The McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne UniversitySpring 2018

Kant's Moral Theory

PHIL 538Time: Fridays 11-1:40Place: CH324

Professor: Jennifer Bates

Office: 321 College HallPhone: 412-396-6506Email: batesj@duq.edu

Kant 1724-1804

Course Description:

It all starts with Kant. Whether one follows the tradition up through Romanticism to Kierkegaard’s paradoxical Purity of the Heart, or takes Hegel’s criticism in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the romantic “Beautiful Soul,” to become a dialectical phenomenologist, or solves the Kantian phenomena/noumena dilemma by dropping noumena to follow Husserlian phenomenology: Kant is the Ursprung of them all. In this course, we look at Kantian will and desire, and how these function in his critical system, and beyond. Our focus will be on the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, for the main aspects of Kant’s moral theory. But I also want to discuss his works on perpetual peace and cosmopolitanism, as well as inquire whether Kant’s moral subject needs to be saved from the above-mentioned developments.

Course Requirement: Rotation 30%; class presentation 30%; final paper 40%.

This course fulfils the Modern Philosophy Requirement.