INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCEPersonality and Humanity in Kant: Theoretical, Moral and

Anthropological Perspectives

ABSTRACTS

Andrew Ward (University of York)

“Has Parfit disproved Kant’s account of the Freedom required for Moral Responsibility and Desert?”

Abstract

In the chapter entitled ‘Free Will and Desert’ of On What Matters (Volume I, Chapter 11), Derek Parfit launches two separate attacks on Kant’s account of the freedom required for moral responsibility: what Kant calls ‘transcendental freedom’. This account is at the heart of Kant’s conception of a person since, without transcendental freedom, Kant argues that the human being would merely be a ‘mechanism’. As such, he contends that the moral law could not be applied to us and, consequently, no imputations of responsibility or desert would be possible. In fact, we would not be persons at all, but merely what he calls conscious machines [‘automaton spirituale’].

In his first attack, Parfit claims that Kant displays both muddle and straightforward error in supposing that the compatibilist’s, hypothetical, sense of ‘could have done otherwise’ is insufficient for capturing the freedom required for moral responsibility. Kant had famously maintained that this compatibilist conception of freedom is nothing but ‘the freedom of a turnspit, which, once it has been wound up, also performs its motions on its own’. I will defend Kant against the charge that, in criticising the compatibilist’s position, he, on the one hand, confuses fatalism with causal determinism and, on the other, inconsistently allows that moral responsibility, and therefore personhood, is compatible with causal determinism. I will argue that he consistently claims that only if we possess transcendental freedom can we be conceived as free, morally responsible, agents (i.e. as persons) – and that, in so claiming, Kant does not confuse causal determinism with fatalism, as Parfit understands it.

In his second attack, Parfit holds that, even allowing Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena, his account of transcendental freedom should be totally rejected. In this attack, Parfit holds that Kant’s own account of moral responsibility and desert is ‘demonstrably inconceivable’, and that only a compatibilist account of freedom can be conceived as applying to us. If correct, this would mean that whereas something like Parfit’s own conception of a person could still be successfully employed, the Kantian notion of a person would have to be rejected as not only false in fact, but as literally unthinkable. I contend that Parfit is wrong to affirm that Kant has failed to show that we can

defend transcendental freedom while allowing thoroughgoing causal determinism in the spatio/temporal (the phenomenal) world. Contra Parfit, I will argue that Kant has shown that such freedom is possible, even if thoroughgoing causal determinism does exist in the phenomenal world. Given his phenomena/noumena distinction, Kant can allow both that, from the phenomenal perspective, every one of an agent’s decisions and subsequent actions must be causally determined and that, from the perspective of the noumenal world, the agent can be conceived as free from the causal determinism of nature and morally responsible for all his or her decisions and actions in the phenomenal world. In sum, I will argue that Parfit’s attacks on Kant have established neither that his account of freedom and moral responsibility must be rejected nor, consequently, that his conception of a person as an autonomous agent cannot be sustained.

The paper concludes with a brief discussion of whether, in the light of scientific evidence that is not considered by Parfit, Kant’s account of a person can be accepted as actually applying to us. For while Kant may well be correct regarding the conditions that must obtain if we are to be, in the Kantian sense, persons, and he may also be correct to hold that it is possible for transcendental freedom to exist in a thoroughly causal determined universe, it may not be possible for such freedom to exist in the particular causally determined world in which we find ourselves. If this should be the case, it is concluded that Kant himself would deny that we can consider ourselves as persons at all, and we should regard the demands of moral obligation and our imputations of desert as nothing but ‘a mere phantom of the mind’.

Andrew Ward: Lecturer in Philosophy and Honorary Life Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of York, UK. Some relevant publications: Kant: The Three Critiques (Polity Press, Cambridge: 2006); ‘The Survival of Persons: A Reply to Parfit’s Reductionism’, An Anthology of Philosophical Studies (2018), edited by Patricia Hanna.

Antonino Falduto (University of St Andrews / Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)

“Personality and Revolution”

Abstract

In my paper, I aim to show how Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Benjamin Erhard analyse the principles of the French revolutionaries starting from some considerations about Immanuel Kant’s point of view. I concentrate on Fichte and Erhard for two reasons. The first reason has to do with Fichte’s direct quotation of Erhard’s work in his Foundations of Natural Right from 1796. Considered the fact that Fichte most sparely quote other philosophers in his works, this reference to Erhard is most noteworthy. The second reason is of systematic nature: I want to argue that both Fichte and Erhard, in contrast to Kant, defend the people’s right to a revolution by deriving it from freedom of thought and speech, which are, on turn, based on a metaphysical foundation of the concepts of freedom and self.

In order to illustrate my thesis, I will first recall some of Kant’s statements about freedom of thought and speech. Second, I will go towards Fichte’s arguments concerning freedom of thought and freedom of speech in his writing on the Freedom of Thought from 1793 and I will link the justification of the right of freely expressing our thoughts with the justification of the people’s right to a revolution. Moreover, in order to shed light on the link between these two rights, I will third refer to Fichte’s writing on the French Revolution from 1793 and Erhard’s pamphlet On the Right of the People to a Revolution from 1795.

Once referred to these approaches concerning the legitimacy of a revolution, in my conclusion I will show how we can properly understand the delineated revolutionary theories only in the context

of the metaphysical theories of the self the mentioned authors argue for. In fact, I will underline that, according to Fichte and Erhard, and in contrast to Kant, we have a right to revolution because we have a right to be what we really are, namely ourselves. The presupposition of the right to revolution is the presupposition of freedom as the characteristic of the self in its original form. This self can exist only insofar as the others exist and they can show us – and we can show them – the difference of being others, the possibility of heteronomous laws, the unicity of the moral law, and, from this, the existence of the self of a self-conscious, autonomous human being and its personality.

From the prerogative of autonomy as the real, original form of the self of human beings, and from its possibility only through intersubjectivity descends the right to revolt, both in Fichte’s and in Erhard’s text. Fichte’s metaphysics of the self can be taken to be a presupposition of Erhard’s right to a revolution, since only if the self consists in freedom, then it is possible to contend the existence of human rights, and of the right to a revolution as one of these human rights. Conclusively, my aim is that of showing how far Fichte and Erhard are from Kant’s idea of the constitution of autonomy and the self, and why the considerations on the people’s right to revolution by Fichte and Erhard so much differ from Kant’s theory of personality as it is connected to his definition of self and freedom.

