North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy – Serie

A collection of Lewis White Beck's most important essays on Immanuel Kant's philosophy.The North American Kant Society was founded at the Sixth International Kant Congress, held at Pennsylvania State University in 1985. Lewis White Beck did not attend the congress, but his presence was felt throughout. In the yearsthat followed, he was always available with further encouragement and advice, and the Society lost a friend when he died in the summer of 1997.This volume is a collection of Beck's most important essays on Kant's life and work. Beck represented Kant's legacy as a living and defensible philosophy when it was generally considered to be of antiquarian interest, and his work is responsible in no small measure for the Kant renaissance of the past 30 years. His essays on Kant reflect and advance twentieth-century philosophical concerns, and he stands as a model for generations of academic historians of philosophy by resisting the false dichotomy between philosophy and the history of philosophy prevalent among Anglo-American and Continental philosophers alike. From questions about the nature of analyticity to the validity of Wittgenstein's "private language argument" to the latest developments in the historyof science, Beck's Kant interpretation never failed to connect to the present. Lewis White Beck was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester and one of the foremost scholars on the life and writings of Immanuel Kant.

An examination on how virtue is acquired in Kant's ethics.In Kant's philosophy, virtue is defined as the moral strength or resolve to adopt obligatory ends and to act upon only those maxims that can apply equally to all. But how is virtue acquired? To answer this question, this projectturns to Kant's moral anthropology, broadly conceived, in which he considers those "subjective conditions in human nature" that both facilitate and hinder the quest for virtue.Tailored to the specific constitution of human beings,then, are a number of moral-anthropological strategies for strengthening and promoting moral principles. Drawing on Kant's own discussions and the work of several contemporary interpreters this study identifies key approaches tocharacter formation. The central concern of the project, however, is to investigate the roles Kant suggests the larger social-political and natural settings -- that is, the dynamic and inspiring contexts of natural beauty, law andpolitical discourse -- play in the process of virtue acquisition.The story of politics' and nature's influence on virtue acquisition leads into intriguing and, given traditional understandings of Kant, unexpected territory.This study also takes up the question of reciprocal relations: Once acquired, What support, if any, does virtue provide for politics and nature? With the goal of highlighting what may be valuable in a Kantian approach tothe environment, the book assesses the workability of alternative ethical paradigms, e.g. bio- and ecocentric philosophies, and concludes that, while both schools of thought challenge anthropocentric assumptions in helpful ways, they are ultimately flawed. By engaging in this kind of critique, this study creates a plausibility structure for re-considering the merits of a Kantian approach. Scott Roulier is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lyon College.

A collection of essays investigating key historical and scientific questions relating to the concept of natural purpose in Kant's philosophy of biology.Understanding Purpose is an exploration of the central concept of natural purpose [Naturzweck] in Kant's philosophy of biology. Kant's work in this area is marked by a strong teleological concern: living organisms, in his view, are qualitatively different from mechanistic devices, and as a result they cannot be understood by means of the same principles. At the same time, Kant's own use of the concept of purpose does not presuppose any theological commitments, and is merely "regulative"; that is, it is employed as a heuristic device. The contributors to this volume also investigate the following key historical questions relating to Kant's philosophy of biology: How does it relate to European work in the life sciences that was done before Kant arrived on the scene? How did Kant's unique approach to the philosophy of biology in turn influence later work in this area?The issues explored in this volume are as pertinent to the history of philosophy as they are to the history of science -- it is precisely the blurred boundaries between these two disciplines that allows for new perspectives on Kantianism and early nineteenth-century German biology to emerge.Contributors: Jean-Claude Dupont, Mark Fisher, Philippe Huneman, Robert J. Richards, Phillip R. Sloan, Stéphane Schmitt, and John Zammito.Philippe Huneman is researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Unit of the Université Paris.

An interdisciplanary collection of essays focused on Kant's work on the concept of community.The concept of community plays a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy, his practical philosophy, his aesthetics, and his religious thought. Kant uses community in many philosophical contexts: the category of community introduced in his table of categories in the Critique of Pure Reason; the community of substances in the third analogy; the realm of ends as an ethical community; the state and the public sphere as political communities; the sensus communis of the Critique of Judgment; and the idea of the church as a religious community in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Given Kant's status as a systematic philosopher, volume editorsPayne and Thorpe maintain that any examination of the concept of community in one area of his work can be understood only in relation to the others. In this volume, then, scholars from different disciplines -- specializing in various aspects of and approaches to Kant's work -- offer their interpretations of Kant on the concept of community. The various essays further illustrate the central relevance and importance of Kant's conception of community to contemporary debates in various fields.Charlton Payne is postdoctoral fellow at Plattform Weltregionen und Interaktionen, Universität Erfurt, Germany. Lucas Thorpe is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy atBogaziçi University, Turkey. Contributors: Ronald Beiner, Jeffrey Edwards, Michael Feola, Paul Guyer, Jane Kneller, Béatrice Longuenesse, Jan Mieszkowski, Onora O'Neill, Charlton Payne, Susan M. Shell, Lucas Thorpe, Eric Watkins, Allen W. Wood