Tom Bailey

This is the editors' preface to a special issue of Philosophia on 'Religion and Limits of Liberalism'. It begins by noting the challenges which the 'return' of religions to liberal democracies poses to the liberal commitment to respect citizens’ freedom and equality. Then, with particular reference to Rawls' theory of liberal politics, it situates the papers in relation to three different senses of liberal ‘respect’ that are challenged by contemporary religions – one understood in terms of the justification of political power, another as tolerance of diversity, and the third in terms of freedom from interference

This article argues that in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) Nietzsche defends “will to power” as a transcendentally ideal condition of objectivity, in the sense in which Kant considers, say, space, time, or the concepts of substance and causation to be such conditions. The article shows how Nietzsche’s engage-ment with the transcendental idealist arguments of his Kantian contemporaries leads him to reject naturalism and to adopt a peculiarly transcendental kind of skepticism, which rejects as unjustified the conditions that would make objec-tivity possible. The article then turns to the argument for “will to power” in BGE 36, showing that it is best read as defending a transcendentally ideal condition of objectivity, and thus as responding to transcendental skepticism. The article concludes by elaborating on this understanding of “will to power,” particularly in relation to the sense of causality that Nietzsche invokes and in comparison with Kant’s own transcendental claims.

John Rawls's influential theory of justice and public reason has often been thought to exclude religion from politics, out of fear of its illiberal and destabilizing potentials. It has therefore been criticized by defenders of religion for marginalizing and alienating the wealth of religious sensibilities, voices, and demands now present in contemporary liberal societies. In this anthology, established scholars of Rawls and the philosophy of religion reexamine and rearticulate the central tenets of Rawls's theory to show they in fact offer sophisticated resources for accommodating and responding to religions in liberal political life. The chapters reassert the subtlety, openness, and flexibility of his sense of liberal "respect" and "consensus," revealing their inclusive implications for religious citizens. They also explore the means he proposes for accommodating nonliberal religions in liberal politics, developing his conception of "public reason" into a novel account of the possibilities for rational engagement between liberal and religious ideas. And they reevaluate Rawls's liberalism from the "transcendent" perspectives of religions themselves, critically considering its normative and political value, as well as its own "religious" character. _Rawls and Religion_ makes a unique and important contribution to contemporary debates over liberalism and its response to the proliferation of religions in contemporary political life.

