Olga Lenczewska

Kant’s views on human history have been widely studied, but commentators have rarely discussed his speculative account of humanity’s origins, assuming that it does not neatly fit into his critical philosophy. This paper challenges this assumption by defending two claims. First, Kant’s major essay on this topic, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” is a key component of his teleological understanding of human history and should be incorporated into the study of his critical philosophy. Second, the story of humanity’s origins informs Kant’s prescriptions for our moral education by better explaining individual development and providing guidelines for it.

This book project reshapes the way we think about Enlightenment: rather than viewing it primarily as the era of the emancipation of human reason, it emphasizes the gendered nature of the Enlightenment ideal of human progress and investigates how this ideal oppressed women. I take a critical look at this ideal from within intellectual debates of the time, examining how the restrictive view of women’s socio-political and educational opportunities was challenged by progressive female German and Polish thinkers of the late Enlightenment. The under-studied views of these thinkers exhibit insightful early-feminist arguments against women’s inability to take an active role in the Enlightenment project and the confinement of women to the “private” sphere of the household, in which they take care of men – “public”, free-thinking citizens.

Revise & resubmit. While various Kantian influences on Rawls have been discussed in the literature, these discussions have been limited to Part I of A Theory of Justice and consequently to topics concerning a priori ethical considerations and their consequences for political philosophy. In contrast to others who have interpreted Rawls’s Kantianism in this way, I show that what is also at the core of Rawls’s Kantian project in Theory is Kant’s theory of moral development. This theory of moral development, which Kant develops in his Lectures on Pedagogy, Lectures on Anthropology, and Essays regarding the Philanthropinum, bears close conceptual ties to Rawls’s account of rational and moral maturation of the citizens of a well-ordered society in Theory Part III. These two philosophers share a similar approach to solving the problem of political stability – an approach grounded in the moral education of an individual. By looking at Rawls’s interpretation of Kant’s ethics in the Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, moreover, we can better understand Rawls’s proof for the possibility of the inherent stability of a well-ordered society.

My dissertation examines Kant’s and Rawls’s theories of the moral development of individuals within structured political communities. I reconstruct Kant’s under-studied account of the emergence of reason by looking at his remarks on the transition our species underwent from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings. I show how his account of the emergence of reason fits with his broader view of humankind’s rational progress and the moral development of an individual. Next, I argue that Kant’s anthropological and pedagogical writings influenced Rawls’s early views on moral development in A Theory of Justice. In contrast to other commentators who have located Kant’s influence on Rawls in his emphasis on the free and equal nature of human beings, my dissertation shows that Kant’s anthropological theory of moral development is also at the core of Rawls’s Kantian project. I also argue that the moral-psychological account Rawls develops in Part III of Theory sheds light on crucial aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, notably on his emphasis on the need for one generation to provide the moral education of subsequent generations in order to achieve political stability. Dissertation Committee: Allen Wood (co-chair), Leif Wenar (co-chair), Juliana Bidadanure, David Hills, David Estlund (external, Brown).

While Kant’s account of humankind’s rational progress has been widely discussed, his views about the way in which this progress might have begun and the circumstances surrounding this beginning have been largely neglected. Implicit in such an omission is the assumption that Kant does not say much about the very beginning of human history or that whatever he says is of little philosophical value. This paper challenges these assumptions. I reconstruct Kant’s account of the emergence of reason by looking at his various conjectural and more literal remarks about our species’ transition from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings possessing a rudimentary form of rationality. Next, I show how this account fits with Kant’s broader view of humankind’s rational progress and its subsequent stages. By doing so, I elucidate Kant’s guidelines for achieving this progress in the future by unifying them with his regulative view of reason’s past.

Under contract for the series Elements in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The focus of this Element is Kant’s history of human reason: his teleological vision of the past development of our rational capacities from their very emergence until Kant’s own “age of Enlightenment”. One of the goals of this Element is to connect Kant’s speculative account of the very beginning of rationality – a topic which has thus far been largely neglected or at least under-studied in Kantian scholarship – to his well-known theory of humankind’s progress. By doing so, I hope to elucidate Kant’s hopes with regard to reason’s future progress and his guidelines for how to achieve this progress by unifying them with his vision of reason’s past. Another goal of this Element is to bring more attention to Kant’s essay “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (1786), where a large part of this account is presented, and to show that this “somewhat unusual” (Yovel 1989) text does not stand in conflict with Kant’s critical philosophy and is not merely tangentially related to it, but actually illuminates and complements certain aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy. This Element is divided into three parts. Part 1 introduces Kant’s speculations about the transition our species underwent from non-rational animals into primitive, rational humans. It also shows how these speculations fit with Kant’s broader view of the development of humans’ reason, or of the species’ gradual process of learning how to make a mature (enlightened) use of reason. Part 2 focuses on a text where the speculative account of the beginning of human history is presented in most detail: the “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”. I defend the exegetical importance of this essay for Kant’s practical philosophy by arguing that the claims Kant makes in it are not merely fictional or imaginative, but play a key role in his teleological view of the progression of human history. I also assess the contribution that Kant makes to the conjectural history genre through this essay and discuss how distinct it is from the most prominent and well-studied conjectural histories of the Enlightenment era. Part 3 focuses on what Kant’s account of the history of reason tells us about his political and pedagogical guidelines for the continuance of humanity’s progress toward the fulfillment of its vocation and for the progress of any given individual. I also present and defend my understanding of what it means to think and act in an enlightened (or as Kant also calls it, a “pluralistic”) way, connecting this idea to the three maxims of good thinking, the public use of reason, and the role of interpersonal communication in advancing our rational capacities.