Antonino Falduto is lecturer at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) and Feodor-Lynen-Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation at the University of St Andrews (UK). Dr Falduto studied Philosophy in Italy, Ireland, and Germany. His work focuses on the History of Moral Philosophy (in particular: Classical German Philosophy and Scottish Enlightenment). Books: The Faculties of the Human Mind and the Case of Moral Feeling in Kant’s Philosophy (Berlin/Boston 2012; paperback: 2014); as editors: Metaphysik – Ästhetik – Ethik. Beiträge zur Interpretation der Philosophie Kants (ed. with C. Kolisang and G. Rivero, Würzburg 2012); Kant und seine Kritiker / Kant and His Critics (ed. with H. F. Klemme, Hildesheim 2018).

Daniel Stader (MLU Halle-Wittenberg)

"Metapher und Idee. Über die Entwicklung von Recht und Moral in Kants «IaG»“

Abstract

In meinem Vortrag gehe ich davon aus, dass sich Kants Vorstellung der Entwicklung von Recht und Moral in der Geschichte der Menschheit nicht im Begrifflichen erschöpft, sondern dass es eines metaphorologischen Ansatzes bedarf, um die gedankliche Dimension des Verhältnisses zu erfassen. Ansätze für eine solche Methode liefert einerseits Kant selbst, der sich des unbegrifflichen Gehalts metaphorischer Verwendungen durchaus bewusst ist (vgl. KU, § 59), andererseits Hans Blumenbergs Metaphorologie, die an Kant anlehnend Instrumente für eine figurative Analyse auf bildlichem Grund gebauter Theorien liefert. Exemplarisch soll der Wert dieser Instrumente an den Metaphern der Botanik und Mechanik in Kants „Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht“ aufgezeigt werden.

Daniel Stader. Nach dem B.A. in Philosophie und Germanistik an der Universität Trier und dem M.A. in Philosophie an der Freien Universität Berlin arbeitete Daniel Stader in verschiedenen wissensgeschichtlichen und literaturwissenschaftlichen Projekten an der FU Berlin. Derzeit arbeitet und promoviert er an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle im Projekt „Kants Begriff der (Un)Mündigkeit in historischer und systematischer Perspektive“. Publikationen: Stader, Daniel / Traninger, Anita: „Unparteilichkeit und das Problem der Trennung von Person und Sache (Bayle, Thomasius, Hoffmann)“, in: Scientia Poetica 20 (2016), S. 44–80.

Dennis Vanden Auweele (KU Leuven)

“Kant’s Moral Person, a Pessimist?”

Abstract

The term ‘person’ derives from the Latin persona, which literally means ‘mask’ but can also be rendered more playfully as ‘sounding through’ (per-sona). Our personhood is that through which we sound ourselves through to the world and by which the world might impact us. It is what enlists us as singular agents in a larger order. Two elements are here of importance: first, that personhood makes us into unique, singular agents; second, that personhood allows us to participate in something beyond our individuality.

In 1926, Nicolai Hartmann voiced an oft-repeated criticism at Kant’s usage of personhood, which to him overemphasizes our participation in the universal order at the cost of our individuality. It makes us, in Hartmann’s view, “a mere numeral in the crowd and could be replaced by anyone else; his personal existence is futile and meaningless.” Indeed, two of Kant’s reflections on personhood – in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason – point in that direction. In the former, Kant connects the idea of a universal end in itself to personality (4:428); in the latter, he calls personality our “susceptibility to respect for the moral law as of itself a sufficient incentive to the power of choice” (6:27). In both instances, Kant views personality as a way by which individual human agents participate in an order higher than their private subjectivity. While one could recover some more robust sense of individuality in Kant’s philosophy, it generally holds that Kant’s ethics and concept of the person is geared mostly towards elevating human beings beyond their particular inclinations. He is most strident on this in Groundwork, where he laments that “the inclinations themselves, as sources of needs, are so far from having an absolute worth, so as to make one wish to have them, that it must instead be the universal wish of every rational being to be altogether free from them” (4:428). It is my objective in this paper to discuss in which way this one-sided approach to personality impacts the individual human being’s disposition towards the moral law. Succinctly, this asks whether individual human beings find their attempts to progress morally supported (optimism) or thwarted (pessimism) by their individuality.

Despite that most textbook versions of Kant’s ethics present his thought as progressive, emancipatory and optimistic, I will argue that Kant is committed to a pessimistic point of view with regard to the singular human person’s natural predisposition to morality. This argument will be made in xxx steps. First, I will discuss Kant’s theory of moral motivation as what was called a motivational hedonism by Richard McCarty. Second, I will argue that while this view commits Kant’s moral anthropology to a moral feeling in human personality, Kant’s specific interpretation of that moral feeling is superimposed on individuality rather than part of that individuality. Third, the superimposition of moral feeling explains why Kant takes prudence to be at best a means for cultivating moral resolve, but in itself no moral disposition. Finally, this will show how Kant’s sense of moral personhood is remarkably pessimistic about the natural potential for human agents to behave morally. The main reasons for this is that Kant’s notion of personhood forgets to root more robustly our individuality in the universal order; at best, Kant takes recourse here to a dualism – homo phenomenon and homo noumenon – which only exacerbates the distance between human being and moral law.

Dennis Vanden Auweele is postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at KU Leuven (University of Leuven). He defended his doctoral dissertation in 2014 with a thesis on 'Pessimism in Kant and Schopenhauer'. This has been published in two books: Pessimism in

Kant’s Ethics and Rational Religion (Lexington Books, 2019) and The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism (Routledge, 2017.) He is particularly interested in 18th-19th-century ethics and philosophy of religion and researches, next to Kant, such things as Schopenhauer, Schelling and Nietzsche.

Fernando Silva (CFUL)

“Personhood: a Kantian concept between Empirical Psychology and Pragmatic Anthropology”

Abstract

To this day Kantian scholars and readers have not yet sufficiently dissociated the position and task of the scientific fields of Empirical Psychology and Pragmatic Anthropology, mostly because Kant himself refers to both as Anthropology. As a result of this, one even more pernicious, the topics which constitute both scientific fields have been taken as similar topics, now approached in Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics, now in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology – yet similar in content and aim. However, according to Kant, they are not one and the same, just as they’re harboring sciences are not one and the same. This much is shown by several of those topics, and especially by one the analysis of which presides over this text: the concept of pragmatic person. Hence, in an effort to delineate and ascertain the true position and aim of Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, we therefore propose a twofold objective: first, to ascertain the position of Pragmatic Anthropology among human knowledge, by dissociating it from Empirical Psychology. Then, to analyze concept of person between Empirical Psychology and Pragmatic Anthropology and to show how this concept is key towards the final realization of our first objective.

