In a note introduced into the second edition of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1794), Kant assigns a systematic role to the General Remarks at the end of each Part of his book. He calls those Remarks, “as it were, parerga to religion within the boundaries of pure reason; they do not belong within it yet border on it” (RGV 6:52). As Kant sees them, the parerga are only a “secondary occupation” that consists in removing transcendent obstacles. This (...) paper is skeptical of Kant's view. It proposes an alternative account, according to which the parerga are essential to our moral education, since they force human reason to confront its own limitations and resist the urge to take refuge in spurious religious beliefs. That urge, I argue, is linked to the propensity to evil, and uses religious orthodoxy to undermine moral religion. By clipping our dogmatic wings, the parerga encourage reason to face its own dialectical tendencies and direct its speculative interest to immanent practical use. This redirection counteracts the debilitating effects of the propensity to evil and plays a key role in our moral regeneration. To consider the parerga “derivative,” as Kant himself does, is therefore a grave mistake. (shrink)

This paper examines an issue of recent Kant scholarship on education: the supposed disconnect between his theory of morals and his theory of character. While the debate is often couched in terms of Kant’s ‘phenomenal–noumenal’ distinction, or the distinction between moral theory and culture, I follow scholarship suggesting the best way to understand Kant’s distinction is by following his account of the ‘conduct of thought.’ Doing so demonstrates the Lectures on Logic and particularly, his account of prejudice, as playing a (...) large role in the articulation of what it is to think subjectively. We also see the importance of conducting our thinking from the subjective standpoint to an objective (moral) one in order to fulfill our obligations to both think and act morally. (shrink)