It is in the interest of the totalitarian state that subjects not think for themselves, much less confer about their thinking. Writing under the hostile watch of the Prussian censorship, Immanuel Kant dared to argue the need for open argument, in the university if nowhere else. In this heroic criticism of repression, first published in 1798, he anticipated the crises that endanger the free expression of ideas in the name of national policy. Composed of three sections written at different times, (...) The Conflict of the Faculties dwells on the eternal combat between the "lower" faculty of philosophy, which is answerable only to individual reason, and the faculties of theology, law, and medicine, which get "higher" precedence in the world of affairs and whose teachings and practices are of interest to the government. Kant makes clear, for example, the close alliance between the theological faculty and the government that sanctions its teachings and can resort to force and censorship. All the more vital and precious, then, the faculty of philosophy, which encourages independent thought before action. The first section, "The Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Theology Faculty," is essentially a vindication of the right of the philosophical faculty to freedom of expression. In the other sections the philosopher takes a long and penetrating look at medicine and law, the one preserving the physical "temple" and the other regulating its actions. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study in any language to examine in detail and critically assess the second part of Kant's ethics- -an empirical, impure part, which determines how best to apply pure principles to the human situation. Drawing attention to Kant's under-explored impure ethics, this revealing investigation refutes the common and long-standing misperception that Kants ethics advocates empty formalism. Making detailed use of a variety of Kantian texts never before translated into English, author Robert B. Louden reassesses the strengths (...) and weaknesses of Kantian ethics as a whole, once the second part is re-admitted to its rightful place within Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

_The first comprehensive examination in English of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View._.

The aim of this work is to identify and characterize the fundamental causal/explanatory entities in nature. Chapter One criticizes the methodology of much of the recent work on laws of nature, which consists of analyzing our concept of a law with thought-experiments. This procedure faces two objections. Firstly, such thought-experiments beg the questions they are intended to answer, due to the weakness of our grip on the concept of a law. Secondly, the conceptual approach to laws is misconceived: the concept (...) of a law plays no significant role in science, and if it plays a role in philosophy, that is an accident of history that lacks rational justification. Chapter two considers symmetry as a possible surrogate for laws of nature and, specifically, clarifies the role of symmetry in, or its relation to, conservation laws, Curie's principle, the historical development of theories in high-energy physics, and gauge theories. The over-all conclusion is that, contrary to many physicists, symmetries are not the fundamental explanatory facts. Chapter Three begins with a clean slate and argues that the explanation of any event is to be found in the dispositional properties of the entities that participate in it. Firstly it is shown that much of scientific methodology is naturally understood as the study of dispositions, and that the characteristic results of scientific inquiry---its "laws"---can be understood as making claims about objects' essential dispositions. Secondly, I argue against empiricist analyses that dispositions must be understood realistically as relatively stable properties. Chapter Four criticizes law-based theories of explanation for assuming a determinate and empirically meaningful notion of laws, and outlines instead a theory of dispositional explanation, describing some of the varieties of dispositional explanation and showing how dispositions themselves are explained: the dispositions of compound objects are explained by reference to the dispositions of their constituent parts, but we cannot explain the dispositions of simple entities except to attribute them to the essential natures of such objects. (shrink)