•  71
    Kant and the Culture of Discipline
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (1): 121-138. 2010.
    Kant’s notion of culture is typically treated in the context of his philosophy of history. In this paper, however, I explore the importance of culture for Kant’s doctrine of virtue, and argue that culture affords a new way—contra immortality—to think the possibility of attaining virtue. As I show, Kant identifies culture as a site of the self-effacement of nature in its influence on the will. Because of this, we see that for Kant the task of virtue encounters nature not only as obstacle, but als…Read more
  •  53
    When Kant announces in a letter to Reinhold that he has discovered a new domain of a priori principles, he situates these principles in a ‘faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure ’. And it is indeed in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, named in this letter the Critique of Taste, that we find his elucidation of the relation of the principle of purposiveness to the feeling of pleasure. The kinds of judgements in which our feelings are evaluated in accordance with a principle are what Kant n…Read more
  •  43
    Philosophy and the Public Sphere
    Idealistic Studies 41 (1-2): 83-94. 2011.
    Kant’s elevation of practical reason to a position of primacy in relation to theoretical reason is certainly well known. With this, though, comes also a new articulation of what the task of philosophy is. This paper addresses how Kant thinks that philosophy must actively promote and work to bring about the essential ends of human life, namely, moral goodness and a just society. This means that philosophers must direct the use of their reason to the public sphere. In this, the primary occupations…Read more
  •  27
    What is Philosophical about Kant’s Anthropology?
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (3): 336-347. 2017.
    In this essay, I argue that Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is fundamentally about the sphere of civilization, and, with this, a particular kind of philosophical self-understanding. By civilization, Kant means to indicate the process by which human beings transform their inner natures based on pragmatic or prudential considerations born of our living together. Civilization is what we do to ourselves in order to get along with others with whom we share the earth. In the Anthrop…Read more
  •  24
    Kant and the Liberal Arts: A Defense
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 49 (3): 1-14. 2015.
    Immanuel Kant, true to the Enlightenment milieu of which he was a part, believes education to have a necessary and formative role advancing human beings toward our moral vocation. While he may not have written extensively on the topic of education directly, what he does say makes it unmistakable that it has a central role to play in practical life. The need for education is, first, distinctive for us: “The human being is the only creature that must be educated.”1 Second, the need for education i…Read more
  •  23
    Kant's Critique of Judgment seems not to be an obviously unified work. Unlike other attempts to comprehend it as a unity, which treat it as serving either practical or theoretical interests, Kristi Sweet's book posits it as examining a genuinely independent sphere of human life. In her in-depth account of Kant's Critical philosophical system, Sweet argues that the Critique addresses the question: for what may I hope? The answer is given in Kant's account of 'territory,' a region of experience th…Read more
  •  22
    Mapping the Critical System: Kant and the Highest Good
    Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 3 (3): 301-319. 2022.
    This essay considers Kant’s concept of the highest good from a systematic point of view. The two spheres of freedom and nature—of the practical and theoretical—need to be brought into a causal relation for the highest good to be achieved. Kant seems to offer numerous possibilities for how human beings are able to think that it is possible for the highest good to be attainable. I argue that it is only in the third Critique, however, that Kant articulates an answer that also establishes freedom an…Read more
  •  14
    In this article, I offer a novel and in-depth account of how, for Kant, free speech is the mechanism that moves a society closer to justice. I argue that the criticism of the legislator preserved by free speech must also be the result of collective agreement. I further argue that structural features of judgements of taste and the sensus communis give guidance for how we should communicate publicly to succeed at the aims Kant has laid out, as judgements of taste, like politics, belong fundamental…Read more
  •  8
    Kant on Practical Life: From Duty to History
    Cambridge University Press. 2013.
    Kant's 'practical philosophy' comprehends a diverse group of his writings on ethics, politics, law, religion, and the philosophy of history and culture. Kristi E. Sweet demonstrates the unity and interdependence of these writings by showing how they take as their animating principle the human desire for what Kant calls the unconditioned - understood in the context of his practical thought as human freedom. She traces the relationship between this desire for freedom and the multiple forms of fini…Read more
  •  3
    Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant by Paul Guyer
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 60 (4): 702-703. 2022.
    Paul Guyer's Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant is the product of over forty years of scholarly research. Guyer published his first article in 1976 and his first book in 1979. His work has encompassed the whole of Kant's corpus: while he began his career writing on Kant's aesthetics, he was concerned even then with the epistemological and practical contours of Kant's thinking. His subsequent work takes up these aspects of Kant's thought directly. Methodologically, too, Guyer's work ha…Read more