Browsing by Subject "Kant"
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Item A place for moral theory in the argument from evil(2012-08) Reed, Robert P; Webb, Mark O.; Schwartz, JeremyArguments from evil intend to prove that the existence of an all-powerful and morally-perfect being would preclude the existence of evil. Such arguments hold that the absence of evil is a necessary consequence of a morally-perfect and all-powerful being existing. Yet evil does exist and so by modus tollens, God must not. Despite the presence of unmistakably moral terms in these arguments such as “evil” and “morally-perfect”, treatments of the problem of evil in the philosophical literature have avoided discussing the related normative and metaethical issues and so have hindered the progress of the debate. Whether or not the attributes of being all-powerful and being morally-perfect do in fact preclude the existence of evil is substantially (if not entirely) determined by the moral or normative structure of the world: the moral truths about good, evil, normativity, right action etc. and any properties and facts about the world needed to ground them (supposing moral truths require such grounding). So the very same truths moral philosophers seek while doing normative ethics will largely determine whether the existence of a morally-perfect and omnipotent being precludes the existence of evil. The truth about God and evil hinges upon the truth about morality. Thus, the question of whether or not God and evil can coexist cannot be answered without committing to the sorts of normative claims at issue in moral philosophy.Item A Pragmatic Standard of Legal Validity(2012-07-16) Tyler, JohnAmerican jurisprudence currently applies two incompatible validity standards to determine which laws are enforceable. The natural law tradition evaluates validity by an uncertain standard of divine law, and its methodology relies on contradictory views of human reason. Legal positivism, on the other hand, relies on a methodology that commits the analytic fallacy, separates law from its application, and produces an incomplete model of law. These incompatible standards have created a schism in American jurisprudence that impairs the delivery of justice. This dissertation therefore formulates a new standard for legal validity. This new standard rejects the uncertainties and inconsistencies inherent in natural law theory. It also rejects the narrow linguistic methodology of legal positivism. In their stead, this dissertation adopts a pragmatic methodology that develops a standard for legal validity based on actual legal experience. This approach focuses on the operations of law and its effects upon ongoing human activities, and it evaluates legal principles by applying the experimental method to the social consequences they produce. Because legal history provides a long record of past experimentation with legal principles, legal history is an essential feature of this method. This new validity standard contains three principles. The principle of reason requires legal systems to respect every subject as a rational creature with a free will. The principle of reason also requires procedural due process to protect against the punishment of the innocent and the tyranny of the majority. Legal systems that respect their subjects' status as rational creatures with free wills permit their subjects to orient their own behavior. The principle of reason therefore requires substantive due process to ensure that laws provide dependable guideposts to individuals in orienting their behavior. The principle of consent recognizes that the legitimacy of law derives from the consent of those subject to its power. Common law custom, the doctrine of stare decisis, and legislation sanctioned by the subjects' legitimate representatives all evidence consent. The principle of autonomy establishes the authority of law. Laws must wield supremacy over political rulers, and political rulers must be subject to the same laws as other citizens. Political rulers may not arbitrarily alter the law to accord to their will. Legal history demonstrates that, in the absence of a validity standard based on these principles, legal systems will not treat their subjects as ends in themselves. They will inevitably treat their subjects as mere means to other ends. Once laws do this, men have no rest from evil.Item Ancient and modern approaches to the question of punishment : Hobbes, Kant and Plato(2010-08) Shuster, Arthur; Pangle, Thomas L.; Hankinson, Robert; Muirhead, Russell; Pangle, Lorraine; Stauffer, Devin; Tulis, JeffreyThe modern criminal justice system is experiencing what may be called a moral crisis brought about by a fundamental disagreement regarding the just and humane treatment of criminals and the purpose of punishment. This crisis has been addressed by contemporary scholarship without much success. The most serious defect of these scholarly attempts has been a failure to grasp how the apparently clashing aims of punishment—deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation—relate to the fundamental principles of modern politics. