Chris L. Firestone

While earlier work has emphasized Kant’s philosophy of religion as thinly disguised morality, this timely and original reappraisal of Kant’s philosophy of religion incorporates recent scholarship. In this volume, Chris L. Firestone, Stephen R. Palmquist, and the other contributors make a strong case for more specific focus on religious topics in the Kantian corpus. Main themes include the relationship between Kant’s philosophy of religion and his philosophy as a whole, the contemporary relevance of specific issues arising out of Kant’s philosophical theology, and the relationship of Kant’s philosophy to Christian theology. As a whole, this book capitalizes on contemporary movements in Kant studies by looking at Kant not as an anti-metaphysician, but as a genuine seeker of spirituality in the human experience

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to Moral Law by Christopher J. InsoleChris L. FirestoneChristopher J. Insole. Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to Moral Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. v + 409. Hardback, $110.00.The extent to which the philosophy of Immanuel Kant converges with or diverges from Christian thought has been a hotly debated topic in recent years. Central to that debate has been the resurgence of interest in Kant's classic Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (henceforth, Religion). The most insightful interpretations and applications of Religion, it seems, have utilized resources from a broad range of Kant's writings, emphasizing his philosophy considered as an integrated whole. Christopher Insole's recent monograph—Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to Moral Law—attempts to redirect this debate with an argument spanning Kant's precritical and critical periods in performing a deep dive on the topic of freedom. On the face of it, the argument is not purely theological or even religious. It revolves, instead, around a metaphysical analysis of freedom, both as exemplified in Kant's writings and relative to his historical predecessors.Key to Insole's proposal is that Kant's critical notion of freedom evolves into something very different than that of his predecessors (on which his early writings depend) and, in its development, decisively "ruptures" with the Christian tradition. Human freedom, on Insole's analysis of Kant, must be "end-setting" and not constrained or directed by any type of external compulsion. This suggests that God cannot be understood to influence freedom causally, or at least not without human conscious and free consent. Numerous writers have thought they spied Christian connections in Kant's notion of freedom, such as the need for divine forgiveness, and even grace, to avoid the absurdum practicum. Insole resists all such attempts as being foreign to the novelty of the mature Kant's reflections on freedom. No external force can be brought to bear as a determining causal influence on human freedom, presumably because an end set before us from outside undermines our ability to set an end for ourselves. God is at best the "all-knowing distributor of happiness" (321) that makes end-setting and the kingdom of ends worthwhile moral pursuits. Insole's express intention is to "show the significance of Kant's denial that God can be our final cause" and that "his philosophical religiosity, understood on its own terms, and as expressed across his whole oeuvre" shows that "Kant cannot easily be called a Christian thinker" at all (2–4).Extricating Kant from Christianity proves to be a monumental task. Insole uses eighteen chapters and more than four hundred pages to make his case. The argument distinguishes itself from other such attempts in its rigorous analytic approach to unpacking the metaphysical underpinnings of issues supposedly at the root of Kant's philosophical theology. The book presents a cumulative case argument for Kant's supposed break with "the Christian theological tradition as he would have received it" (13). Much rests on whether or not this argument is cogent. Kant, according to Insole, is something akin to a theological Platonist and moral Stoic, who attempts to establish a unique form of "philosophical religiosity" (3 and 156). This makes Kant similar to the likes of Augustine and Ambrose, but different in terms of his theological aspirations. Insole casts Kant not as a pure philosopher seeking to understand philosophy relative to the Christian tradition, but rather as a philosophical [End Page 164] theologian bent on showing human freedom, free end-setting, and an ethical community of end-setters to be the exclusive means for attaining the highest good. Although this may sound Pelagian, Insole insists it is not, because "the Pelagian could still regard God as our final cause and efficient cause" (299). In other words, in Insole's interpretation, Kant is a strict philosophical humanist or what theologians might term a hyper-Pelagian.The difficult details of Insole's arguments are important to consider but not easily dealt with in the space provided here. Early in the book, Insole takes his reader on a metaphysical tour of "Divine Ideas" and "God...

Stephen R. Palmquist’s Kant and Mysticism revisits his earlier work on Kant and Swedenborg, arguing that, contrary to standard interpretations, the arguments of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer expand into ‘Critical mysticism’ throughout the Critical philosophy and into the Opus Postumum. Although the beginning portions of Palmquist’s book successfully disturb the standard portrait of Kant as the all-destroyer of metaphysics and religious experience, his argument for critical mysticism is inconclusive. It is impossible to know if his interpretation of the Opus Postumum is more right than its competitors. The conflict of interpretations shows Palmquist’s interpretation to be a hermeneutic impossible possibility.

