Posts Tagged Immanuel Kant
Michael Sandel on Kant’s Morality (Like Plato?)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes, Things to Watch on July 15, 2011
In response to my Steven B. Smith post, Facebook commenter Robinson K. recommended Michael Sandel of Harvard as another great lecturer in political philosophy.
He’s got a whole course on “Justice” available for online viewing. Though there doesn’t appear to be a lecture on Plato in there, I noted that episode 7 was described by reference to the example Plato uses (referred to on the Plato episode, and more extensively on our Kant morality episode) about whether you lie to someone to prevent an act of brutality (the “Nazis at the door looking for the hidden Jews” example). Here’s that lecture in full:
Watch at JusticeHarvard.org.
Get the video podcast from iTunes.
Now, for the most part, this is just a rather labored (i.e. aimed at undergraduates unfamiliar with Kant’s difficult-to-understand views) presentation of Kant on morality, but I took a look at this with Plato in mind and found a parallel:
At around 6 minutes in, he describes Kant’s view of morality as arising out of our status as non-empirical beings:
“As a subject of experience, I inhabit an intelligible world… to be independent of causes in the sensible world is to be free.”
Schleiermacher as Romantic Vanguard
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on June 17, 2011
Many of the books discussed on PEL advance their thesis methodically. Not so with Schleiermacher’s On Religion. (Schleiermacher’s approach changed after he became a university professor, whereupon he became more systematic and less interesting.) Schleiermacher’s lack of structured argument may have resulted from his theological, as opposed to philosophical, training. But it’s also a function of his audience. On Religion was not primarily a philosophical tract, but a religious work addressed to a literary circle of cultured atheists. Think McSweeney’s with more money.
Comparing Kant with Schleiermacher on God and the Soul
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 16, 2011
On the Schleiermacher episode, we spent some time comparing On Religion to Kant’s religious arguments, particularly citing Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Kant did not try to prove God’s existence or the soul’s immortality. Rather, he postulated those concepts as helpful ways to help realize the summum bonum, the highest good. “Postulate” is defined as a “a hypothesis advanced as an essential presupposition, condition, or premise of a train of reasoning.”
With that in mind, read along as you listen to this passage from the Critique of Practical Reason. Reviewing it may help highlight what Schleiermacher was rejecting:
The Immortality of the Soul as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason
The realization of the summum bonum [highest good] in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law. But in this will the perfect accordance of the mind with the moral law is the supreme condition of the summum bonum. This then must be possible, as well as its object, since it is contained in the command to promote the latter.
Episode 39: Schleiermacher Defends Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on June 10, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:43:12 — 94.5MB)
Discussing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers” (1799, with notes added 1821), first and second speeches.
Does religion necessarily conflict with science? Schleiermacher says no: the essence of religion is an emotional response to life; it doesn’t give knowledge or even tell us what to do exactly. Moreover, this attitude is a necessary to fully enter into life, to be a whole and fulfilled person. Yes, he’s of the “romantic” school, but his approach can still be seen today in liberal Protestant churches.
Featuring guest podcaster and blog contributor Daniel Horne.
Read the text online or buy the book.
End song: “Remembrance” by Fingers (read more about it).
Topic for #39: Schleiermacher’s Liberal Piety
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on May 8, 2011
Friedrich Schleiermacher, a contemporary of Hegel, bought into Kant’s views on ethics and the division between scientific and religious realms, but didn’t like Kant’s ultimate view of religion, i.e. that its only support is an indirect (and really pretty flimsy) appeal to what we have to as a practical matter believe for ethics to really make sense to us.
Instead, for Schleiermacher (a Lutheran preacher), religion is grounded on the emotion of piety, which each one of us can experientially (phenomenologically) confirm the existence of, if we’re not too poor in spirit to do so. This reflection on our own emotions is what provides meaning to life: religion is not a theory of the way the world is or a direct command to some action, but is fundamentally an inexpressible but all-pervasive experience of oneness with the world.
This of course raises some questions: if religion isn’t knowledge, then what is its relation to metaphysical claims such as in the existence of God? Even if piety is not the justification for ethical action, fully human action or knowledge, according to S., will involve piety. Religion ends up being an essential part of life fully on par with science and ethics. Also, the feeling of piety has to play itself out socially in particular historical circumstances, and that’s where we get religious traditions. So S. is a pluralist about religion, but not a non-denominational spiritualist (like maybe Emerson).
We’re reading an early work (from 1799), “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers,” (focusing on the first two of the four speeches) which was originally written when he was at his most theologically adventurous (influenced greatly by Spinoza), but then was revised and has end notes to each “Speech” written much later in his life (1821) where he wants to prove that he really is a Christian.
Read the text online or buy the book.
We’ll also look at the prefaces to Kant’s “Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason” (sometimes translated as “Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone”), which you can read online here.
