Kant’s System of Perspectives series. However, I put that plan on hold a few years later, after I realised that Kant’s Critical Religion, despite its length, only scratched the surface of numerous issues relating to Kant’s theory of religion—especially various textual complexities in RGV. Moreover, some critics of Kant’s Critical Religion, even among those who agreed with my overall claim—namely, that Kant was attempting to affirm and even bolster Christianity (albeit in a significantly reformed interpretation)—tended to misconstrue and therefore reject key arguments I had sketched. Clearly, more work needed to be done if the scholarly community was to be convinced that anything like the position I defended there was accurate.

This is a Lithuanian translation, by Giedrius Sadauskas, of my paper, ‘The Philosopher as a “Secret Agent” for Peace: Taking Seriously Kant’s Revival of the “Old Question” ’, in Valerio Rohden, Ricardo R. Terra and Guido A. de Almeida (eds.), Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants, vol. 4 of Akten des X. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp.601-612. An offprint of the English version is available in the "Kant 4 - Moral and political philosophy articles" section of this website. An online version of the text (in Lithuanian) is available at the link shown below.

In a recent article in this journal [Phil. Math., II, v.4 (1989), n.2, pp.?- ?] J. Fang argues that we must not be fooled by A.J. Ayer (God rest his soul!) and his cohorts into believing that mathematical knowledge has an analytic a priori status. Even computers, he reminds us, take some amount of time to perform their calculations. The simplicity of Kant's infamous example of a mathematical proposition (7+5=12) is "partly to blame" for "mislead[ing] scholars in the direction of neglecting the temporal element"; yet a brief instant of time is required to grasp even this simple truth. If Kant were alive today, "and if he had had a little more mathematical savvy", Fang explains, he could have used the latest example of the largest prime number (391,581 x 2 216,193 - 1) as a better example of the "synthetic a priori" character of mathematics. The reason Fang is so intent upon emphasizing the temporal character of mathematics is that he wishes to avoid "the uncritical mixing of ... a theology and a philosophy of mathematics." For "in the light of the Computer Age today: finitism is king!" Although Kant's aim was explicitly "to study the 'human' ... faculty", Fang claims that even he did not adequatley emphasize "the clearly and concretely distinguishable line of demarcation between the human and divine faculties."

This is a Belarusian translation of an essay interpreting the much-neglected Second Part of Kant's book, Conflict of the Faculties, entitled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?”, by showing the close relationship between the themes it deals with and those Kant addresses in the Supplements and Appendices of Perpetual Peace. In both works, Kant portrays the philosopher as having the duty to promote a “secret article”, without which his vision of a lasting international peace through the agency of a federation of states is bound to fail. Both works identify this article as involving the necessity of publicity as a transcendental condition for peace, and call for philosophers to engage politicians and lawyers in a creative attitude towards lawmaking. Kant’s visionary program has failed to reach its goal up to now, not because it is too idealistic, but because philosophers have failed to take up the challenge.

At what is arguably the most significant turning point in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Immanuel Kant has just completed his exploration of the safe ground of possible experience and is about to embark on the Transcendental Dialectic’s exploration of the stormy sea of metaphysics, he introduces one of the greatest curiosities in the Kantian corpus: a “table … of the concept of nothing” (A290/B346-A292/B349). The brief passage, which is tacked on to the end of a “Remark” that supplements an Appendix to a weighty chapter exploring “the Ground of the Distinction of all Objects [Gegenstände] in General into Phenomena and Noumena” (A235/B294), appears as an afterthought to an afterthought to an afterthought and is thus easily overlooked by interpreters. Indeed, the passage may seem to be little more than an amusing distraction, perhaps intended as light entertainment before Kant undertakes the real work of demolishing traditional metaphysics; or at best, it might be one of those annoying sections whose only reason for existing is to fill a perceived (but artificial) gap in the completeness of Kant’s systematic conception of reason’s architectonic unity. This chapter takes the argument seriously, notwithstanding its widespread neglect, by unpacking the specific purpose served by each perspective on “nothing” that appears in Kant’s table. Closer analysis shows how the table clarifies Kant’s notion of “something in general” by contrasting it with four distinct opposites. The passage thereby orients us to appreciate how the Critique secures the status of metaphysics as queen of the sciences.

This book announces a new academic discipline, the “cognitive science of mathematics” (p. XI), by demonstrating how an empirical examination of the ideas underlying our use of mathematical symbols and calculations must employ metaphors grounded in the “embodied mind.” The authors ruthlessly attack what they dub “The Romance of Mathematics” (p. XV), their metaphor for any approach that treats mathematics as grounded in an abstract, disembodied yet objective reality that mysteriously provides the essential structure to the natural, human world.

Palmquist’s Commentary provides the first definitive clarification on Kant’s Philosophy of Religion in English; it includes the full text of Pluhar’s translation, interspersed with explanations, providing both a detailed overview and an original interpretation of Kant’s work. Offers definitive, sentence-level commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason Presents a thoroughly revised version of Pluhar’s translation of the full text of Kant’s Religion, including detailed notes comparing the translation with the others still in use today Identifies most of the several hundred changes Kant made to the second (1794) edition and unearths evidence that many major changes were responses to criticisms of the first edition Provides both a detailed overview and original interpretation of Kant’s work on the philosophy of religion Demonstrates that Kant’s arguments in Religion are not only cogent, but have clear and profound practical applications to the way religion is actually practiced in the world today Includes a glossary aimed at justifying new translations of key technical terms in Religion, many of which have previously neglected religious and theological implications.

