Like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we now have both an A- and a substantially revised B-edition of Henry Allison's commentary to and defence of that work: Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense . Unlike Kant's Critique, however, Allison's first edition is unlikely to persist as an occasional rival to the second, since reviewers rightly consider the second to have superseded the landmark scholarship of the first. Nevertheless, before Allison's first edition is entirely supplanted, I would like to save (...) a neglected insight from its treatment of the B-deduction that is not retained in the second edition. (shrink)

Surprisingly often Kant asserts that it is possible to behave in such a degrading way that one ‘throws oneself away’ and turns oneself ‘into a thing’, as a result of which others may treat one ‘as they please’. Rather than dismiss these claims out of hand, I argue that they force us to reconsider what is meant and required by ‘respect for humanity’. I argue that to ‘throw away’ humanity is not to lose or extinguish it, but rather to refuse (...) or otherwise fail to claim the respect that it authorizes one to claim. If I refuse or fail to make this claim, there is a sense in which I become a thing, and I leave others no choice but to treat me as such. This is compatible with their respect for humanity in my person. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s own views—his commitment to happiness as part of a transcendent highest good, his view of the afterlife as a place of moral striving, and his conception of the “absolute unity” of rational and animal natures in a human person—commit him to belief in an embodied afterlife. This belief is just as necessary for conceiving the possibility of the highest good as the beliefs in personal immortality, freedom, and God’s existence, and thus it too is a “practical (...) postulate” in Kant’s sense. (shrink)

This interesting and important contribution to scholarship on Kant’s account of sublime feeling develops an argument that the author first makes in an article, “Kant’s Consistency Regarding the Regime Change in France” (Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 [2006]: 443–60). The heart of the argument, presented in chapters 2 through 5, concludes that aesthetic enthusiasm (Enthusiasm, which Clewis distinguishes from Schwärmerei, or fanaticism) is a kind of sublime feeling, which can indirectly support morality and thus elicit an interest of reason (as (...) Kant claims the beautiful does). In chapter 6, Clewis uses the foregoing analysis to resolve an apparent inconsistency between Kant’s remarks on the enthusiasm of .. (shrink)

William McNeill and Nicholas Walker provide an excellent translation of Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, the text of a lecture course delivered in 1929-30 and originally published in 1983 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. In this text, which is crucial to understanding the transition from Heidegger's earlier to his later thinking, readers will find a helpful overview of Heidegger's conception of metaphysics, a brilliant phenomenological analysis of boredom, an investigation of the essence of life and animality, and an analysis of (...) the structure of the propositional statement. (shrink)