God is a problematic idea in Kant's terms, but many scholars continue to be interested in Kantian theories of religion and the issues that they raise. In these new essays, scholars both within and outside Kant studies analyse Kant's writings and his claims about natural, philosophical, and revealed theology. Topics debated include arguments for the existence of God, natural theology, redemption, divine action, miracles, revelation, and life after death. The volume includes careful examination of key Kantian texts alongside discussion of their themes from both constructive and analytic perspectives. These contributions broaden the scope of the scholarship on Kant, exploring the value of doing theology in consonance or conversation with Kant. It builds bridges across divides that often separate the analytic from the continental and the philosophical from the theological. The resulting volume clarifies the significance and relevance of Kant's theology for current debates about the philosophy of God and religion.

I contend that Kant’s philosophy, as it stands, is strictly deistic in a strictly epistemic sense, but its own internal theological momentum suggests this epistemic deism may be overcome in the eyes of faith because of ontological considerations surrounding God and God’s work in the world. I sketch six “signposts” in defense of this claim that emerge out of the New Wave. Because these signposts lead directly to two philosophically viable and theologically acceptable roadways for overcoming the charge of deism, I conclude that “maybe” is the best answer to the question “Can the New Wave Baptize Kant’s Deism?”

In _The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought,_ Chris L. Firestone, Nathan A. Jacobs, and thirteen other contributors examine the role of God in the thought of major European philosophers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The philosophers considered are, by and large, not orthodox theists; they are highly influential freethinkers, emancipated by an age no longer tethered to the authority of church and state. While acknowledging this fact, the contributors are united in arguing that this is only one side of a complex story. To redress the imbalance of attention to secularism among crucial modern thinkers and to consolidate a more theologically informed view of modernity, they focus on the centrality of the sacred in the thought of these philosophers. The essays, each in its own way, argue that the major figures in modernity are theologically astute, bent not on removing God from philosophy but on putting faith and reason on a more sure footing in light of advancements in science and a perceived need to rethink the relationship between God and world. By highlighting and defending the theologically affirmative dimensions of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and others, the essayists present a forceful and timely correction of widely accepted interpretations of these philosophers. To ignore or downplay the theological dimensions of the philosophical works they address, they argue, distorts our understanding of modern thought. "Over the past twenty-five years there has been a gradual change in the study of modern philosophy toward recognizing the centrality of our relation to God in the work of most of the major modern thinkers of the period. _The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought_ is a timely and useful collection that has the potential to crystallize this important development in the study of modern philosophy." —_John E. Hare, Yale Divinity School_

The standard reading of Kant presumes that 'the moral hypothesis' is a necessary and sufficient condition for understanding his philosophy of religion. This paper opens with the assumption -- taken from one of Kant's last works -- that philosophy and theology must always remain in conflict. Then, by way of an abductive comparison of the positions of Ronald M. Green and John Hick, I demonstrate that the moral hypothesis leads to religious compromises that contradict this assumption. To conclude, I argue that the motif of transformation is syptomatic of the underlying problem and suggest that it be replaced by the motif of transition.

In this essay, I reply to the above four critics of In Defense of Kant’s Religion (IDKR). In reply to George di Giovanni, I highlight the interpretive differencesthat divide the authors of IDKR and di Giovanni, and argue that di Giovanni’s atheist reading of Kant does not follow, even granting his premises. In reply to Pamela Sue Anderson, I show that if her reading of Kant is accurate, Kant’s own talk of God becomes empty and contemptible by his own lights, and I then show how her empirical bias prompts a significant misreading of IDKR. In reply to Stephen Palmquist, I expose four fallacious maneuvers in his paper, which comprise the bulk of his essay. And in reply to Michalson, I address a series of minor concerns raised in his essay, and then set the record straight on the motives behind IDKR in general and my own take on Kant’s compatibility (or lack thereof) with Christianity in specific.

Chris L. Firestone and Nathan Jacobs integrate and interpret the work of leading Kant scholars to come to a new and deeper understanding of Kant's difficult book, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In this text, Kant's vocabulary and language are especially tortured and convoluted. Readers have often lost sight of the thinker's deep ties to Christianity and questioned the viability of the work as serious philosophy of religion. Firestone and Jacobs provide strong and cogent grounds for taking Kant's religion seriously and defend him against the charges of incoherence. In their reading, Christian essentials are incorporated into the confines of reason, and they argue that Kant establishes a rational religious faith in accord with religious conviction as it is elaborated in his mature philosophy. For readers at all levels, this book articulates a way to ground religion and theology in a fully fledged defense of Religion which is linked to the larger corpus of Kant's philosophical enterprise.