Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Th is paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions through an assessment of three epistemic models of democracy : the Condorcet Jury Th eorem, the Diversity Trumps Ability Th eorem, and Dewey's experimentalist model. Dewey's model is superior to the others in its ability to model the epistemic functions of three constitutive features of democracy : the epistemic diversity of participants, the interaction of voting with discussion, and feedback mechanisms such as periodic elections and protests. It views democracy as (...) an institution for pooling widely distributed information about problems and policies of public interest by engaging the participation of epistemically diverse knowers. Democratic norms of free discourse, dissent, feedback, and accountability function to ensure collective, experimentallybased learning from the diverse experiences of diff erent knowers. I illustrate these points with a case study of community forestry groups in South Asia, whose epistemic powers have been hobbled by their suppression of women's participation. (shrink)

After a long period of comparative neglect, in the last few decades growing numbers of philosophers have been paying attention to the startling contrast presented between Kant’s universal moral theory, with its inspiring enlightenment ideas of human autonomy, equality and dignity and Kant’s racism. Against Charles Mills, who argues that the way to make Kant consistent is by attributing to him a threshold notion of moral personhood, according to which some races do not qualify for consideration under the categorical imperative, (...) I argue that Kant cannot be made consistent on race, and that rather than trying to make him so, we should use the example of Kant’s racism to tell us something about the nature of racism. I argue that Kant’s own moral philosophy and moral psychology in fact give some materials for thinking about his racism, and about racism. (shrink)

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)

Der sensus communis vermittelt Apriori und Aposteriori, Intellektualität und Sinnlichkeit, Inter- und Intrasubjektivität. Die Studie analysiert die Bedeutungen und Funktionen des Begriffs in Kants Gesamtwerk, wobei sie Kants Einteilung der Philosophie folgt: Sie untersucht den sensus communis logicus im theoretischen Bereich, den sensus communis aestheticus im ästhetischen Bereich und den sensus communis practicus im praktischen Bereich.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This paper deals with the motivation behind Kant’s conception of “religion” as “the recognition of all our duties as divine commands”. It argues that in order to understand this motivation, we must grasp Kant’s conception of radical evil as social in origin, and the response to it as equally social - the creation of a voluntary, universal “ethical community”. Kant's historical model for this community is a religious community (especially the Christian church), though Kant regards traditional churches or religious communities (...) as suitable to their moral vocation only if they undergo Enlightenment reform. The paper concludes with a plea for the Enlightenment view of religion, and an indictment of the common failure to understand it correctly. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Hannah Arendt’s notion of “enlarged mentality.” I use a close textual exposition of enlarged mentality in Arendt’s writings in order to offer an interpretation of Denktagebuch Notebook XXII, in which Arendt initially sketched her political interpretation of the Critique of Judgment. I maintain that a close examination of enlarged mentality—particularly as it appears in Arendt’s notebooks—answers basic questions about Arendt’s appropriation of Kant’s third Critique that have eluded scholarly commentators. In this paper, I seek to (...) answer one such question: why did Arendt turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgment? I argue that in turning to Kant for a model of political judgment Arendt took herself to be correcting methodological inconsistencies that she believed she located in the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Ido Geiger's paper ‘What it is the Use of the Universal Law Formula of the Categorical Imperative?’ is part of a growing trend in Kant scholarship, which stresses the significance of the rational competence of ordinary human beings. I argue that this approach needs to take into account that the common agent is an active reasoner who has the means to find out what she ought to do. The purpose of my paper is to show how universality already figures in (...) the active reasoning of pre-theoretical agents in the form of a common universalization test. I present textual evidence for this test, and argue that this conception does not present pre-theoretical moral cognition in an overly intellectualistic or mechanistic way. Finally, I discuss how, on the pre-theoretical level, universalization relates to humanity or a rational agent's special status. Universalization is present to common agents in the form of procedures or questions that we ask ourselves, humanity as an awareness of certain particularly blatant violat.. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 3 Seiten: 358-387.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this essay Walter Okshevsky addresses the question of whether a certain form of dialogically derived agreement can function as an epistemic criterion of moral judgment and ground of moral authority. Okshevsky examines arguments for and against in the literature of educational philosophy and develops Jürgen Habermas's affirmative answer as presented in his discourse theory of morality. Habermas's position is articulated as a moral epistemology and is developed through his critique of the “monologism” of certain aspects of Immanuel Kant's moral (...) theory. Okshevsky concludes with a consideration of some educational implications of Habermas's position. (shrink)

