After suggesting that Stephen Turner’s work is characterized by a determination to offer viable alternatives to blockages generated by adherence to dogmas, particularly those generated by adherence to Kantian metaphysics, this review article concentrates on his recent book Explaining the Normative. The article sets out the book’s descriptions of a wide variety of positions, ‘each of which accounts for a different kind of normativity’. Perhaps the only common feature of these positions is the idea of ‘the necessity or indispensability of (...) the normative’. Turner challenges the normativists’ certainty, employing a range of argumentative strategies which add up to the project of explaining the normative. The article seeks to show how Turner goes about this project and to show that he succeeds in his quest to undermine the normativists’ claim that the normative itself cannot be explained. Ultimately, Turner is able to say to them, politely but firmly, ‘Yes it can’. (shrink)

This introduction is divided into two parts. First, drawing on Paul Guyer’s suggestion that we should turn to Kant to reinvestigate the foundations of religious liberty, I outline Kant’s views on the relations between the ethical and the political community, as presented in Part Three of the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, focusing in particular on his arguments for separation between religion and the state. Examining critically the idea to employ Kant in contemporary debates, I claim that Kant’s (...) account of pure moral faith and the church as its ‘vehicle’ may pose difficulties for any argument for religious liberty that appeals to his thought. For Kant is better equipped to offer resources to overcome rather than to accommodate the fact of so-called “moral pluralism,” i.e. the condition in which the principle of religious liberty can find its application. In the second part, I summarise the arguments of the authors who contribute to this volume: D. Jakušić, W. Kozyra, S. Lo Re, G.E. Michalson Jr., and S.R. Palmquist. (shrink)

Foreword from the Guest Editor to the special issue of Diametros – “Enlightenment and Secularism.”.

Both critics and defenders of Kant’sReligion within the Boundaries of Mere Reasonhave raised worries about its alleged employment of an ‘Augustinian’ conception of moral evil as well as the accounts of grace and moral regeneration consequent to it. Combined, these aspects of theReligionare often seen as responsible for its principal ‘wobble’, ‘conundrum’ or ‘internal contradiction’, and are likewise among the key reasons why theReligionis commonly seen as at odds with the epistemic strictures and moral principles which shape Kant’s broader Critical (...) corpus. It is the purpose of this article to reassess these charges and to show thereby that rather than accepting this alleged Augustinianism, Kant engages with and ultimatelyrejectsits core tenets. (shrink)

Kant’s late essay ‘The End of All Things’ (1794) establishes a distinctly modern field of inquiry that has fittingly been called ‘philosophical eschatology’ by asking, ‘why do human beings expect an end of the world at all?’ (AA 8:330) Interpretation of the essay’s purpose and argument have usually taken one of two routes: Kant is either understood as writing an esoteric political critique under the guise of the philosophy of religion, or as being focused largely on problems related to the (...) immortality of the soul as a postulate of pure practical reason. In contrast, I argue that the essay presents the end of all things as a cosmological idea of reason. In this essay I trace Kant’s idea of an end as its preconditions are established through the three Critiques, and finally made explicit in his late work. (shrink)

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects... you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus (...) inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don't see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn't this fabulous? Isn't it really worth going to graduate school to study critique? (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age . I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic conceptions (...) of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition. Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological “disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community , and cosmos. Taylor delivers this history in his “reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”. (shrink)

Currently there is a widely held view that international law and its historiography did not emerge until the nineteenth century, with earlier forms of jus gentium or Völkerrecht being consigned to the status of a superseded ‘pre-history’. It is not widely understood that this view itself belongs to a particular kind of historiography–the dialectical historiography of international law–that was born in 1840s Germany, and wielded this viewpoint as a cultural-political weapon to exclude its rivals from ‘modernity’. In outlining a history (...) of this dialectical historiography, the present article focuses on the reception of Kantian and Hegelian philosophies, understood as species of Protestant rationalist metaphysics, in the juridical-political arena of the German Vormärz. Dialectical histories and theories of international law were the effects and instruments of this reception, which gave rise to the new academic subculture of philosophical international law. This subculture in turn permitted the fashioning of a new intellectual persona, the philosopher-jurist, who could claim to transcend positive treaty-based international law through personal insight into a ‘common international legal consciousness’, and to treat this insight as the threshold of ‘modern’ international law. (shrink)