Fernando M. F. Silva, Post-Doctoral fellow and member of the Centre of Philosophy, University of Lisbon. PhD in 2016, on Novalis’ critique of identity, as expounded in the «Fichte-Studien». Chief concerns: Kantian Aesthetics and Anthropology, German Idealism and Romanticism, in authors such as Baumgarten, Kant, Fichte, Novalis, Fr. Schlegel or Hölderlin, having published on and translated several of them. Main publications: ‘The poem of the understanding is philosophy’. Novalis and the art of self-critique, in Mimesis Verlag, Germany (t. b. p. in 2019); «“Das Unsterbliche mit dem Sterblichen zu verbinden“. Sobre o pensamento principal da filosofia de Platão segundo Schelling», in Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, 2017; «Um “secreto procedimento da alma dos homens”: Kant sobre o problema das representações obscuras», in Con-textos Kantianos, 2017.

Fiorella Tomassini (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

“Kant and the notion of a juridical duty to oneself”

Abstract

In the Doctrine of Right, Kant holds that the classical Ulpian command “honeste vive” is a juridical duty that has the particular feature, in contrast to the other juridical duties, of being internal (RL, AA 06: 236). In this presentation, I explore the reasons as to why Kant denies that the duty to be

an honorable human being comprises an ethical obligation (as, for example, Pufendorf and Achenwall thought) and conceives it as a juridical duty to oneself. I will argue that, despite the conceptual problems that the systematical incorporation of this type of duty into the doctrine of morals might entail, these reasons are coherent.

Fiorella Tomassini earned her PHD at the University of Buenos Aires (2018) and is currently a Post-doctoral fellow (CONICET). Her thesis was about the relationship between Kant’s philosophy of right and the natural law tradition. She was a visiting researcher at the University of Halle with grants from DAAD in 2016 (May-November) and in 2018-2019 (September-March). Her current research project is centered on the notions of republic and revolution in Kant and some of his radical followers.

Gabriel Rivero (MLU Halle-Wittenberg)

“Rechtliche Verbindlichkeit als erzeugte Verbindlichkeit. Erweiterung des Rechtsbegriffs und Eigentumsrechtfertigung in Kants Rechtslehre“

Abstract

Der in der Kant-Forschung viel diskutierte Paragraph 2 der Rechtslehre von 1797 stellt eine Erweiterung des Rechtsbegriffs dar, die durch das Erlaubnisgesetz erfolgt. Durch diese Erweiterung ist es der Ansicht Kants nach möglich, „allen andern eine Verbindlichkeit aufzulegen, die sie sonst nicht hätten, sich des Gebrauchs gewisser Gegenstände unserer Willkür zu enthalten[.]“ (RL, AA VI: 247). Davon ausgehend möchte ich zum einen die These vertreten, dass Kants Auffassung der rechtlichen Verbindlichkeit als eine erzeugte Verbindlichkeit zu interpretieren ist, deren Pointe darin besteht, einen Unterschied zwischen Fremd- und Selbstverpflichtung zu ziehen. Zum anderen möchte ich die systematischen und entwicklungsgeschichtlichen Implikationen einer solchen Konzeption für Kants Rechtfertigung des äußeren Mein und Dein thematisieren, die sich insbesondere auf die Begründung des Eigentumsrechts auswirkte und somit eine entsprechende Änderung in Kants Auffassung desselben zu Beginn der neunziger Jahre zur Folge hatte.

Gabriel Rivero, Studium der Philosophie an der Universität Río Cuarto, Argentinien; 2012 Promotion am Fachbereich 05 Philologie und Philosophie der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz mit einer Dissertation zum Thema Ontologiebegriff bei Kant. Forschungsaufenthalt an der Universität Bern (2005-2007) und im Centre d´Études en Rhétorique, Philosophie et Histoire des Idées (Sept.-Nov. 2007). 2013-2018 Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Universität Mannheim; seit Februar 2018 Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Geschichte der Philosophie, MLU Halle-Wittenberg im Rahmen des DFG-Projekts „Kants Begriff der (Un)Mündigkeit in historischer und systematischer Perspektive“. Forschungsinteresse: Philosophie der Neuzeit, insbesondere Kants theoretische Philosophie und Rechtsphilosophie, Deutscher Idealismus, Marx und der Marxismus, Rechts- und politische Philosophie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Hauptpublikationen: Gabriel Rivero (Hrsg.): Pflicht und Verbindlichkeit bei Kant. Quellengeschichtliche, systematische und wirkungsgeschichtliche Beiträge. Aufklärung. Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts und seiner Wirkungsgeschichte 30 (2018); Gabriel Rivero, Zur Bedeutung des Begriffs

Ontologie bei Kant. Eine entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung, Kantstudien-Ergänzungshefte. Berlin/Boston 2014, 2017.

Gualtiero Lorini (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Milan)

“«A Man for all Faculties»? The Unity of Kantian Reason from a Pragmatic Point of View”

Abstract

The present contribution aims to investigate the way Kant deals with the relation between the individual and the humankind, in order to provide a complete and unitary image of the human being. According to some commentators, the reconciliation between the individual and the humankind is achieved by Kant only in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, by means of the structure of reflective judgment (e. g. Nobbe, 1995), and it reflects a hypothesis that has long been widespread among scholars, like i. a. Erdmann, Arnoldt, Dilthey, and Adickes. According to this view, Kant’s anthropology is not a discipline in its own right, so that it is not able to answer the fundamental questions it raises.

Now, we aim to challenge this reading by contending that the specificity of the anthropological point of view on the world can be effectively brought to light by taking into consideration the specific way Kant’s anthropology deals with two crucial elements of the Copernican revolution. The first element consists in the normative nature of reason, which constitutes the distinctive trait of the human being also in its relation to other beings (see e. g. Anth, AA 07: 127). Since anthropology focuses on the human being, who is characterized by reason, we can take reason to be the object of anthropology too. Yet, the anthropological inquiry is a posteriori, and therefore proceeds by starting from the world where reason manifests its own normative nature. At the same time, the anthropological perspective is itself an expression of this reason and of its requirement of self-analysis. That is why it can only express itself in the language of normativity. Therefore, the distinctive practice of anthropology can only be observation, intended not as the simple observation of a plurality of empirical elements, but, rather, as a fundamental observation of the way in which reason expands its own regularity at the level of experience, thereby aiming at the rules of the Denkungsart.

This leads us to the second central aspect of Criticism, whose anthropological consideration can help us to clarify the nature of this discipline, that is, the concept of objectivity. Indeed, the transcendental investigation delimits the perimeter of objectivity by means of the universal laws a priori, whereas in the anthropological field the objective validity of the norm must be reached a posteriori, namely, at the level of the Teilbarkeit, that is to say, the effective possibility for other subjects to share the norm’s validity. In this context, what needs to be further investigated is whether, and to what extent, this Teilbarkeit can be related to, and can fit with the a priori intersubjectivity gained on the transcendental plane. After a confrontation with the gnoseological implications of this task, the present analysis requires a consideration of the sense in which the “pragmatic” nature of Kant’s anthropology has to be interpreted within the broader framework of Kant’s practical philosophy. We aim to show how this approach can help integrating the inquiry on the limits of reason, theoretically considered, and the doctrine of the human being’s practical capacities. Indeed, Kant does not seem to defend that the human being in its entirety can be reduced to the formalism of an unconditional duty that imposes itself on a transcendental “I”. Quite on the contrary, the most authentic sense of the human freedom lies in the possibility of recognizing the human being’s rational essence also in the practical manifestations of the “person“, understood as a “complex”, which does not totally exclude the determinations of emotions and feelings.