This paper argues for Kantian “universalism,” according to which the subject of empirical cognition is not merely individual, but universal. In the first section, I consider the limitations of Hume’s individualist view of the subject of judgment, which is able to explain how another person exerts power over my judgments, but cannot explain how what she says can challenge or support my judgments. In the second section, I argue that Kant’s universalism accounts for the possibility of rational support both among (...) different judgments in me, and among judgments of different subjects. The third section looks at the consequences of universalism for Kant’s account of testimony. I argue that on Kant’s view, it does not matter whether I learn something from my own experience or from your experience. Testimony thus does not emerge in Kant’s philosophy as a significant topic. In the fourth section, I argue that the enlightenment project of overcoming prejudice and acquiring wisdom makes it imperative that knowledge be not only universally shareable, but also actually shared among members of an epistemic community. (shrink)

Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of Kant’s (...) moral project. (shrink)

During the 1780s, as Kant was developing his universalistic moral theory, he published texts in which he defended the superiority of whites over non-whites. Whether commentators see this as evidence of inconsistent universalism or of consistent inegalitarianism, they generally assume that Kant's position on race remained stable during the 1780s and 1790s. Against this standard view, I argue on the basis of his texts that Kant radically changed his mind. I examine his 1780s race theory and his hierarchical conception of (...) the races, and subsequently address the question of the significance of these views, especially in the light of Kant's own ethical theory. I then show that during the 1790s Kant restricts the role of the concept of race, and drops his hierarchical account of the races in favour of a more genuinely egalitarian and cosmopolitan view. (shrink)

The prohibition on using others ‘merely as means’ is one of the best-known and most influential elements of Immanuel Kant’s moral theory. But it is widely regarded as impossible to specify with precision the conditions under which this prohibition is violated. On the basis of a re-examination of Kant’s texts, the article develops a novel account of the conditions for using someone ‘merely as a means’. It is argued that this account has not only strong textual support but also significant (...) philosophical advantages over alternative conceptions. (shrink)

Kant’s most prominent formulation of the Categorical Imperative, known as the Formula of Universal Law (FUL), is generally thought to demand that one act only on maxims that one can will as universal laws without this generating a contradiction. Kant's view is standardly summarized as requiring the 'universalizability' of one's maxims and described in terms of the distinction between 'contradictions in conception' and 'contradictions in the will'. Focusing on the underappreciated significance of the simultaneity condition included in the FUL, I (...) argue, by contrast, that the principle is better read as requiring that one be able to will two things simultaneously without self-contradiction, namely, that a maxim be one's own and that it be a universal law. This amounts to a new interpretation of the FUL with significant interpretive and philosophical advantages. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

The present paper argues for the relevance of Immanuel Kant and the German Enlightenment to contemporary social epistemology. Rather than distancing themselves from the alleged ‘individualism’ of Enlightenment philosophers, social epistemologists would be well-advised to look at the substantive discussion of social-epistemological questions in the works of Kant and other Enlightenment figures. After a brief rebuttal of the received view of the Enlightenment as an intrinsically individualist enterprise, this paper charts the historical trajectory of philosophical discussions of testimony as a (...) source of knowledge, via such philosophers as C. Thomasius, C. A. Crusius, J. M. Chladenius, G. F. Meier, and finally Kant. Building on recent work on Kant's epistemology of testimony, the paper considers Kant's broader contributions to social epistemology. This includes an analysis of Kant's comments on the social basis of contingent epistemic standards, e.g. in the sciences, as well as on problems arising from the management of what Kant calls the growing ‘volume of knowledge’. Special attention is paid to the relation between Kant's views and contemporary problems arising both in the context of education and from our increased reliance on scientific experts. (shrink)

The article defends three claims regarding the relation between the different formulas of the categorical imperative. On its prevailing reading, FUL gives different moral guidance than FH; left answered, this problem is an argument for adopting a competing perspective on FUL. The prohibitions and commands of the formulas should be taken to be extensionally the same; but FKE adds a dimension missing from the others, gained by uniting their perspectives, namely, bringing the variety of moral laws into systematic unity. The (...) grammatically ambiguous phrase inGMS, 4: 436.9–10 claims that FA alone unites the other formulas in itself. (shrink)

Reasoning may be defined as a deliberate effort to coordinate inferences so as to reach justifiable conclusions. Thus defined, reasoning includes collaborative as well as individual forms of cognitive action. The purpose of the present study was to demonstrate a circumstance in which collaborative reasoning is qualitatively superior to individual reasoning. The selection task, a well known logical hypothesis-testing problem, was presented to 143 college undergraduates-32 individuals and 20 groups of 5 or 6 interacting peers. The correct (falsification) response pattern (...) was selected by only 9% of the individuals but by 75% of the groups. The superior performance of the groups was due to collaborative reasoning rather than to imitation or peer pressure. Groups typically co-constructed a structure of arguments qualitatively more sophisticated than that generated by most individuals. The results support Piagetian and Habermasian views of peer interaction as a locus of rational social processes. (shrink)