Empirical evidence suggests that human nature tends to be corrupt from the very outset of our moral life. In Sections II and III of the First Piece of Religion, Immanuel Kant approaches this theme of the corruption of human goodness in a more direct way. Although our predisposition is good, he argues that all human beings must have a propensity or original inclination that points us in the opposite direction. In Section II, he argues that, if it exists, then its status must be more than just that of an accidental or optional feature of human experience; this propensity must be inevitable. Section III explains how even people who appear to be good may be concealing an evil heart, if we understand the concept of evil in a philosophically appropriate manner. Human evil arises as a perversion of an originally good predisposition.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics offers several strategies for critiquing Chung-ying Cheng’s synthesis of Confucianism and Kant. Interpreting Kant’s Groundwork, Cheng argues that the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is too rigid: if the “life principle” is the ultimate root of Kant’s four types of duty, then human inclinations are good; Kant’s perfect duties turn out to be imperfect in some situations, while his imperfect duties such as benevolence turn out sometimes to be perfect. Although Cheng’s synthesis does not satisfy the Groundwork’s universal aim, it does show how to apply Kant’s insights to empirical moral situations.

In this chapter, Immanuel Kant's account of the history of the true (universal) church has a clear progression. It moves from a discussion of Jesus’ radical break with all that was nonuniversal in Judaism, to the tendency of Christians down through the ages to shape their faith into something just as nonuniversal as Judaism. Kant's account concludes with reflections on why we have good reason to be optimistic for the future, because Kant's own interpretation of pure moral religion portrays the message of the coming of God's kingdom in symbolic terms that can be applicable to all good‐hearted people. Kant also focuses on the shortcomings not of Judaism, but of Christianity itself, when interpreted as just another historical faith‐particularly in the hands of biblical scholars.

Immanuel Kant's first way of answering the main question of the First Piece in Religion‐whether human beings are good or evil by nature‐has been to examine the necessary conditions for being human, insofar as these relate “to our capacity for desire”, the rational faculty that governed Kant's considerations in CPrR. As creatures of desire who are “condemned to be free” in the way we use our volition, we are animals who must choose a rational principle to govern our desires. Our original predisposition to good is not a “contingent” possibility; rather, it is necessary for the very possibility of our nature that we desire to remain alive, to compare ourselves with others, and to respect the moral law. This predisposition therefore functions as the first aspect of what (in the three Critiques) Kant would have called the transcendental boundary defining his topic.

Section IV of the First Piece of Religion accomplishes the first major task of Immanuel Kant's first experiment by explaining what bare reason justifies us to say about the essential condition of human nature. The second half of Section IV fulfils the corresponding mandate of Kant's second experiment by assessing how closely the traditional Christian understanding of evil conforms to this rational standard. After examining these two aspects of his conclusion, this chapter demonstrates how the bulk of Kant's “General Comment”‐the portion that was labeled “Section V” in R1 previews his subsequent argument that a true religion is one that empowers us to overcome the problem that evil poses for human nature. This basic precept of Kantian religion is: ignorance of the exact method God may have of making up for our moral deficiencies is not only acceptable, but “unavoidable”.

In this chapter, Immanuel Kant's focus is on how members of a (true) church should interpret their Scripture. Not surprisingly, Kant's position on this issue is unequivocal: Scriptures must be given a moral interpretation, if they are to have any relevance to a true church. The first mark of a true church is its universality; through it, a church is grounded in pure religious faith. Kant asks us to choose: (a) Will we interpret religious faith as an attempt to satisfy God by obeying nonmoral precepts, motivated by fear of punishment for service withheld and/or by hope of reward for service rendered? Or (b) Will we interpret faith as a form of assurance based on the practical hope that God will bless those who, though still imperfect, have the sincere conviction to walk the path of continual moral improvement in their lifestyle?.

In Section Two of Second Piece of Religion, Immanuel Kant presents a step‐by‐ step assessment of the biblical account of salvation, starting with the Genesis narrative, proceeding from there to the life and teachings of Jesus, and concluding with his death and resurrection as the source of a new freedom. The main text of the Second Piece then ends with a summary interpretation of the rational meaning of biblical symbols regarding the struggle between good and evil. Kant gives an account of the metaphorical description of the struggle between evil and good‐a description that portrays the struggle through the symbolism of two external powers (Satan and God). The chapter focuses separately on several equally important themes Kant emphasizes in the development of the second experiment.

What makes religion not only possible but necessary for a meaningful human life is the fact that human nature is meant for good but ends up being mired in evil. Religion's task is to solve this problem. We might portray reason as “bumping its head” on the inexorable limits of necessary ignorance when it attempts to answer the two questions: where does moral evil come from? and how can we overcome its powerful influence on us? Immanuel Kant regards good and evil as equal and opposite rational principles. Kant focuses on two key questions: (1) must an example of the archetype be fully human? and (2) could we also rightly regard such an archetype as divine? This chapter also examines the answers Kant proposes along with side comments he makes on various other issues in Christology.