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to begin to understand how these different penal aims may today be compatible and how incompatible, or even to appreciate what is at stake in each of them. In order to gain a firmer grip on the problem, this dissertation returns to the original arguments for modern punishment by examining crucial moments in its theoretical development. In Hobbes, modern punishment theory attains its first and most consistent articulation. Hobbes shows that the principles of modern politics limit the scope of justice to the protection of private freedom and property, and thus necessitate that deterrence should be the dominant aim of punishment. In his reaction against Hobbes, Kant affirms the importance of human dignity and argues that a penal system of pure deterrence would threaten the humanity of the criminal. Kant presents retribution as a more noble aim of punishment and tries to defend it on modern grounds, although he ultimately fails in this task. In light of the aporetic conclusion of the examination of modern punishment theory, this dissertation turns to investigate the classical approach to the question of punishment as it is expressed in the proposal for humane penal reform in Plato’s 'Laws.' In the 'Laws,' the highest aim of punishment, as the city understands it, is shown to be moral rehabilitation, although retribution and deterrence are also incorporated into the city’s actual penal code as a concession to necessity and to the limitations of the thumotic civic outlook. The most humanizing feature of the penal reform proposal in the 'Laws' is, however, its philosophical analysis of the nature of crime.Item Anticipations of Kant in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient MarinerSalazar, Raul Zachary; Murphy, Jonathan W.Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy resonates in the works of one of the most important Romantic writers in history, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In chapter one of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), Kant diagnoses the human race as being radically evil; they raise selfish incentives of desire above the moral law. Kant also expresses that the human race cannot extirpate themselves of radical evil because they are frail, impure, and perverse. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a follower of Kant, seeks to remedy Kant’s diagnosis of radical evil in his works Aids to Reflection (1825) and Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) by suggesting that the “human will,” when tempered by Reason, awakens mankind’s spiritual mind and safeguards him from sin. This thesis closely examines the first chapter of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in order to familiarize readers with Kantian arguments and key terms. The thesis then examines the similarities between Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection and Kant’s Religion. These similarities make a Kantian interpretation of Rime possible, which is the heart of this thesis.Item Constructing numbers through moments in time: Kant's philosophy of mathematics(Texas A&M University, 2004-11-15) Wilson, Paul AnthonyAmong the various theses in the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism is the thesis that numbers are constructs of the human mind. In this thesis, a historical account of intuitionism will be exposited- - from its beginnings in Kant's classic work, Critique of Pure Reason, to contemporary treatments by Brouwer and other intuitionists who have developed his position further. In chapter II, I examine the ontology of Kant's philosophy of arithmetic. The issue at hand is to explore how Kant, using intuition and time, argues for numbers as mental constructs. In chapter III, I examine how mathematics for Kant yields synthetic a priori truth, which is to say an informative statement about the world whose truth can be known independently of observation. In chapter IV, I examine how intuitionism developed under the care of Brouwer and others (e.g. Dummett) and how Hilbert sought to address issues in Kantian philosophy of mathematics with his finitist approach. In conclusion, I examine briefly what intuitionism resolves and what it leaves to be desired.Item Freedom in Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Keystone of Pure Reason(2010-07-14) Aylsworth, Timothy J.The objective of my thesis was to examine Kant's concept of freedom and the role that it plays in his Critical philosophy. Each section deals with an interpretive or theoretical problem concerning freedom in the context of one of Kant's Critiques. In Section 2, I focus the Critique of Practical Reason and I argue that transcendental freedom is a crucial premise in Kant?s deduction of the moral law. In Section 3, I turn to the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant claims that transcendental idealism is the theoretical apparatus that allows us to understand the compatibility of freedom and determinism. Because the first Critique lays the foundation for the rest of the Critical project, I try to develop a reading of this text that can sustain the viability of Kant's concept of freedom. In Section 4, I look to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, which Kant wrote in order to bridge the gap between nature, as it was described in the first Critique and freedom, as it was developed in the second Critique. Kant's teleological account of nature, which subordinates nature to the moral use of freedom, bridges the gap between nature and freedom by providing an account of how nature can realize the objective end of practical reason, viz., the highest good.Item From the schematic to the symbolic: the radical possibilities of the