Plato and Kant advance a constitutional model of the soul, in which reason and appetite or passion have different structural and functional roles in the generation of motivation, as opposed to the familiar Combat Model in which they are portrayed as independent sources of motivation struggling for control. In terms of the constitutional model we may explain what makes an action different from an event. What makes an action attributable to a person, and therefore what makes it an action, is (...) that it issues from the person''s constitution, and therefore from the person as a whole, rather than from some force working on or in the person. This in turn implies an account of what makes an action good: what makes an action good is that it is deliberated upon and chosen in a way that unifies the person into a constitutional system. Through deliberative action we constitute ourselves as unified agents. Platonic justice and Kant''s categorical imperative are shown to be normative standards for action because they are principles of self-constitution. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is seen (...) as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory. (shrink)

In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation for a (...) coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

Lewis white beck's "a commentary on kant's critique of practical reason" overlooks the fact that some of the ideas most important to kant's ethics are not presented in the second "critique". It also lacks a necessary emphasis on the notion of the highest good, The unifying theme of the work as a whole. The author traces the role of this concept throughout the second "critique" and shows how kant developed the content of the idea of the highest good in the (...) combined notions of perfection as the moral good and happiness as the natural good. (staff). (shrink)

Julian Wuerth offers a radically new interpretation of major themes in Kant's philosophy. He explores Kant's ontology of the mind, his transcendental idealism, his account of the mind's powers, and his theory of action, and goes on to develop an original, moral realist account of Kant's ethics.

Julian Wuerth - Kant's Immediatism, Pre-Critique - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 489-532 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Kant's Immediatism, Pre-Critique Julian Wuerth As the author of a copernican revolution in philosophy, Kant argues that philosophy begins with the study of the self. To grasp the scope and nature of knowledge in natural science, ethics, and aesthetics, we must first understand the self and its faculties of representation, pleasure, and desire, (...) respectively. While the literature acknowledges the foundational role of Kant's account of the self in his system of philosophy, it typically focuses on Kant's isolated conclusions about a priori concepts, or on the ontology of the self solely as Kant presents it in his rejection of rational psychology. The result is a gap in the commentary. The place of these conclusions in a single, broader account of the self, and the positive ontological status of this self, remains largely a mystery. These shortcomings are related: Kant's account of the ontology of the self provides the background for understanding the unity and interrelations of the many different powers of the self and their accidents, including a priori concepts. A recent spate of literature on Kant's account of the self addresses important components of this account but perpetuates some traditional methodological weaknesses. The often original commentaries by.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 (2006) 489-532 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Kant's Immediatism, Pre-CritiqueJulian WuerthAs the author of a copernican revolution in philosophy, 1 Kant argues that philosophy begins with the study of the self. 2 To grasp the scope and nature of [End Page 489] knowledge in natural science, ethics, and aesthetics, we must first understand the self and its faculties of representation, pleasure, and desire, (...) respectively. 3 While the literature acknowledges the foundational role of Kant's account of the self in his system of philosophy, it typically focuses on Kant's isolated conclusions about a priori concepts, or on the ontology of the self solely as Kant presents it in his rejection of rational psychology. The result is a gap in the commentary. The place of these conclusions in a single, broader account of the self, and the positive ontological status of this self, remains largely a mystery. These shortcomings are related: Kant's account of the ontology of the self provides the background for understanding the unity and interrelations of the many different powers of the self and their accidents, including a priori concepts. [End Page 490]A recent spate of literature on Kant's account of the self addresses important components of this account but perpetuates some traditional methodological weaknesses. The often original commentaries by Patricia Kitcher, Thomas Powell, and Wayne Waxman stick to frontline issues such as Kant's Paralogisms, his accounts of different faculties of representation, and his Transcendental Deduction, for example; they do not examine Kant's underlying positive ontology of the self, his more general ontology of substance, powers, and accidents, or the other faculties that Kant ascribes to the self. 4 This traditional orientation reflects a problematic research methodology: these accounts do not consider any of Kant's voluminous recorded thought from before the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), even though Kant published the Critique when he was already fifty-seven years old, after decades of detailed, systematic, and largely consistent studies of the self. These interpretations instead rely almost exclusively on the Critique and rarely even consult Kant's many other post-1781 sources. They accordingly focus on the faculties highlighted in the Critique, namely the various faculties of representation and not the faculties of pleasure or desire, and they take the Critique's pithy and notoriously cryptic chapter on the Paralogisms as a full statement of the soul's ontology. Unfortunately, the Paralogisms present only a negative account of the soul's ontology, not a complete one. These interpretations therefore understand Kant's rejection of [End Page 491] the intemperate rationalist arguments—which hold that the conclusions of the soul's simplicity and substantiality imply the soul's permanence, incorruptibility, and immortality—as Kant's rejection of all ontologically significant conclusions of the soul's substantiality and simplicity, even more temperate ones that do not imply the soul's permanence, incorruptibility, and immortality.Although these interpretations—united in their view that Kant rejects the substantiality of the soul in any ontologically significant sense—may at first seem viable if we consider only the Paralogisms, a closer look at the Paralogisms reveals significant problems, a look beyond the Paralogisms shows that these interpretations are repeatedly contradicted, and application of these interpretations when approaching other doctrines in Kant's philosophy repeatedly leads us down dead-ends. Thus Kant states in the Paralogisms, and in many other places after the Critique, that the soul is a substance, understood in the most basic ontological sense of the pure category of substance. 5 And Kant claims that the soul has powers and accidents, while at the same time repeatedly making clear that accidents (unlike mere logical predicates) are a form of existence and that all existence is grounded in substance, either being substance or a determination, or mode, of substance. Without Kant's concept of noumenal substance, his concepts of the soul's accidents and powers are rendered incoherent, frustrating our understanding of many other Kantian doctrines, including Kant's critique of rational psychology... (shrink)