Although the relation between normativity and objectivity, taken in the anthropological sense, is not able to solve the difficulties tied to the architectonical positioning of anthropology in the whole of Kant’s thought, it can clarify the reasons for these difficulties by emphasizing the way in which anthropology envelops and penetrates transcendental philosophy, rather than being subsumed by it.

Gualtiero Lorini is assistant professor of theoretical philosophy at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan (Italy) and an Alexander von Humboldt Alumnus. He is a member of the Kant-Gesellschaft and the North American Kant Society. His research interests include German idealism, philosophical anthropology in eighteenth-century Germany, and the interactions between Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology. Among his most recent publications, the monograph Fonti e lessico dell’ontologia kantiana. I corsi di metafisica (1762-1795) (Pisa: ETS, 2017) and the edited volume (with R.B. Louden) Knowledge, Morals and Practice in Kant’s Anthropology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Heiner F. Klemme (MLU Halle-Wittenberg)

“To preserve oneself. On the relationship between metaphysics and maturity in Kant”

Abstract

I will deal with a concept that is at the heart of Kant’s practical philosophy, that of self-preservation. In the first section of my paper, I will try to explain the relationship between autocracy, autonomy and self-preservation in Leibniz and, in particular, in Christian Wolff, as a background for Kant’s position. In the second section with the title "From autocracy to autonomy", I will try to explain how Kant attributes a new meaning to the concepts of autocracy and self-preservation on the basis of transcendental idealism and an idea put forward by Rousseau. In the third section, I try to characterize Kant’s conception of self-preservation in more detail by looking at one of its crucial aspects, maturity. In the fourth and last section, I will briefly address the difference between self-preservation and self-ownership. – My main sources are Kant’s lectures on ethics (around 1775), the student transcripts of his anthropology lecture (1775/76-1781/82) and his essay „What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?“ (1786).

Heiner F. Klemme is full professor for Philosophy at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. He held professorships at the universities of Wuppertal (2006-2008) and Mainz (2008-2014), was visiting professor at the universities of São Paulo and Marília (Brazil) and honoray professor at Wuhan University (China). He is president of the « Christian-Wolff-Gesellschaft für die Philosophie der Aufklärung » and head of the « Immanuel-Kant-Forum ». His publications include Kants Philosophie des Subjekts (1996), Immanuel Kant (2004), David Hume zur Einführung (2006), Kants ‚Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten’. Ein systematischer Kommentar (2017) and (in conjunction with Ansgar Lorenz): Immanuel Kant. Philosophie für Einsteiger  (2017; spanish edition 2018), Thomas Hobbes. Philosophie für Einsteiger (2018), and Ethik. Philosophie für Einsteiger (to be published in 2019). He

is co-editor of Kant-Studien, Kantstudien-Ergänzungshefte, The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth Century German Philosophers(2016) and many other books and editions.

Janis Schaab (University of St. Andrews)

“Kant and the Second Person”

Abstract

According to the Second-Personal Account, moral obligations are grounded in the authority that we have over one another by virtue of our mutual recognition as persons (Darwall 2006, also see Wallace 2019, Zylberman 2017). Some defenders of the Second-Personal Account cite Kant as their philosophical ally. Some even claim that the Kantian project of grounding moral obligations in the form of practical reason can only succeed if it emphasises the second-personal dimension of practical reason (Darwall 2006: chapter 9, Schapiro 2010).

Critics object that, in Kant’s moral theory, moral consideration of others is downstream of the moral law, whose source resides in pure practical reason alone (Pauer-Studer 2010, Sensen 2011, Timmermann 2014). They conclude that Kant’s moral theory is decidedly first-personal, not second-personal.

In this paper, I argue that there is a more significant overlap between Kant’s moral theory and the Second-Personal Account than these critics realise. I give replies to three main arguments employed by these critics.

The first argument concerns the Second-Personal Account’s emphasis on persons’ authority to make demands on one another. Here, the Second-Personal Account is read as stating that another person’s demand that an agent φ, by itself, can put the agent under an obligation to φ (see Sensen 2011: 121).

However, this is not the best reading of the Second-Personal Account. Instead, “second-personal address”, the attempt to give someone second-personal reasons by making demands on them, has certain “normative felicity conditions” (Darwall 2006: 5). In particular, as can be shown in a lengthy argument, second-personal address presupposes, for its validity, that the addressee possesses the capacity of autonomy of the will, and that the demand in question is compatible with their realisation of that capacity (Darwall 2006: chapter 10). It turns out, then, that the Second-Personal Account agrees with the following interpretation of Kant (Sensen 2011: 121):

Making a claim does not by itself generate an obligation for the agent. For Kant, the bindingness arises through the qualification of the claim as a universal law, as commanded by the Categorical Imperative.

The second critical argument points out that, in Kant’s moral theory, duties are prior, metaphysically as well as epistemologically, to rights (Timmermann 2014: 137). Now, the Second-Personal Account is, by and large, not framed in terms of rights. The notion that second-personal demands are essential to our encounter with the moral law might nevertheless seem to run counter to the primacy of duties vis-à-vis rights.

However, the Second-Personal Account agrees that an encounter with the moral law in our own practical consciousness is necessary to know what we are obligated to do (Darwall 2006: chapter 10). What the Second-Personal Account adds is that our consciousness of being bound by the law essentially involves the awareness that we can legitimately be held accountable if we fail to comply with the law. The Second-Personal Account does not regard persons’ actual demands as prior to obligations. Instead, it proposes that the connection between obligation and accountability is part of the very concept of moral obligation.

The critics’ third main argument asserts that respect for the law, which Kant identifies as the motive of duty, is not to be conflated with respect for persons. After all, the encounter with the moral law that furnishes the fact of reason and gives rise to the feeling of respect takes place within our own practical reason (Timmermann 2014: 138-140). And while it is true that, for Kant, respect is produced when the moral law “infringes upon self-love” and “strikes down self-conceit”, it fundamentally concerns not the self’s relation vis-à-vis other selves but the relations between inclinations vis-à-vis pure practical reason (Timmermann 2014: 139, KpV 5:73, italics deleted).

