Gordon Michalson

This essay underscores the significant contribution Firestone and Jacobs make through the very thorough way their book surveys the wide range of recent scholarship bearing on Kant’s Religion. The essay then argues, however, that the complex scaffolding designed to summarize and categorize the varied responses to Kant has the effect of muting the authors’ own very bold interpretive stance. This point is particularly true with respect to their account of the compatibility of Kant’s Religion with the Christian tradition. In addition, the essay suggests that the judicial metaphor of “defense” is overplayed, forcing certain interpretations of Kant into potentially misleading positions for the sake of the interpretive scheme.

The essay explores the meaning and implications of Milbank's claim that the post‐Kantian presuppositions of modern theology must be eradicated. After defining and locating the post‐Kantian element in the context of Milbank's broader concerns, the essay employs a comparison between Milbank and Barth to draw out the differences between radical orthodoxy and neo‐orthodoxy with respect to the Kantian ideal of “mediation” between theology and culture. The essay concludes with comparisons of Milbank's metanarrative concerning “modern” thought with those offered by Hans Blumenberg and James Edwards. The effect is not only to suggest the apparent arbitrariness of Milbank's account, but also to indicate the evident futility of arguing with Milbank's theological position on the basis of alternative accounts of the post‐Kantian tradition.

Kant is often viewed as the exemplar of the Enlightenment tendency to reduce religion to morality, to eliminate religious appeals to mystery or to supernatural action, and to insist – in Kant's own words – that we ourselves must make ourselves ‘into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil’, we are to become. His entire philosophy in some ways epitomizes what Hans Blumenberg has called the ‘project of self–assertion’, the ‘essence of which [can be] formulated as the “program of antidivine self–deification”’. For if the centerpiece of Kant's philosophical vision is human autonomy, and if the implicit point of a Kantian view of morality and religion is to equate salvation with the individual achievement of virtue, then there seems to be little role left for a heteronomous grace or divine act to play.

In this collection of seven essays, Raymond Geuss brings his distinctive philosophical perspective to bear on the interrelations among the three issues announced in his title. At one point calling his approach an “excursion into conceptual history”, Geuss manages to keep his potentially intractable topic under control by integrating very broad thematic elements with extended moments of textual analysis, focusing on such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Tugendhat. Although the essays range fairly widely, it becomes evident that the two central figures in Geuss’s loosely connected concerns are, in the end, Nietzsche and Adorno, signaling the volume’s chief preoccupation with the interrelations between art and morality in modern culture. In the pursuit of these and other complexities, the author’s deep learning is coupled with a style that is virtually crystalline.

This paper explores the implications of Manfred Kuehn’s observation that Kant’s claim in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that the ethical community must be a community under God seems “a bit strained.” After clarifying Kant’s train of thought that results in his conception of the ethical community in the form of the “visible church,” the paper argues that the seemingly strong religious dimension may be misleading. If we understand the ethical community to be the development of the kingdom of ends in the Groundwork, it becomes apparent that Kant’s notion of God’s “sovereignty” over the ethical community is a shared sovereignty lodged in rationality and not in God’s own will. The “strain” that Kuehn senses thus suggests the potentially gratuitous nature of Kant’s references to God’s sovereignty over the ethical community. Despite the initial appearances, Kant’s account of the ethical community in the form of the visible church is, over the long term, closer to a secularizing move than to a robustly religious one.

This essay underscores the significant contribution Firestone and Jacobs make through the very thorough way their book surveys the wide range of recent scholarship bearing on Kant’s Religion. The essay then argues, however, that the complex scaffolding designed to summarize and categorize the varied responses to Kant has the effect of muting the authors’ own very bold interpretive stance. This point is particularly true with respect to their account of the compatibility of Kant’s Religion with the Christian tradition. In addition, the essay suggests that the judicial metaphor of “defense” is overplayed, forcing certain interpretations of Kant into potentially misleading positions for the sake of the interpretive scheme.

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason was written late in his career. It presents a theory of 'radical evil' in human nature, touches on the issue of divine grace, develops a Christology, and takes a seemingly strong interest in the issue of scriptural interpretation. The essays in this Critical Guide explore the reasons why this is so, and offer careful and illuminating interpretations of the themes of the work. The relationship of Kant's Religion to his other writings is discussed in ways that underscore the importance of this work for the entire critical philosophy, and provide a broad perspective on his moral thought; connections are also drawn between religion, history, and politics in Kant's later thinking. Together the essays offer a rich exploration of the work which will be of great interest to those involved in Kant studies and the philosophy of religion.