imagination in Kant's third Critique(2010-01-16) Camp, Ty D.In this thesis it is argued that Kant's Copernican turn depends on his doctrine of the imagination, and that by understanding the role of imagination as symbolic rather than schematic, the resources are provided to show that his critical philosophy has more radical possibilities than those of his post-Kantian critics. To display this, it is first pointed out that the crucial role the imagination plays in Kant's Copernican turn is not fully developed in his first Critique. Next, it is argued that Kant's doctrine of the imagination is not fully realized until the third Critique in which Kant radicalizes his notion of constructivism by introducing a distinction between determinative and reflective judgments. Finally, it is suggested that while Hegel believes that Kant?s idealism is not dynamic enough to support a full-fledged constructivism, in fact, when Kant?s mature doctrine of the imagination is taken into account, this is no longer the case because Kant believes that our particular experiences of the world unfold artistically and creatively according to the work of the imagination. It is suggested, therefore, that in many ways Kant anticipates the developments of thinkers such as Hegel and other post- Kantians and may even continue to lie beyond them.Item Genius and the Origins of Art in Kant's Aesthetics(2013-05) Silbernagel, A; DiPoppa, Francesca; Ribeiro, AnnaThe account of artistic genius given by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment functions to explain how fine art is possible under Kant’s aesthetics. However, the cryptic quality of this account has led to its neglect in the secondary literature, where it is treated as an afterthought, episodic, or tangential. By clarifying Kant’s account of genius, this paper aims to secure the possibility of fine art under Kant’s aesthetics. In section one I summarize Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment, and explain how it gives rise to the problem of fine art, or the question of how artistic beauty is possible. Kant’s answer to this question is his account of genius, essential to which is genius’s connection to nature. In section two I clarify this connection, which involves specifying what the elements of genius are, their origins, and how they contribute to the production of beautiful art. On my reading, nature supplies genius with some, but not all, of the tools and materials that are required for the production of beautiful art. One important implication of my reading, which is discussed in section three, is that Kant’s genius entails the capacity to produce, not just fine art, but sublime art as well.Item Immanuel Kant and T.H. Green on Emotions, Sympathy, and Morality(2010-07-14) Downs, Wayne J.In this work I investigate the role of emotion in the moral philosophies of Immanuel Kant and T.H. Green. Noting Kant's reputation as a rationalist holding a predominately negative view toward emotions, I studied the works of Kant with this two-fold question in mind: Why did Kant allegedly find emotions as hindrances to moral actions, and what exactly would such a view entail if it were indeed his perspective? Based on Kant's writings regarding duties to others in Doctrine of Virtues, I show that in his discussion on sympathetic actions there appears to be a reliance on emotions in the construction of a moral response to another's fate. I place Kant's theory in juxtaposition with T.H. Green's moral philosophy because Green, a lesser-known British Idealist, is commonly presented as a theorist within the Kantian tradition. However, working exclusively with Green's major work, Prolegomena to Ethics, there are notable differences between Kant and Green. Green does not hold a negative view of emotions as Kant did, and more fundamentally, the distinction between Kant and Green stems from their differing perspectives of human nature. Whereas Kant presented human nature as comprised of two coexisting, and conflicting, natures - the animal nature and the moral nature - Green dissolved this dualism by making reason that which unifies the human being's animal nature and moral nature. Hence, it is my purpose to study Green's moral philosophy against the backdrop of Kant's moral theory, with particular focus on the role of emotions and sympathy in human behavior. In this comparative analysis, I show how Green's theory, although heavily indebted to Kant, works to correct some problematic issues that arise from Kant's denigration of emotions inherent in his dualism. Furthermore, in this discussion that begins as an examination of two views on the relationship between emotions and morality, one is pressed to entertain a deeper question concerning how these thinkers arrived at their views of human nature. This progression is indeed appropriate, at least when considering Kant and Green, because their regard for emotions is directly dependent upon their views of human nature as distinct from animal nature. In the end, it is suggested that Green's theory not only serves to correct Kant's work, but by rectifying Kant's problematic dualistic view of human nature, Green created a philosophy all his own that may more accurately represent the true nature of humankind.Item Kant's response to the problem of induction(2008-08) Sharp, Curtis T.; DiPoppa, Francesca; Kim, SungsuIn this paper, I examine Immanuel Kant’s response to David Hume’s problem of induction. I