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166Three aspects of Kantian Autonomy: Independence, Self-Determination and CitizenshipCon-Textos Kantianos 20 41-49. 2024.In the Groundwork, we find three distinct conceptions of freedom: (i) A negative conception of freedom, understood as a capacity for spontaneous action independent of alien causes; (ii) a positive conception of freedom, understood as the capacity of giving law to oneself; and (iii) a second positive conception, understood as the capacity to give laws that bind others as well as oneself. The dominant interpretation of Kant ignores this third conception of freedom and interprets the second concept…Read more
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203Guyer, Sellars and Kant on the Dignity and Value of FreedomKant Studien Supplementa 1 (1): 21-38. 2024.Paul Guyer is well known for defending the claim that freedom, understood as the capacity to set ends, is Kant’s fundamental value. In contrast, I have developed a reading of Kant’s ethics that places autonomy and community at the heart of Kant’s ethics. At the heart of my account is a conception of autonomy understood as what I call the capacity for sovereignty. I argue that these two positions can be made compatible. To do this involves making a distinction between the concepts of dignity and …Read more
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12Introduction: The Many Senses of Community in KantIn Charlton Payne & Lucas Thorpe (eds.), Kant and the concept of community, University of Rochester Press. pp. 1-16. 2011.
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13Kant on the Relationship between Autonomy and CommunityIn Charlton Payne & Lucas Thorpe (eds.), Kant and the concept of community, University of Rochester Press. pp. 63-87. 2011.The central idea behind this paper is the claim that Kant's moral idea of a realm of ends is modeled on the category of community examined in his theoretical works, and that understanding Kant's account of the category of community helps us understand certain features of the idea of a realm of ends, and in particular the fact that a member of a realm of ends must be an autonomous agent. For Kant the idea of a community is essentially the idea of a multitude of individuals in interaction and in t…Read more
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2125Immanuel Kant and DeontologyIn Michael Hemmingsen (ed.), Ethical Theory in Global Perspective, Suny Press. pp. 191-206. 2024.This chapter has two main sections. In the first section I briefly sketch Immanuel Kant’s moral theory as laid out in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). I explain Kant’s claim that morality must be grounded on what he calls a categorical imperative and examine his three formulations of this categorical imperative. In the second section I explain the distinction between “deontological” and “teleological” ethical theories. Kantian ethics is often presented as the paradigm example …Read more
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492Thomas Reid on the Role of Conception and Belief in Perception and MemoryHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 38 (4): 357-374. 2021.Thomas Reid argues that both perception and memory involve a conception of an object and usually cause a corresponding belief. According to defenders of the constitutive interpretation, such as Rebecca Copenhaver, the belief is constitutive of acts of perception and memory. I instead argue for a causal interpretation: although in normal circumstances perceiving and remembering cause a corresponding belief, the belief is not constitutive of perception or memory. Copenhaver's strongest argument fo…Read more
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578Common Sense and Comparative LinguisticsRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 146 (1): 71-88. 2021.I discuss the role of translatability in philosophical justification. I begin by discussing and defending Thomas Reid’s account of the role that facts about comparative linguistics can play in philosophical justification. Reid believes that common sense offers a reliable but defeasible form of justification. We cannot know by introspection, however, which of our judgments belong to common sense. Judgments of common sense are universal, and so he argues that the strongest evidence that a judgment…Read more
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731Atomic event concepts in perception, action and beliefJournal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1): 110-127. 2022.Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such…Read more
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486The effect of action on perceptual feature bindingVision Research 177 97-108. 2020.Color-motion asynchrony (CMA) refers to an apparent lag of direction of motion when a dynamic stimulus changes both color and direction at the same time. The subjective order of simultaneous events, however, is not only perceptual but also subject to illusions during voluntary actions. Self-initiated actions, for example, seem to precede their sensory outcomes following an adaptation to a delay between the action and the sensory feedback. Here, we demonstrate that the extent of the apparent asyn…Read more
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397What’s wrong with Constructivist Readings of Kant?In Ricardo Gutierrez Aguilar (ed.), The Philosophy of Kant. pp. 165-186. 2019.Kantian ethics today is dominated followers of Rawls, many of them his former students. Following Rawls they interpret Kant as a moral constructivist who defines the good in terms of the reasonable. Such readings give priority to the first formulation of the categorical imperative and argue that the other two formulations are (ontologically or definitionally) dependent upon it. In contrast the aim of my paper will be to show that Kant should be interpreted firstly as a moral idealist and secondl…Read more
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1294Kant on the ‘Guarantee of Perpetual Peace’ and the Ideal of the United NationsDokuz Eylül University Journal of Humanities 6 (1). 2019.The ideal of the United Nations was first put forward by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace. Kant, in the tradition of Locke and Rousseau is a liberal who believes that relations between individuals can either be based upon law and consent or upon force and violence. One way that such the ideal of world peace could be achieved would be through the creation of a single world state, of which every human being was a citizen. Such an ideal was advocated by a number of eighteenth century…Read more
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642Kant, Guyer, and Tomasello on the Capacity to Recognize the Humanity of OthersIn Kate A. Moran (ed.), Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity, Cambridge University Press. pp. 107-136. 2018.On the surface Kant himself seems quite clear about who is deserving of respect: The morally relevant others are all “rational, free beings” or all “human beings.” It is clear, however, that Kant does not want to identify “human beings” in this sense with members of a particular biological species, for he is explicitly open to the idea that there might be non-biologically human rational beings. Thus, for example he is explicitly open to the possibility of extraterrestrial rational beings, who wo…Read more
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859This paper examines Timothy Williamson's recent 'expertise defense' of armchair philosophy mounted by skeptical experimental philosophers. The skeptical experimental philosophers argue that the methodology of traditional 'armchair' philosophers rests up trusting their own intuitions about particular problem cases. Empirical studies suggest that these intuitions are not generally shared and that such intuitions are strongly influenced factors that are not truth conducive such as cultura…Read more
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1401Seeing White and Wrong: Reid on the Role of Sensations in Perception, with a Focus on Color PerceptionIn Thomas Reid on Mind, Knowledge, and Value (Mind Association Occasional Series), Oxford University Press. pp. 100-123. 2015.