Contemporary global politics poses urgent challenges – from humanitarian, migratory and environmental problems to economic, religious and military conflicts – that strain not only existing political systems and resources, but also the frameworks and concepts of political thinking. The standard cosmopolitan response is to invoke a sense of global community, governed by such principles as human rights or humanitarianism, free or fair trade, global equality, multiculturalism, or extra-national democracy. Yet, the contours, grounds and implications of such a global community remain notoriously controversial, and it risks abstracting precisely from the particular and conflictual character of the challenges which global politics poses. The contributions to this collection undertake to develop a more fruitful cosmopolitan response to global political challenges, one that roots cosmopolitanism in the particularity and conflict of global politics itself. They argue that this ‘contestatory’ cosmopolitanism must be dialectical, agonistic and democratic: that is, its concepts and principles must be developed immanently and critically out of prevailing normative resources; they must reflect and acknowledge their antagonistic roots; and they must be the result of participatory and self-determining publics. In elaborating this alternative, the contributions also return to neglected cosmopolitan theorists like Hegel, Adorno, Arendt, Camus, Derrida, and Mouffe, and reconsider mainstream figures such as Kant and Habermas. This book was originally published as a special edition of _Critical Horizons. _.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di FerrarisTom BaileyAlfredo Ferrarin, editor. Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di Ferraris. Pisa: ETS, 2006. Pp. 172. Paper, € 13.Maurizio Ferraris’ Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della Critica della ragion pura (Milan 2004) has been a notable success in the field of popular philosophical writing in Italy. With refreshing irreverence and wit, the book mounts a sustained attack on the supposed confusions of Kant’s first Critique, and bemoans their influence on later philosophy. In particular, Ferraris [End Page 328] argues that by attempting to found the necessary features of experience on physics, Kant confuses experience and ontology with science and epistemology and arrives at the implausible conclusion that our experience and knowledge, and perhaps even the existence, of things depend on how our minds are structured. Unsurprisingly, Goodbye Kant! has provoked strong reactions from Kant scholars. Alfredo Ferrarin’s Congedarsi da Kant? collects four particularly considered responses, along with a reply from Ferraris himself.The book begins with Ferrarin’s contribution, which focuses on Ferraris’ claim that, for Kant, the sensible experience of an object necessarily requires a concept of that object. With reference to spatial intuition, the three-fold synthesis, and Kant’s example of a savage seeing a house for the first time, Ferrarin argues that Kant in fact defends the independence of intuition from concepts, such that intuition is possible and can provide certain cognitive results without our having any particular concept of what the object of intuition is. Ferrarin also insists that, in claiming that “[t]he I think must be able to accompany all my representations,” Kant considers having an experience to imply only the possibility—and not, as Ferraris claims, the necessity—of the experience being consciously thought, and that Kant considers imagination not as a “creative” psychological activity within experience, as Ferraris implies, but rather as a certain normative activity that experience presupposes. Instead of basing experience on physics, then, Ferrarin argues that Kant distinguishes experience from science and considers both to be made possible by certain general a priori forms of sensing and conceiving of objects.In the following article, Claudio La Rocca takes issue with Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project in the Critique. For La Rocca, Kant is concerned with the conditions under which discourses or experiences have sense for a subject, and, specifically, with how referring to empirical objects differs from referring to the objects of, say, hallucinations, aesthetic experiences, or moral reasoning. On La Rocca’s account, referring meaningfully to an object presupposes shared rules which identify that kind of object and distinguish it from others, and which are “spelled out” in experience even before being “read” conceptually. However, unlike the distinctions between kinds of empirical objects, the general distinction between empirical objects and objects of other discourses or experiences cannot itself be derived from experience, since experience presupposes it. Thus La Rocca presents Kant’s basic project as the identification of the a priori rules which distinguish empirical objects as such, rather than the idealist project attributed to him by Ferraris, that of showing how the existence or properties of such objects depend on the mind or how our experience of them depends on the concepts or scientific theories we have of them.Paolo Parrini adopts a slightly different approach by arguing that it is Ferraris, and not Kant, who fails to distinguish adequately between experience, ontology, and epistemology. In particular, Parrini insists that, rather than basing experience or ontology on science, as Ferraris claims, Kant aims to show that a priori concepts are necessary to distinguish the objective from the subjective in ordinary experience, and that Ferraris’ own realism naively ignores certain crucial distinctions between what is experienced, what exists, and what we know. Parrini thus undertakes to defend not only Kant, but also certain post-Kantians—and the logical empiricists in particular—against Ferraris’ criticisms.In the final response to Ferraris, Massimo Barale further questions Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project. By considering only the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, Barale insists that Ferraris treats the most elementary, and even preliminary, parts of Kant...

This article contends that the first section of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals provides a sophisticated and valid argument, and that commentators are therefore mistaken in dismissing this section as flawed. In particular, the article undertakes to show that in this section Kant argues from a conception of the goodness of a good will to two distinctive features of moral goodness, and from these features to his ?formula of universal law?. The article reveals the sophistication and validity of this argument by considering it in the light of a number of criticisms that are commonly levelled at the section. In conclusion, the article proposes that this interpretation of the section also has significant implications for the understanding of Kant's method, his formulas and his basic conception of the ?moral?

Maurizio Ferraris’ Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della Critica della ragion pura has been a notable success in the field of popular philosophical writing in Italy. With refreshing irreverence and wit, the book mounts a sustained attack on the supposed confusions of Kant’s first Critique, and bemoans their influence on later philosophy. In particular, Ferraris argues that by attempting to found the necessary features of experience on physics, Kant confuses experience and ontology with science and epistemology and arrives at the implausible conclusion that our experience and knowledge, and perhaps even the existence, of things depend on how our minds are structured. Unsurprisingly, Goodbye Kant! has provoked strong reactions from Kant scholars. Alfredo Ferrarin’s Congedarsi da Kant? collects four particularly considered responses, along with a reply from Ferraris himself