pay particular attention to Kant’s main writings on causation: the Second Analogy in The Critique of Pure Reason and the Introduction to The Critique of Judgment. I agree with Paul Guyer that Kant does not provide a solution to the problem in the Critique of Reason. I disagree with Guyer, however, that Kant also does not provide a solution in the Critique of Judgment: whereas Guyer concludes that Kant tells us that we merely assume – and cannot prove - that induction is justified, I conclude that Kant argues for an externalist justification of induction.Item Kantian and Hegelian tendencies in twentieth century theories ; Mentalist versus mechanist approaches to first language acquisition(1993) Reinke, Cindy L.; Arens, Katherine, 1953-; Louden, Mark LaurenceItem Kant’s analytic-geometric revolution : ostensive judgment as algebraic time–state relation in the Critique of pure reason(2011-12) Heftler, Christopher Scott; Higgins, Kathleen Marie; Seung, Thomas; Martinich, Aloysius; Phillips, Stephen; Cleaver, HarryIn the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defends the mathematically deterministic world of physics by arguing that its essential features arise necessarily from innate forms of intuition and rules of understanding through combinatory acts of imagination. Knowing is active: it constructs the unity of nature by combining appearances in certain mandatory ways. What is mandated is that sensible awareness provide objects that conform to the structure of ostensive judgment: “This (S) is P.” Sensibility alone provides no such objects, so the imagination compensates by combining passing point-data into “pure” referents for the subject-position, predicate-position, and copula. The result is a cognitive encounter with a generic physical object whose characteristics—magnitude, substance, property, quality, and causality—are abstracted as the Kantian categories. Each characteristic is a product of “sensible synthesis” that has been “determined” by a “function of unity” in judgment. Understanding the possibility of such determination by judgment is the chief difficulty for any rehabilitative reconstruction of Kant’s theory. I will show that Kant conceives of figurative synthesis as an act of line-drawing, and of the functions of unity as rules for attending to this act. The subject-position refers to substance, identified as the objective time-continuum; the predicate-position, to quality, identified as the continuum of property values (constituting the second-order type named by the predicate concept). The upshot is that both positions refer to continuous magnitudes, related so that one (time-value) is the condition of the other (property-value). Kant’s theory of physically constructive grammar is thus equivalent to the analytic-geometric formalism at work in the practice of mathematical physics, which schematizes time and state as lines related by an algebraic formula. Kant theorizes the subject–predicate relation in ostensive judgment as an algebraic time–state function. When aimed towards sensibility, “S is P” functions as the algebraic relation “t → ƒ(t).”Item Politics and Eschatology: Christian, Muslim and Liberal Traditions and Their Visions of Humankind's Future(2012-02-14) Loureiro, Roberto V.Within the context of contemporary politics, Christian, Muslim and Liberal traditions have been, in many instances, at odds with each other regarding how humankind?s social political future should be ordered. Such a conflicting condition has been aggravated by the global circulation of democratic ideals, which has significantly disseminated Western liberal values and made those ideals an almost universal desirable social commodity. In support of this argument, one can observe the unprecedented and controversial assumption that liberal democracy has become the ultimate form of political governance. It is in the context of these end-times liberal aspirations, whether self desired or imposed through external pressure, that some competing and conflicting elements are introduced into the political landscape of Christian and Muslim groups. By presenting itself as the universal and final solution for humanity?s future, liberalism appears to create uneasiness among religious people who, indeed, see its secular and religious-privatizing tendencies as a secular eschatological competitor. Despite this perceived end-times conflict, there may be hope for a constructive dialogue among these groups.Item The Idea of Personality in Kant?s Moral Philosophy(2010-10-12) Deem, Michael J.Kant?s idea of the person and its place within his so-called ?Formula of Humanity? has taken on an important role in contemporary discussions of normative ethics. Yet, despite its popularity, confusion remains as to what Kant really means by person and personality in his exposition of the moral imperative. This confusion has led to the attribution of positions to Kant that he clearly does not hold. My concern in this thesis is to engage the texts of Kant?s moral philosophy in an effort to clarify his idea of person/personality. Accordingly, my concerns are primarily exegetical, though I do engage some contemporary trends in Kant scholarship and Kantian ethics. I have divided the thesis into three main sections, which comprise Sections II, III, IV. In Section II, I look to Kant?s precritical ethics, examining his initial discovery of the formal and material principles of morality and his interest