Kant’s essays in the philosophy of history, such as Universal History and Conjectural Beginning, offer a speculative account of the gradual development of reason in our species and of the way the mature use of reason can be attained. Such mature use of reason, as Kant explains a few years later in the published Anthropology, is characterized by abandoning the standpoint of “practical egoism” and learning how to exercise the psychological disposition to “pluralism”. To be a pluralist, he claims, means to be capable of seeing things from other people’s standpoints, of giving deliberative weight to the needs of others, and of taking part in universally valid judgments. But Kant is never explicit about what is required in order to become a pluralist, nor does he explain what it means to be a pluralist beyond a brief remark in the Anthropology. My paper takes a detailed look at this under-studied notion and offers a novel account of this notion. I explicate the features of pluralistic thinking and I connect this notion to the public use of reason, the three maxims of common human understanding, and the role played by interpersonal communication in advancing the progress of our rational capacities. I also explain the key role of education in reason’s development and the conceptual relationship between the enlightenment of an individual and the enlightenment of the human species.

ABSTRACT Jason Brennan’s recent epistemic argument for epistocracy relies on the assumption that voter competence requires knowledge of economics and political science. He conjectures that people who would qualify as competent are mostly white, upper-middle- to upper-class, educated, employed men, who know better how to promote the interests of the disadvantaged than the disadvantaged themselves. My paper, first, shows that this account of voter competence is too narrow and, second, proposes a modified account of this concept. Brennan mistakenly reasons as though it is obvious that socially disadvantaged and oppressed people, by virtue of lacking sufficient knowledge of political science and economics, do not belong on an epistocratic council. This is because there is another way of being competent: possessing first-personal experience and knowledge unique to disadvantaged or oppressed situatedness. Once voter competence is characterized accurately and more holistically, epistocracy’s problematic implications of privileging already dominant genders, races, and classes, which characterize Brennan’s account, no longer arise.

This article assesses the potential for basic income to become a tool for empowering women in the household and in the workplace. Recent debates among feminist political theorists indicate that it is not obvious whether basic income has the potential to push our society toward greater socioeconomic gender justice. I show that arguments for and against basic income put forward by feminist theorists rely on implicit assumptions about how women's work should be conceived—assumptions that are not shared among all of them. I also argue that these beliefs can be sorted into two dichotomies: one concerned with the suitability of remuneration for caregiving, the other with the question of who should be responsible for caregiving. I conclude by explaining the possible causes of the divergences in the views of feminist supporters and critics of UBI, and by recommending ways to arrive at common conceptual grounds.

This paper concerns the growing political polarization in the U.S. and the challenges faced by political activists in their effort to mobilize around struggles and demands for policy changes. We argue that basic income can serve as a key policy around which social movements and political activists of different beliefs systems – feminist activists, racial justice activists, liberal egalitarians, Marxists-socialists, and libertarians – could form an overlapping consensus. This would allow them to have a common political goal without having to reach agreement over fundamental values, thus gaining more political visibility and increasing their ability to promote socio-political change.

This paper is a novel attempt at reconstructing Kant’s account of self-consciousness in the first Critique by making evident its gradual expository progression, and at identifying the epistemic status of the two modes of self-consciousness: pure and empirical. I trace the gradual exposition of theoretical self-consciousness across three crucial parts of the book: the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. In doing so, I show that the account of theoretical self-consciousness is not presented to us all at once, but is progressively expanded and filled in. I also emphasize the importance of the distinction between the subject’s awareness of its existence, “Dasein”, and of its existence, “Existenz”. I conclude by discussing Kant’s preliminary remarks about practical self-consciousness in the Paralogisms, which bear an important relation to theoretical self-consciousness.

This paper discusses the importance of informed medical consent through a case study examines the implications this case had for the medical rights of EU citizens. I start by describing a case of a Slovakian national of Roma origin against the Government of Slovakia, which appeared at the European Court of Human Rights in 2007-2012. The twenty-year old woman, who had been sterilized at a Slovakian hospital during the birth of her second child, claimed that the procedure took place without her full and informed consent, and argued that the doctors’ decision was connected to the society’s long-standing negative attitude towards Roma people. After presenting the background of the case and the legal proceedings, I discuss the relevant national and European law in order to explain the positions of both sides and the rulings of the courts. I conclude by putting the case in a wider context of racial discrimination in the EU and providing a policy analysis regarding both the Slovakian and the European policies toward the Roma minority.