I argue that it is nevertheless congenial to Kant’s overall framework to interpret the motive of duty as a feeling of respect for persons—more precisely, respect for persons’ second-personal authority. After all, while the Second-Personal Account agrees that the feeling of respect arises from the agent’s encounter of the moral law within her own practical reason, it asserts that this encounter must involve the agent’s awareness of being accountable for acting on the moral law. Respect for the moral law, as a matter of conceptual entailment, is respect for the equal second-personal authority of all members of the moral community (also see Russell FC).

My three replies are parts of a single, coherent picture, according to which the second-personal character of moral obligation is an feature of the moral law’s source in pure practical reason. The actual demands of concrete others do not ground but are grounded in that source. Accordingly, dignity is a standing that persons are marked out as having by the moral law, which is a direct command of reason (see Sensen 2011: 2).

Of course, none of this is to suggest that the Second-Personal Account is Kant’s moral theory.

Janis Schaab just received his PhD from the St Andrews/Stirling Philosophy Graduate Programme. His work focuses on Kantian approaches to ethical theory. His dissertation provides a restatement of Kantian constructivism, with the aim of avoiding some of the objections and clearing up some of the ambiguities that afflict previous versions of the view. It restates Kantian constructivism as the view that moral normativity has its source in the form of second-personal reasoning. In recent work, Janis aims to develop the second-personal approach to morality further. He has published articles in Philosophical Studies and Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung.

Lea Ypi (London School of Economics and Political Science)

“Systematic unity and the practical use of ideas in the Canon of Pure Reason”

Abstract

This paper examines the relation between theoretical and practical reason in the context of Kant’s claims about the importance of systematic unity in the Architectonic of Pure Reason. It focuses in particular on the Canon of Pure Reason, and argues that the practical use of ideas of reason satisfies the demand for systematic unity. Yet the fact that Kant does not distinguish between practical and transcendental freedom, that practical freedom is equated with the liberum arbitrium and that reason in its practical use has no domain of its own (unlike in the third Critique) leads to a confusion between the role of teleology from a heuristic perspective and the idea of nature as a teleological system. This in turn undermines the autonomy of reason, both from a theoretical and from a practical perspective.

 Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, and, with Jonathan White, The Meaning of

Partisanship, both published by Oxford University Press. She has co-edited Migration in Political Theory (Oxford University Press 2016, with Sarah Fine) and Kant and Colonialism (Oxford University Press 2015, with Katrin Flikschuh). Her book on systematic unity in Kant’s Architectonic of Pure Reason is currently under contract with Oxford University Press.

Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos (CFUL)

“A noção kantiana de “Pessoa”: aspetos semânticos e pressupostos”

Abstract

Tema central da filosofia moral e da filosofia do direito e da política kantianas, a noção de “Pessoa” é quase sempre tomada como se o seu conteúdo e significado fossem simples e óbvios, quando, na verdade, não é assim. O intuito da comunicação é: explicitar os ambientes semânticos que conferem a peculiar pregnância que essa noção estratégica da filosofia prática kantiana carrega; tornar claros os pressupostos que ela invoca para a sua sustentação; e mostrar a constelação de outros tópicos que ela convoca para lhe garantirem toda a sua coerência.

Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos é Professor catedrático (aposentado) da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa e investigador do CFUL. Principais obras próprias sobre filosofia kantiana: Metáforas da Razão ou economia poética do pensar kantiano (1989; 1994); A Razão sensível: Estudos kantianos (1994); Regresso a Kant. Ética, Estética, Filosofia Política (2012); Ideia de uma Heurística Transcendental (2012).

Luigi Caranti (University of Catania)

“Kant’s Notion of Personhood and the Dignity Approach to Human Rights”

Abstract

Even though human rights today have a far greater impact on politics than in the past, the philosophical reflection that surrounds them has had a less fortunate history. It is doubtful whether we are today in a better position than we were in 1948 to answer any of the philosophical questions surrounding them, including, and perhaps most crucially, the question about their foundation. Why are human rights standards – of whatever sort – that we should adopt, or even just take seriously?

The first part of this paper summarizes my recent work on the above question (Caranti 2017). I will briefly show why the main orientations in the contemporary philosophy of human rights all fail to yield a satisfactory foundation and sketch an alternative foundation that exploits Kant’s notion of personhood. In the second part; I will further refine this analysis of personhood in Kant to reply to one major objection that my approach has attracted.

Luigi Caranti (Ph.D. Boston University) is professor of political philosophy at the Università di Catania, Italy. He worked in various international institutions including the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University, the Australian National University and the Philipps-

Universität – Marburg. His studies mainly concern the philosophy of Kant. Recently, his interests focus on the theory of human rights, democratic peace theory, and the scientific and philosophical debate concerning world poverty and economic inequality. Caranti is the author of five monographs including Kant's Political Legacy. Human Rights, Peace, Progress (UWP 2017) and Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy (UTP 2007) and has published in national and international peer reviewed journals such as Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of International Political Theory, Kant Studien. He is scientific responsible of the on-going Marie Curie RISE “Kant in South America” project and directed various projects funded by the European Commission in the past, including three individual Marie Curie grants.

Luke Davies (London School of Economics and Political Science)

“Kant on civil self-sufficiency”

Abstract

Kant draws a distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens. Active citizens are those members of a state who are permitted to participate in lawgiving. Passive citizens may not participate in this way; though they are protected by the laws of a state, they do not contribute to those laws. Kant tells us that the members of a state who count as active citizens are those who possess the attribute of civil self-sufficiency [bürgerlichen Selbstständigkeit] (MM 6:314). Civil self-sufficiency is thus an integral feature of Kant’s account of citizenship. Possession of this attribute permits (and plausibly also requires) some members of a state to participate in shaping the coercively enforced laws of that state.

Participation in lawgiving is important to Kant’s political philosophy. This is because, on a Kantian view, state institutions are a necessary condition for individual claim-rights. Moreover, individual claim-rights partly constitute our external freedom, and external freedom is the central concern of Kant’s political philosophy as a whole. Thus, those who possess the attribute of civil self-sufficiency (and who are thereby active citizens) are the only members of a state permitted to contribute to the necessary institutional conditions for the external freedom of each.

Kant’s criteria for who counts as civilly self-sufficient has been the subject of much critical scrutiny, and for good reason. For example, he explicitly excludes women from that status. We might therefore worry that Kant’s account of civil self-sufficiency is inseparable from his well-known sexism. He also appears to exclude the poor from active citizenship by making property ownership a necessary condition for civil self-sufficiency. Moreover, the examples Kant deploys to help us understand the distinction between civilly self-sufficient members of a state and mere associates of a state are far from transparent, and thus open to the charge of arbitrariness. These two concerns are troubling given the connection between active citizenship and participation in lawgiving noted above. Indeed, if the objections made by critical commentators can be sustained, then it will turn out that the determination of who can contribute to the necessary conditions for the external freedom of each, on a Kantian account, will rest on either fundamentally inegalitarian or arbitrary grounds.