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1099Kant on the Relationship between Autonomy and CommunityIn Charlton Payne & Lucas Thorpe (eds.), Kant and the concept of community, University of Rochester Press. 2011.The central idea behind this paper is the claim that Kant's moral idea of a realm of ends is modeled on the category of community examined in his theoretical works, and that understanding Kant's account of the category of community helps us understand certain features of the idea of a realm of ends, and in particular the fact that a member of a realm of ends must be an autonomous agent. For Kant the idea of a community is essentially the idea of a multitude of individuals in interaction and in t…Read more
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2014Sayyid Qutb and Aquinas: Liberalism, Natural Law and the Philosophy of JihadHeythrop Journal 60 413-435. 2019.In this paper I focus on the work of Sayyid Qutb and in particular his book Milestones, which is often regarded as the Communist Manifesto of Islamic fundamentalism. This paper has four main sections. First I outline Qutb’s political position and in particular examine his advocacy of offensive jihad. In section two I argue that there are a number of tendencies that make his position potentially more liberal that it is often taken to be. I here argue that there are at least six reasons why Qutb’s…Read more
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51Kant and the concept of community (edited book)University of Rochester Press. 2011.An interdisciplanary collection of essays focused on Kant's work on the concept of community.
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546The point of studying ethics according to KantJournal of Value Inquiry 40 (4): 461-474. 2006.Many readers of Kant’s ethical writings take him to be primarily concerned with offering guidelines for action. At the least, they write about Kant as if this were the purpose of his ethical writings. For example, Christine Korsgaard, in her influential article Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: The Argument of Groundwork I, writes that, ‘‘the argument of Groundwork I is an attempt to give what I call a ‘motivational analysis’ of the concept of a right action, in order to discover what that conc…Read more
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702One Community or Many? From Logic to Juridical Law, via Metaphysics [in Kant]In Sorin Baiasu, Howard Williams & Sami Pihlstrom (eds.), Politics and Metaphysics in Kant, University of Wales Press. 2011.There are at least five ‘core’ notions of community found in Kant's works: 1. The scientific notion of interaction. This concept is introduced in the Third Analogy and developed in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. 2. A metaphysical idea. The idea of a world of individuals (monads) in interaction. This idea was developed in Kant’s precritical period and can be found in his metaphysics lectures. 3. A moral ideal. The idea of a realm of ends. 4. A political ideal. The idea of a…Read more
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610Is Kant's Realm of Ends a Unum per Se? Aquinas, Suárez, Leibniz and Kant on CompositionBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (3): 461-485. 2010.Kant and Leibniz are interested in explaining how a number of individuals can come together and form a single unified composite substance. Leibniz does not have a convincing account of how this is possible. In his pre-critical writings and in his later metaphysics lectures, Kant is committed to the claim that the idea of a world is the idea of a real whole, and hence is the idea of a composite substance. This metaphysical idea is taken over into his ethical writings and becomes the idea of a rea…Read more
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1737The realm of ends as a community of spirits: Kant and swedenborg on the kingdom of heaven and the cleansing of the doors of perceptionHeythrop Journal 52 (1): 52-75. 2011.In this paper I examine the genesis of Kant’s conception of a realm of ends, arguing that Kant first started to think of morality in terms of striving to be a member of a realm of ends, understood as an ideal community, in the early 1760s, and that he was influenced in this by his encounter with the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. In 1766 Kant published Dreams of a Spirit Seer, a commentary on Swedenborg’s magnum opus, Heavenly Secrets. Most commentators take Kant’s attitude towards Swed…Read more
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75The Kant DictionaryBloomsbury Academic. 2014.A fully cross-referenced A-Z reference guide to the ideas and work of Immanuel Kant - one of the most important figures in Western Philosophy.
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1914Kant's Moral Idealism: The Logical Basis and Metaphysical Origin of the Ideas of Community and AutonomyDissertation, University of Pennsylvania. 2003.This thesis examines the theoretical foundations of Kant's moral philosophy. I argue that Kant's moral ideal of a kingdom of ends is to be identified with the theoretical idea of a community, and that this idea can be traced back to the category of community introduced in his table of categories. In particular I argue that, for the mature Kant, the only application of the theoretical idea of community is the moral idea of a kingdom of ends, the only way we can conceive of a kingdom of ends is as…Read more
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