Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article discusses the concept of publicity in Kant’s moral philosophy. Insofar as the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ can describe our relations with others, they can be considered to be moral concepts. I argue that we can find in Kant a moral duty not to keep our maxims of action private, or secret. Whereas Korsgaard argues that sometimes in the face of evil it is permissible to sidestep the moral law, I argue that it is rather through publicity that (...) we can deal with evil in the non-ideal world. Moreover, by being open with our maxims, moral progress is possible. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Making the Ideal Real: Publicity and Morality in KantVolume 21, Issue 2Melissa Zinkin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000042Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Making the Ideal Real: Publicity and Morality in KantVolume 21, Issue 2Melissa Zinkin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000042Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Making the Ideal Real: Publicity and Morality in KantVolume 21, Issue 2Melissa Zinkin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000042Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

Kant's discussion of the feeling of respect presents a puzzle regarding both the precise nature of this feeling and its role in his moral theory as an incentive that motivates us to follow the moral law. If it is a feeling that motivates us to follow the law, this would contradict Kant's view that moral obligation is based on reason alone. I argue that Kant has an account of respect as feeling that is nevertheless not separate from the use of (...) reason, but is intrinsic to willing. I demonstrate this by taking literally Kant's references to force in the second Critique. By referring to Kant's pre-critical essay on Negative Magnitudes (1763), I show that Kant's account of how the moral law effects in us a feeling of respect is underpinned by his view that the will is a kind of negative magnitude, or force. I conclude by noting some of the implications of my discussion for Kant's account of virtue. (shrink)

: Kant’s 1763 essay, Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, is one of the least discussed of all his pre-critical writings. When it is referred to, it is usually just to note a few passages that anticipate Kant’s later, Critical philosophy. I argue that instead of understanding these early anticipations of the Critical philosophy as separable from Kant’s discussion of negative magnitudes, we should take their origin in Kant’s investigation of negative magnitudes to be of central (...) importance, since it can help us to understand aspects of Kant’s Critical view of cognition where negative magnitudes still play a role. I argue that negative magnitudes suggest to Kant a kind of cognitive activity that is neither the spontaneity of discursive thought not the receptivity of the senses. Rather it is an “effort” of the mind, of which we are conscious through a feeling. I show that Kant’s early views about negative magnitudes are retained in his Critical philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to the pleasure that we feel when judging that an object is beautiful as the pleasure of "mere reflection". Yet Kant never makes explicit what exactly is the relationship between the activity of "mere reflection" and the feeling of pleasure. I discuss several contemporary accounts of the pleasure of taste and argue that none of them is fully accurate, since, in each case, they leave open the possibility that one (...) can reflect without having a feeling of pleasure, and hence allow a possible skepticism of taste. I then present my own account, which can better explain why Kant thinks that when one reflects one must also have a feeling of pleasure. My view, which emphasizes the role of attention in Kant, depicts well what we do when we judge something to be beautiful. It can also suggest a way to explain the relation between judgments of taste and moral feeling, and begin to show how the faculty of feeling fills a gap in the system of our cognitive faculties. (shrink)

This article makes a distinction between two kinds of feminist philosophy. One looks ‘up’ to the realm of philosophy and aims to intervene in this realm in order to make it feminist. The other looks ‘down’ to the world of human experience and aims to make it feminist. This article argues that feminist philosophers’ efforts are better spent on the second kind of feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy can better achieve its aims by applying philosophy to the critical analysis of women's (...) lives and gender norms, rather than by attempting to change the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

This dissertation examines Kant's transcendental idealism with respect to his account of natural forces. Although force plays a crucial role in Kant's pre-critical writings, especially in his argument against Leibniz's pre-established harmony, it is conspicuously absent in the Critique of Pure Reason . I argue that force has to be excluded once Kant's philosophy takes its "critical turn" in order for his transcendental argument to be able to prove that the categories of thought apply to objects of experience. In order (...) for the forms of thought to apply to the matter of sensibility, both thought and sensible intuition must not only be forms of unity, or unified forms, but also uniform in quality and capable of being measured in terms of extensive magnitudes. Force, on the other hand, is an intensive magnitude which is measured not in terms of homogeneous units, but in terms of degrees. It must be excluded from Kant's critical philosophy since the coherence of the experience that Kant seeks to justify requires the uniformity and consistency of the subject, the ground of knowledge. Nevertheless, the concept of force can still be found to be "at work" in the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant's schematism of the categories of quality and the principle of the anticipations of perception which are based on this schematism. In order for a quality to be predicated of an object it must have an impact on the subject and become an object of attention. Kant's controversial discussion of judgments of perception in the Prolegomena, can be understood as his attempt to incorporate force into his ontology by introducing a new category of thought, that of analogy. In the case of analogy, I argue, the copula of the judgment is not that of being but is that of force itself. This form of judgment ultimately becomes the reflective judgment in Kant's Critique of Judgment, which makes explicit the form of thought that would make the experience of force possible. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's account of force, a topic that was of central philosophical concern in his day, but which he does not explicitly address in any of his Critiques. Just as with the nature of space and time and the nature of the human will, the nature of force was under dispute by the philosophers and natural scientists to whose legacy Kant was responding. Yet, Kant does not make force an explicit topic of his Critiques, and thus provides no (...) explicit transcendental account of force. Nevertheless, I will argue that one can indeed find in Kant a transcendental account of force, one that is a synthesis of empiricist and rationalist accounts, but in an unexpected place; the third Critique, in the discussion of the principle of purposiveness. (shrink)