I have two aims in this paper. The first is to demonstrate that, on Kant’s account, civilly self-sufficient members of a state are those members who are not under the authority of any private person or group. This reading has the benefit, if correct, of not necessarily excluding women or the poor from the status of active citizenship. The second aim is to argue that Kant’s concerns when drawing the distinction between active and passive citizens, or at least a plausible reconstruction of his concerns, should be taken seriously. On the reading I develop here, Kant wanted to eliminate situations in which those members of the state entitled to participate in lawgiving are beholden to private individuals or groups. More specifically, we might think that Kant was concerned to eliminate a certain form of

corruption in public lawgiving. Even if we disagree with Kant that excluding some adult members of the population from voting is an appropriate way to deal with this concern, the concern itself is important and merits attention. If this reconstruction is plausible, then we will have gone a considerable way towards saving Kant’s account from the charge of arbitrariness. Thus, while ultimately unsatisfactory, we see that Kant’s account suffers from neither of the problems with which it is usually associated.

Luke Davies is a postdoc in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He completed my doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, and the title of his dissertation was ‘Kant on Citizenship’. Prior to starting the DPhil, he completed the BPhil in philosophy at Oxford, and a BA(hons) at the University of Toronto. In addition to Kant’s political philosophy, he is interested in contemporary political philosophy, normative and practice ethics, and early modern philosophy.

Maria Bordignon Zanchet (Bayreuth Universität)

“A trusting vow to common sense: on emotions, passions and self-determination of the will in Kantian moral theory”

Abstract

The role of emotions for one's moral education is one of the remaining questions in ethic field in which the modern philosopher Immanuel Kant extensively undertook his argumentative effort. The traditional interpretation of his moral worth theory, according to which, the determining motive for actions which are intended to be moral must be the motive of duty alone, relates to an intuition especially present nowadays: to act correctly, one must get out of emotion. Put another way, every emotion-based deed carries the distinctive sign of the failure of reason in determining the will. According to this reading, feelings do not play a significant role in our moral actions, being seemed oftentimes as a hindrance to the rightness of our actions, since they are natural (non-controlled, automatic and therefore unreliable) responses to our representations. The idea that our predisposition to the feeling for practical ideas brought by Kant in the Third Critique and also in the Doctrine of Virtue has been used as a basis by contemporary philosophers not only to challenge a traditional interpretation but also to counter common sense. In this way, the feeling of respect for the moral law is, for instance, one of the representatives of the role of emotions for Kantian ethics. Some of these criticisms has shed light on the idea that addressing emotions in the Kantian theory on the basis of a single model is a mistake. Although inclinations may present themselves as obstacles to moral action, some emotions are the very condition of possibility for morality itself. This is not the case of passions. As “a sensible desire that has become a lasting inclination (e.g., hatred, as opposed to anger)” (Kant, I. Metaphysics of Morals 6:408), a passion represent a sensible desire for objects that infringe moral law. The moral blindness provoked by them demarcates its very peculiar connection towards morality, namely, they make it impossible for the will to be determined based on principles. This leads us to

conclude that passions are understood by Kant as being elements of human sensitivity that, even related to a deliberative attitude, end up contributing to the achievement of a sensitive non-moral object of desire. I aim, thereby, to explore the nature of feelings in Kant's theory to suggest that some of them are not only necessary but the very condition of the possibility for morality, while others, as passions, are capable of leading the subject to moral blindness, thus making it suffice to read common sense regarding the relation between these mental states and morality. My advocacy of common sense, however, is not devoid of elaboration. Therefore, I intend to demonstrate the fundamental role carried out by emotions for moral deliberation according to Kant. By systematizing emotions within his theory, I draw my attention to the difference between two distinct models of feelings, showing what Kant had in mind when he detached the passions from the emotions driven by the Faculty of Feeling. This contrast makes more tangible the claim according to which there are emotions directly entailed by morality and makes also possible to what makes common sense to support the idea that emotions hinder the correctness of action.

Maria Bordignon Zanchet is a PhD student at Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät in Bayreuth Universität, Germany. She holds both her Bachelor and Masters degree from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - Brazil, where she studied Philosophy and Educational Politics, with emphasis on formal logic and discourse analysis. In her PhD project, she inquires issues related to Kantian ethics and art in ethical decision-making. Normative ethics, theories of emotion, gender studies and topics of cognitive neuroscience are some of her interest areas.

Marita Rainsborough (Universität Hamburg)

“Critique. Enlightenment. Parrhesia. Michel Foucault’s Questioning of the Concept of the Person and Humanity in Kant’s Works”

Abstract

Michel Foucault is regarded as a sharp critic of the classical philosophical concept of the subject and investigates modes of subjectification as well as their formation processes in contexts of knowledge and power. According to Foucault, man as a historical ‘event’ cannot, in contrast to Kant, be regarded as the starting point, foundation and guarantor of thought and morality. For Kant man has a privileged position and mankind is first and foremost a normative moral and legal-philosophical concept. The "humanity within us" (6:436) or "humanity […] in your own person or in the person of any other" (4:429) is at the centre of Kant's moral reasoning, especially with regard to his concept of man as an “end in itself” (4:429) and human dignity. Thus, for Kant humanity is significantly more than the totality of all human beings. Foucault's critique of Kant's concepts of the person and humanity culminates in his thesis of the death of the subject, which emphasizes the subject's constructedness and negates its freedom. On the other hand, Foucault refers to Kant's theorems of the Enlightenment as well as Critique and, exhibiting the attitude of ethos, places himself in the tradition of Kant’s Parrhesia (as defined by Foucault). How can this contradiction be understood in Foucault's philosophical thinking? What is the significance of Kant's philosophy for Foucault and how do Kant's concepts of the person and humanity impact his thinking?

Marita Rainsborough holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg and is lecturer at Leuphana University of Lüneburg and at the University of Kiel. Since 2018 she is an associated

member of the Center of Philosophy at the University of Lisbon. Her research focuses on postmodern French philosophy in particular Michel Foucault, the legacy of modern German philosophy (e.g. Kant and Hegel) in contemporary thought, and the cultural theories and philosophies of Africa and South America. Her most recent publication is Foucault heute. Neue Perspektiven in Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaft (2018).