Episode 30: Schopenhauer on Explanations and Knowledge
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on December 19, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:13:39 — 122.4MB)
Discussing Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, published in 1847 (as an expansion of his doctoral thesis from 1813).
What kinds of explanations are legitimate? S. thought that causal and logical explanations are often confused, resulting in philosophical errors. In laying out the four types of explanation — the four versions of the principle of sufficient reason — he clearly elaborates his modernized Kantian epistemology. We also discuss his strange notion of “will” that was so influential on Nietzsche and Freud. Plus, we discuss “Action Philosophers!”
Read the book online here or purchase it.
End song: “The Answer,” from the forthcoming album Impossible Things by New People.
Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on August 24, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:36:01 — 88.0MB)
Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2.
We mostly discuss his weird, immanent, non-personal conception of God: God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).
Also, if you’re not going to sell out and go for a university position in philosophy, should you instead grind lenses in your attic without adequate ventilation? (Hint: no) Plus, the Amsterdam of yesterday, whose heady aroma drove people to write like Euclid, property dualism rears its ugly head, and Mel Gibson as Rousseau!
Read a free version online or purchase the book.
One place to read the earlier Spinoza book I refer to, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being (1660), is here. The Karen Armstrong book I keep referring to is The Case for God,
The dumbed down, non-geometric presentation of the Ethics that I talk about is here.
End song: “Spiritual Insect,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).
Episode 20: Pragmatism – Peirce and James
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on June 9, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:07:51 — 234.2MB)
Reading Pragmatism by William James and “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” by Charles Sanders Peirce.
Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions “prove their worth” by being useful in some way, like by fitting well with other portions of our experience or being delicious?
Peirce, the inventor of pragmatism, focuses on the philosophy of science and thinks of inquiry as a way for us to just settle on any belief we can stomach. James, who popularized pragmatism, has a wider view that applies not only to science but to religious beliefs. If it makes you feel nice to believe in Hogwarts, should you do so?
The episode features guest podcaster Dylan Casey (previously from our quantum physics episode).
Read Pragmatism online or purchase it.
End Song: “Friend” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.
Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on May 14, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:31 — 115.0MB)
Reading Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which is sort of a post-publication Cliff’s Notes to his Critique of Pure Reason.
Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience?
Kant says that yes, we can, to a limited extent, but that everyone before him did it wrong, because they didn’t understand how our minds interact with the world to create experience. He insists that once you read his book, you’ll never be satisfied with such “twaddle” again!
LEARN about the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason! THINK about whether geometric truths are justified by our intuition of space (maybe) and arithmetic is grounded in our intuition of time (probably not). DOUBT whether we actually impose causality on our experience as Kant says! MARVEL at our guest participant, Azzurra Crispino, as she augments the number of speakers on this episode to a PERFECTLY SQUARE number! GAWK as your world is turned up-flicking-side down by Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” (a term we neither use nor explain in this episode)!
Read the book online or buy it.
End song: “Subjectivity” from the 1994 album “Happy Songs Will Bring You Down” by The MayTricks.
Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on March 29, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:25 — 114.9MB)
Reading David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of uniformity. So, if we have any legitimate idea of causality at all, it must just be that: regular patterns of conjoined events.
We discuss what Hume thinks this view implies for the free will question, belief in miracles, whether external objects are actually there, Seth’s experience of Towlie, and more.
Read with us: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662.
End song: “Twitch” by by The MayTricks, from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down.
Episode 15: Hegel on History
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 24, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)
Discussing G.W.F Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Though he didn’t actually write a book with this name, notes on his lectures on this topic were published after his death, and the first chunk of that serves as a good entrance point to Hegel’s very strange system.
How should a philosopher approach the study of history? Is history just a bunch of random happenings, or is it a purposive force manipulating us to fulfill its hidden ends? If you have asked yourself this question in this way, then you, like Hegel, are mighty strange.
Here we talk about the unfolding of the world-historical spirit, world-historical individuals (hint: not you), dialectic, his alternative to the social contract, the formation of the self based on what others label you, the geist of America, why a constitutional monarchy is obviously the best form of government, and heaps more.
Read with us: Pages 14-128 of this online version or buy the book with only the part we’re concerned with.
End Song: “Cold,” by Madison Lint (2004), described in my music blog.
Episode 10: Kantian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 19, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:03 — 114.6MB)
Discussing Fundamental Principles (aka Groundwork) of the Metaphysic of Morals.
We try very hard to make sense of Kant’s major ethical principle, the Categorical Imperative, wherein you should only do what you’d will that EVERYONE do, so, for instance, you should not will to eat pie, because then everyone would eat it and there would be none left for you, so too bad.
Also, Kant on free will, “things in themselves,” our duties to animals, and prostitution! Plus: Should you go to grad school?
The Kant reading can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5682. The Allen Wood article “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature” is here: http://www.stanford.edu/~allenw/papers/Nonrational.doc.
End song: “Stop” by Madison Lint (2003).
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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