An important aspect of moral expertise is moral sensitivity, which is the ability to be sensitive to the presence of morally salient features in a context. This requires being able to see and acquire the morally relevant information, as well as organise and interpret it, so that you can undertake the related work of moral judgement, focus (or motivation) and action. As a distinct but interrelated component of ethical expertise, moral sensitivity can and must be trained and educated. However, despite (...) its importance to moral education, there has been comparatively little discussion about the role of ethical sensitivity and the ways that it can be trained within the context of Kant’s, and Kantian, ethics. This paper seeks to address this gap. While Kant does not explicitly focus in detail on moral sensitivity, by breaking sensitivity down into seven distinct aspects through drawing on the Four Component Model, we are able to identify a wealth of resources in Kant’s work from which we can con- struct an account of moral sensitivity education that draws on his underlying moral theory. (shrink)

Nearly all of the work that has been done on Kant’s conception of public reason has focused on its socio-political significance. John Rawls, Onora O’Neill and others have explored its relevance to a well ordered democracy, to pluralism, to toleration, and so on. However, the relevance of public reason for Kant is not limited to the socio-political. Kant repeatedly appeals to the “touchstone of communication” in relation to the normative side of his epistemology. The purpose of this paper is to (...) articulate why Kant regards communication as vital to our theoretical endeavors. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of moral friendship that both draws on and revises Kant’s conception of moral friendship for the purpose of explaining how trusting and being trusted in the way that Kant describes supports moral self-perfection beyond increased self-knowledge and refinement of judgment. I will argue that cultivation of the virtues of friendship is important to the pursuit of moral self-perfection, specifically with respect to combatting the unsociable side of our unsociable sociability. Reciprocal trust shelters the individual’s predisposition (...) to goodness, which comes under attack by the passions in social relations wherein distrust is the default. Reciprocal trust also enables communion, the importance of which has been undervalued in analyses of moral self-perfection. (shrink)

As one would expect, Kant believes that there is a tension, and even a conflict, between our bodily humanity and its ethical counterpart: ‘Inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other’ (Anthropology, 185-86 [7:277]). What is more unexpected, however, is that he further claims that this tension can be resolved in what he calls an example of ‘civilised bliss’, namely dinner parties. Dinner parties are, for Kant, part of the ‘highest ethicophysical good’, the ultimate (...) resolution of the conflict between our physical body and our moral powers, which consists in finding the right proportions for the ‘mixture’ between our partly ‘sensuous’ and partly ‘ethicointellectual’ nature. The aim of this paper is not only to explain Kant’s account of the ideal proportions of ethicophysical good in dinner parties, but also, and more importantly, to argue that dinner parties are in fact the ultimate experience for us, human beings. (shrink)

A common objection to deliberative democracy is that available evidence on public ignorance makes it unlikely that social deliberation among the public is a process likely to yield accurate outputs. The present paper considers—and ultimately rejects—two responses to this objection. The first response is that the correct conclusion to draw from the evidence is simply that we must work harder to ensure that the deliberative process improves the deliberators’ epistemic situation. The main problem for this response is that there are (...) non-deliberative alternatives—most prominently information markets—available that do a better job from an epistemic point of view than does social deliberation. So why keep bothering with deliberation? The second response attempts to answer this question by arguing that only socially deliberative practices can confer legitimacy on the resulting policies. In response to this, it is argued that information markets actually carry more promise than does social deliberation when it comes to offering the kinds of justifications that are relevant to legitimacy. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a little noted claim of Kant’s — that we should “keep the shutters closed” on our flaws and failings. Kant’s own arguments for this claim aren’t fully satisfactorily, and they rest primarily on pragmatic considerations. My aim in this paper is to provide a more robust Kantian-inspired argument for the moral value of reserve. I argue that collaborating with others to keep the shutters closed on our individual and collective flaws aids in the difficult task (...) of building and maintaining moral community among morally frail and flawed human beings. The paper consists of three parts. In Part I, I examine what Kant himself says about reserve. In Part II, I present a Kantian-inspired argument for the moral value of reserve, drawing on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of a front. Moral fronts, I argue, contribute to the fulfillment of the Kantian duties of moral self-improvement and beneficence. To put it differently, they help us instantiate the kingdom of ends in a world of imperfect human beings. In Part III, I address three objections to my argument: that fronts are deceptive, that they actually interfere with moral self-improvement, and that they preclude morally valuable forms of intimacy. I argue that my account can accommodate these concerns. (shrink)