Mattia Orsatti (Università degli Studi Gabriele d'Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara)

“Per alcune considerazioni sull’idea kantiana di anima tra ragione speculativa e ragione pratica”

Abstract

Nella presente proposta intendo analizzare l’idea di anima attraverso il doppio riferimento ai Paralogismi della ragion pura e ai Postulati della ragion pura pratica. Per mezzo di uno sguardo bifocale, capace di inquadrare la questione sia dalla prospettiva teoretica che da quella pratica, l’intervento è dunque volto a ricostruire il concetto di anima nell’opera di Kant, con l’obiettivo di esaminarne la funzione, il significato e le implicazioni filosofiche. In accordo con la stessa idea kantiana di una unità della ragione che si declina secondo i suoi diversi usi, risulta pertanto necessario uno studio che si muova a cavallo tra Critica della ragion pura e Critica della ragion pratica. Questa via infatti risulta essere l’unica atta a evitare i riduzionismi e i fraintendimenti contemporanei legati alle letture unilaterali e alle interpretazioni strumentali.

La filosofia kantiana è stata spesso soggetta al pregiudizio, condiviso da un’apia porzione del pensiero contemporaneo, di una filosofia essenzialmente antimetafisica. Questo pregiudizio trova origine a partire dalla lettura che alcuni rappresentanti dell’aetas post-kantiana, e in particolare Hegel, hanno fornito del filosofo di Königsberg. Hegel infatti riconosce a Kant il merito di aver depurato la vecchia metafisica dei suoi errori; al contempo tuttavia lo accusa di essersi accontentato di questo risultato negativo, senza fornire cioè egli stesso una proposta filosofica positiva. Ovviamente Hegel, nel muovere questo giudizio, mirava programmaticamente ad una elaborazione metafisica in sede teoretica – contro il precetto kantiano. Il depotenziamento metafisico che la lettura hegeliana di Kant porta con sé, ha direttamente o indiretamente condizionato interi filoni contemporanei di pensiero. Basti pensare a Russel e Moore, nonché i fautori di una tradizione filosofica intenzionalmente contrapposta alla delirante e misticheggiante ‘filosofia continentale’. Infatti, tutta quella tradizione di pensiero che possiamo definire – con le dovute precauzioni – come ‘filosofia analitica’ ha considerato fino ai tempi più recenti, Kant come l’ultimo dei pensatori della storia del pensiero continentale con i quali valesse la pena confrontarsi. Questo atteggiamento è ancora una volta veicolato dall’idea di un Kant essenzialmente antimetafisico, e dunque, l’ultimo pensatore che una tradizione antimetafisica come quella iniziata da Russel e Moore possa accettare. La cognizione storica sottesa a tale atteggiamento è pressappoco la seguente: Kant è colui che ha demolito l’edificio della vecchia ontologia; tuttavia, a partire dalla generazione di Hegel, diversi autori hanno tentato di riedificare tale edificio. Tale cognizione storica non risulta essere solamente una prerogativa di tradizioni linguisticamente e culturalmente distanti da questi autori, bensì essa è condivisa, o perlomeno lo è stata, per l’intero Novecento tedesco a partire dallo stesso neokantismo. Al contrario invece, i teologi tedeschi del primo Ottocento, così come altre filosofie cristiane del Novecento, si interessarono delle Idee della Dialettica trascendentale esposte nella Critica della ragion pratica per dare un nuovo fondamento filosofico alla teologia dogmatica, ignorando completamente l’intera dialettica trascendentale in sede teoretica.

Il limite di queste tradizioni, come di altre, è sempre stato quello di considerare – per motivazioni strumentali o per una mancata visione d’insieme – il pensiero kantiano solo

unilateralmente: o solo sul versante teorético o solo sul versante pratico. Un esame degli aspetti del pensiero kantiano dev’essere in ogni caso supportato dall’idea di unità della ragione, con le dovute implicazioni dunque sia teoretiche che pratiche. Questo approccio risulta ancor più urgente se l’aspetto in questione ricopre un valore tradizionalmente metafisico, come nel caso dell’anima. Come ha infatti insistito a più riprese una delle voci più autorevoli del nostro tempo in materia di storia della filosofia classica tedesca, Hans-Friedrich Fulda, riconosce che Kant non può essere considerato un pensatore antimetafisico. Come infatti già riconobbero i pensatori della seconda generazione del neokantismo come ad esempio Hartmann e Heimsoeth, Kant è un pensatore essenzialmente metafisico. Egli tuttavia limita le pretese conoscitive della ragione in campo metafisico, ma al contempo dona maggiore solidità alla stessa metafisica operando sul versante pratico della ragione. Le Idee della vecchia metafisica non richiedono più – e non devono richiedere – una dimostrazione ‘teoretica’. Sebbene valide logicamente, esse risultano in sede speculativa pur sempre dei raziocini dialettici. In pari maniera esse vengono presentate in sede pratica come dei postulati, ossia delle idee pratiche la cui validità si ammette a priori, poiché condizione necessaria per lo stesso utilizzo pratico della ragione. Il contributo proposto intende quindi considerare, con le dovute premesse storico-filosofiche, il concetto di anima nella filosofia kantiana attraverso un gioco di specchi tra Critica della ragion pura e Critica della ragion pratica. Gli obiettivi principal sono quelli di (1) sottolineare la novità e la diversa impostazione del discorso kantiano rispetto alla tradizione precritica; (2) capire cos’è l’anima per Kant e comprendere la sua funzione all’interno dell’architettonica della ragione in generale; questo punto ci conduce necessariamente a chiederci se (3) è possibile conoscere l’anima; (3a) cioè mostrare cosa possiamo e cosa non possiamo sapere dell’anima per Kant, tenendo in considerazione l’idea del primato della ragion pura pratica nel suo collegamento con la speculativa; (3b) ossia in altri termini cercare di capire cosa significhi avere una conoscenza pratica dell’anima; (4) fare alcune osservazioni in merito all’importanza dell’anima e la sua reciproca sussistenza unitamente al concetto di persona, sottolineando le implicazioni antropologiche, molarli, politiche e teoretiche.

Mattia Orsatti is a young scholar specialized in history of german philosophy from Leibniz to Shelling's late philosophy, in particular with regard to Logic, Metaphiscs and Ontology. He studied Philosophy in Università degli studi G. D'annunzio (Chieti) and in 2017 graduated with full marks and laude with a final dissertation about Hegel's Logic in relation to Moderrn Philosophy. Furthermore, he received grants for study stays in Mainz and Heidelberg and took part in many conferences (the last one in Coimbra about Hegel's Logic). Currelntly he is collaborating with Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici.

