Tag Archives: Kant

Groundwork I’s Analysis of Common Moral Rational Cognition

This presentation addresses the criticism of Kant’s ethics as being removed from everyday moral thinking through a discussion of Kant’s analysis of common moral rational cognition in Groundwork I.

It invokes Bernard Williams’ distinction between abstract, “thin” ethical concepts, such as “right” and “good,” which are the subject matter of much contemporary ethical theorizing, and concrete, “thick” ethical concepts such as “coward” and “lie,” which, on Williams’ view, are the “given” of ethical thought, and thus should form the starting point of ethical reflection.

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Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense

My aim in this paper is to analyze Kant’s account, during the early 1760s, of the relation between judgment, distinctness of representations and ‘inner sense’. I will argue that Kant takes over and radically transforms important strands of Wolff’s thought on the same issues. Indeed, both Kant and Wolff define judgment with a view to the act of the mind performed therein.

Kant however rejects Wolff’s attempt to explain the possibility of judgment through the gradual accumulation of lower cognitive acts (such as attention, comparison, reflection). Judgment, Kant argues, is a specific way of relating Continue reading →

Kant’s epigones: Otto Liebmann’s metaphysical rejection of the ‘thing-in-itself’

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One of the particular claims of Kant’s transcendental idealism is that we can cognize, with the help of our transcendental (mental) apparatus, the data of the experience that we perceive through senses.

This ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy provoked animosities and doubts among the disciples of Kant, many of them bringing into question the stake of a proper approach and method of interpreting Kant’s philosophy.

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