in the role feeling plays in the moral life. Of particular interest is Kant?s first introduction of a connection between the feeling of respect for persons and moral duties. In Section III, I suggest that reading Kant?s critical moral philosophy in continuity with the precritical ethics brings into relief Kant?s move from popular morality to an analytic demonstration of the connection of the moral imperative to the will of a rational being. I argue that respecting Kant?s analytic move helps to prevent us from (i) conflating the idea of humanity and personality, which is commonly done in contemporary Kant scholarship and (ii) attributing a strict ?two-world? ontology to Kant?s moral philosophy. Finally, in Section IV, I return to Kant?s conception of moral feeling as respect for persons, and I briefly discuss its motivating force in the fulfillment of the demands of morality. Together, these three sections display the importance of understanding Kant?s idea of personality for any project aiming to faithfully interpret his moral thought.Item A Tocquevillean analysis of the democratic peace research program and modern liberal foreign policy(2012-05) Grinney, Matthew Jay; Pangle, Thomas L.; Trubowitz, PeterAlexis de Tocqueville is widely hailed as one of the most insightful students of democracy and as one of the most perceptive observers of America. While this high praise is fully deserved, Tocqueville was more than simply the author of Democracy in America. Indeed, he completed the journey that inspired his seminal work before he was out of his twenties. The remainder of his life was devoted to the practice of politics. Both as an involved citizen and as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville researched and wrote extensively on French foreign policy. His most notable works are several reports endorsing French colonial projects in Algeria and articles advocating for the emancipation of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies. In this essay I argue that one cannot truly understand Tocqueville the student without analyzing Tocqueville the politician. Approaching his career as a consistent whole, rather than two distinct and incongruous parts, opens new avenues of investigation into his works. First, his incisive examination and critique of the distinct mildness engendered by equality of conditions in America helps fill several theoretical gaps in the democratic peace research program. Second, his arguments in support of both French imperial enterprises as well as the emancipation of slaves reveals that his diplomatic career was animated above all by the desire to forestall the further proliferation of this democratic mildness, which he viewed as one of democracy’s most dangerous vices. Examining his foreign policy positions in light of the lessons he learned in writing Democracy in America is the only way to discover the consistent goal of his life—namely, to educate and guide the future generations of democracy—and thus to understand Tocqueville as he understood himself.Item Toward a normative theory of rationality(2009-05-15) Stovall, Preston JohnThis project offers an articulation of rationality in terms of normativity?that what it means to be acting rationally, in thought or in deed, can be understood via a notion of being bound or obliged to certain behaviors given a prior structure that delimits what is rational to assert in a discourse or perform in a society. In the explicit articulation of the role of norms in limning rationality, this project also emphasizes the opportunity and obligation to self-critically assess the value of the metalinguistic and metapractical standards that license rational assertions and behaviors. After an introduction, section 2 examines the role of rational constraint in Kant?s account of representation, concluding that the transcendental story his philosophy leaves us with impels us to look for an immanent socio-linguistic account of the normativity that obliges us to think and behave in certain ways, rather than lodging the force of normativity in transcendentality. Section 3 then examines Robert Brandom?s inferential semantics by addressing prominent responses to Brandom?s program, making explicit two ways in which normativity operates in inferentialism?one at the level of objectlanguage in the articulation of the propositional commitments and entitlements that specify propositional content, the other at the level of the metalinguistic appraisal of the standards that drive object-language inferentialism. Section 4 turns to the theoretical status of normativity and its role in practical behavior, where it is argued that a notion of normativity can underpin a theory of intentional states. Examining positions on naturalism, the author proposes that a causal account of intentionality, made explicit by the prescriptive nature of the theory advanced, provides a naturalist view of normativity for which norms are in explanations of social states as laws are in explanations of physical states. Hence the obligation to self-critically reflect on and revise the norms that delimit ethical behavior in social systems is understood as commensurate with the obligation to self-critically reflect on and revise the norms that delimit warranted assertions in epistemic discourse. The conclusion offers some remarks on the prospects for rational revision in both a discipline?s discourse and a society?s standards of behavior.