Nuria Sánchez Madrid (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

“Kant’s Emotional Normativity of Reason and Its Human Embodiment: Interests, Reflexion and Feelings”

Abstract

The social intercourse accurately analyzed in Kant's Lectures on Anthropology furnishes a large scope about the emotions, prejudices and practical expectations that the human being has when she is among others. As is well known, Kant's practical philosophy makes of the development of moral personality the end of the transformation that a rational being might endeavor, but the stage of the establishment of a civil contract draws to a rational being that could also be considered as a devil. In this vein, my paper shall tackle the wide notion of humanity that Kant's civil contract entails, highlighting its distance from the ethical community and from the order of social plays. The goal of

my paper will be to sketch the portrait of humanity that Kant's ideal of civil contract yields, especially tackling the coexistence of the images of ethical personality and pragmatical interest in it.

Nuria Sánchez Madrid is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Univ. Complutense of Madrid. She is coordinator of the Group of Research "Normativity, Emotions, Discourse and Society"(GINEDIS) at the Univ. Complutense and of the Latin American Network of Research "Kant: Ethics, Politics and Society", supported by the AUIP. She is external member of the CFUL of the Univ. of Lisbon and of the Group of Research "Aesthetics, Politics and Knowledge" at the IF of the Univ. of Porto. She has been Visiting Professor at Chile, Brazil, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Turkey and published as editor and author with De Gruyter, Olms and Palgrave McMillan. 

Patrícia Kauark-Leite

“Science, genius, and ideas of reason”

Abstract

The aim of this work is to explore how the activity of genius contributes to the development of scientific theories, even despite Kant’s claim in the third Critique that genius produces only beautiful art. I intend to show that science appeals not only to the determining power of judgment, along with the logical rules that structure scientific knowledge, but also to the reflecting power of judgment, along with ideas of reason that are explicitly regulative and even fictional. In my view, it is precisely this creative, fictional dimension of scientific theories that constitutes the Kantian radical enlightenment of knowledge: dare to know! The creative, fictional power of reason, in its scientific use, is incompatible with the needlessly restrictive view of the activity of genius that Kant himself presents in the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, as limited only to artistic creativity. In this connection, I will discuss the role of the creative imagination in science, which operates in a way that is not reducible to the role of the transcendental imagination of the faculty of understanding as it is presented in the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique. The problem that arises here is that the productive imagination does not seem to perform any function in the discursive, hence non- intuitive, enterprise of philosophy. To respond to this problem, I spell out a careful distinction between artistic creation based on aesthetic ideas, and philosophical creation based on ideas of reason.

Patricia Kauark-Leite is Professor of Philosophy at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) and a researcher of the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She graduated at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (1993) and received her PhD from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) in 2004. She was visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2011-2012. Her research interests focus on Kant’s theoretical philosophy and the significance of his transcendental idealism for contemporary science. Her book Theorie quantique et philosophie transcendantale: dialogues possibles (Paris: Hermann, 2012) won the Prize Louis Liard (2012) from Académie des sciences morales et politiques (France) and is a reference for studies in this area. . She is also member of the International Research Group Critique & Contemporary Kantian Philosophy (CCKP).  

Paulo Jesus (CFUL)

“On Becoming a Person and Creating the Kingdom of Ends: The Kantian Character of Humanity”

Abstract

The metaphysical notions of selfhood and personhood appear to be irrevocably empty as well as ultimately indeterminate and indeterminable, when Kant pitilessly assesses the epistemological validity of Rational Psychology in the section of the CPR devoted to the well-known Paralogisms of Pure Reason. By so doing, Kant declares the impossibility of theoretical self-knowledge, reducing the Cogito to the mere self-consciousness of one’s existence and one’s self-determining intelligence. Self-consciousness would simply denote das Bestimmende in mir, which belongs to the realm of noumenal powers and therefore remains strictly unbestimmbar. The essential and non-substantial notion of free selfhood, combined with personal identity and continuity over time, is then conceived of as a matter pertaining to a logical domain beyond truth and falsehood, the domain of an intelligibly spontaneous as-if world, where moral certainty gives new meaning to the cognitive misery of metaphysical ignorance and uncertainty. The free, rational, and causal power of personality is object of practical belief, a useful fiction that gives sense to moral obligation insofar it goes beyond sensibility and entails the efficacy of rational determination of one’s will. In other words, one must believe in the reality of one’s autonomous and autotelic self so that a universal system of morals be possible. Moreover, one needs to connect intimately rationality and finality (or rather self-position of ends and self-conformity to those ends) so that autonomy can be understood as the inner accord of reason with itself. Conversely, heteronomy implies contradiction or unbalance within oneself. Moral development opens up the battlefield where practical reason must win against sensual inclinations; universal duty must rule over particular happiness. It follows that the duty underlining all possible duties concerns the duty of rational self-development, the duty of becoming fully capable of autonomy, and thereby becoming a person among persons, an end-in-itself among ends-in-themselves evolving towards their communal betterment. The primacy of the praxis articulated with the organic dynamism of development constitutes the junction point where the three Critiques converge and reinforce one another to show an Idea of Personality as the powerful pragmatics of self-creating and self-organizing Reason. Furthermore, in close connection with Cogito’s metaphysical emptiness and its practical power located within a purely rational system of action, Kantian Anthropology does not promise any new land for the lost science of humanity. Instead, Anthropology reasserts the unity of consciousness of the “I think” as the hallmark of intelligence and personality. There’s no knowledge on the supposedly true nature of humankind. Quite the opposite, there’s sheer ignorance, and a Neo-Stoic attitude favoring and valuing self-concern or cura sui over self-knowledge. Indeed, the Anthropology

from a Pragmatic Standpoint reiterates and builds upon the critical conclusion according to which the qualitative or positive definition of humanity is logically and metaphysically impossible. The examination of the character of humanity does not solve the problem, because it means nothing but a very plastic power of development. In a very fundamental way, the anthropological didactic has nothing essential to teach, given that at the heart of anthropological understanding Kant finds an open-ended process of anthropogenesis. Humanity would enjoy the character of creating her own character, thanks to her organic plasticity unfolding according to their internally dynamic ends.

Paulo Jesus, MA in Psychology (2000, Coimbra University, Portugal, and Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and PhD in Philosophy (2006, EHESS, Paris, France), was a post-doc researcher at Columbia University and NYU (2007-08), and at CREA (Paris, 2009-10). His research projects focus mainly on personhood and selfhood, from a Kantian and phenomenological standpoint. He was the PI of an interdisciplinary project titled “Poetics of selfhood: Memory, imagination, and narrativity” (funded by the Portuguese Ministry of Higher Education and Science) and author/editor of individual and collective books, such as “Poétique de l’ipse: Étude sur le Je pense kantien” (Peter Lang, 2008), “Du moi au soi: Variations phénoménologiques et herméneutiques” (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016). He is researcher at the Philosophy Center of Lisbon University.

Project MC-RISE “KANT IN SOUTH AMERICA” (KANTINSA)

School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon19th of June 2019