Kant’s Quasi‐Eudaimonism

In contrast to eudaimonism, Kant argues that moral reasoning and prudential reasoning are two distinct uses of practical reason, each with its own standard for good action. Despite Kant’s commitment to the ineradicable potential for fundamental conflict between these types of practical reasoning, I argue that once we shift to consideration of a developmental narrative of these faculties, we see that virtuous moral reasoning is able to substantively influence prudential reasoning, while prudential reason should be responsive to such influence. Further, Kant indicates the integration of virtue as a commitment concerning practical priorities, and so too what should and should not agree with the agent, is beneficial for prudential reasoning by prudential reasoning’s own standards. Although Kant’s ethical system breaks from eudaimonism in significant ways, it retains the eudaimonist claim that virtuously‐informed pursuits of happiness are not only better for virtue, but also better for happiness.     

Agency,Patiency, and The Good Life: the Passivities Objection to Eudaimonism

Many contemporary eudaimonists emphasize the role of agency in the good life. Mark LeBar, for example, characterizes his own eudaimonist view this way: “It is agentist, not patientist, because it emphasizes that our lives go well in virtue of what we do, rather than what happens, to us or otherwise”. Nicholas Wolterstorff, however, has argued that this prioritizing of agency over patiency is a fatal flaw in eudaimonist accounts of well-being. Eudaimonism must be rejected, Wolterstorff argues, because many life-goods are “passivities” that are out of a person’s hands, including how she is treated by others. In this paper, I defend eudaimonism against this passivities objection. I argue that eudaimonism can maintain its agentist character while also capturing the element of truth in the passivities objection—namely, that human well-being is vulnerable and social. I also argue that eudaimonists should avail themselves of the notion of receptivity to capture important aspects of the good life.     

For the Sake of the Final End

The question of the viability of theological eudaimonism as an interpretation of the moral life has generated increasing debate in recent years. This essay aims to advance the debate about theological eudaimonism (and eudaimonism more generally) by addressing a closely related but insufficiently discussed issue: the nature of human agency and its relationship to value. The most commonly raised objection to eudaimonism is that it is objectionably agent-oriented. I argue that worries about objectionable self-orientation often stem from importing foreign pictures of agency into the eudaimonist tradition. I make this case through an analysis of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent critique of eudaimonism. Wolterstorff presupposes a common contemporary conception of agency. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas and Elizabeth Anderson, I show that other conceptions of agency are available. Clarity about the nature of human agency and its relationship to value will bring greater clarity to the debate about eudaimonism and self-orientation.     

Eudaimonism and the Ground of Normative Reasons

This essay develops an argument against eudaimonism in support of John Hare's earlier critique of eudaimonism. In contrast to Hare, who mounts a Kantian-Scotist objection to what he calls a single-source view of motivation in eudaimonism, my critique of eudaimonism focuses on the ground of normative reasons in eudaimonism while also taking a page from Scotus's ethics. I argue that the main issue with eudaimonism is with the ultimate end and manner of our willing, which fails to correspond to the right ordering of love based on the nature of goodness in the object.     

Merleau‐Ponty’s Reading of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

The aim of this paper is to explore Merleau‐Ponty’s ambivalent relationship with Kant’s transcendental philosophy. I begin by looking at several points of convergence between Kant and Merleau‐Ponty, focusing on the affinities between Kant’s account of transcendental realism and Merleau‐Ponty’s notion of objective thought. I then show how Merleau‐Ponty’s analysis of Kant’s paradox of asymmetrical objects points to a parallel in Kant’s thought to Merleau‐Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception. In the second part of the paper, I show why Merleau‐Ponty believes that, despite the promise of Kant’s thought, he fails to adequately escape from objective thought. After presenting the central claims of the transcendental deduction, I piece together Merleau‐Ponty’s criticism of it by answering three questions: For Merleau‐Ponty, how do we encounter the world prior to reflection? How is experience constituted? And what leads Kant to mischaracterise experience in his own transcendental philosophy?     

Eudaimonism,Human Nature,and the Burdened Virtues

This article explores the prospects for a eudaimonist moral theory that is both feminist and Aristotelian. Making the moral philosophy developed by Aristotle compatible with a feminist moral perspective presents a number of philosophical challenges. Lisa Tessman offers one of the most sustained feminist engagements with Aristotelian eudaimonism (Tessman 2005). However, in arguing for the account of flourishing that her eudaimonist theory invokes, Tessman avoids taking a stand either for or against the role Aristotle assigned to human nature. She draws her account of flourishing instead from the beliefs about flourishing implicit in the feminist and black freedom movements. I examine the implicit conception of flourishing in the writings of two prominent leaders of the black freedom movement—Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X—and argue that Tessman's attempt to avoid the “sticky issue” of human nature is not successful. Tessman's defense of the burdened virtues depends on a particular reading of human nature as does a eudaimonist account of the virtues more generally.     

Analogies between al-Māturīdī’s and Duns Scotus’s Ethical Perspectives

Al-Māturīdī and Duns Scotus share an ethical paradigm that represents the middle ground between divine command and natural law theories in ethics. While al-Māturīdī’s theory can generally be located between Ash?arite divine command and Mu?tazilite natural law theories in Islamic ethics, Scotus’s theory can be placed between William of Ockham’s divine command and Thomas Aquinas’s natural law theories in Christian ethics. Although the starting point of their ethical perspectives is fundamentally based on criticism of natural law theory, neither theologian can be labelled as a typical divine command theorist. This moderate theory may therefore be described as the theory of soft divine command. The main purpose of this article is to draw attention to some similarities between al-Māturīdī’s and Duns Scotus’s ethical perspectives: First, both theologians highlight the composite picture of human nature in terms of morality. In other words, they posit that humans have two opposite tendencies: ‘affection for justice’ and ‘affection for advantage’. Second, although both theologians grant reason an ontological authority in determining what is good and bad, this authority is not limitless. Finally, both theologians argue that, unless one takes account of God’s freedom and wisdom, the moral order in the world cannot be fully comprehended.     

The Role of Welfare in Eudaimonism

Eudaimonists deny that eudaimonism is objectionably egoistic, but the way in which they do so commits them to eschewing an important insight that has been a central motivation for eudaimonism: the idea that an individual must, in the end, organize her life in such a way that it is good for her. In this paper I argue that the egoism objection prods eudaimonists to make a choice between (what we might roughly call) welfare‐prior and excellence‐prior eudaimonism, and I make some preliminary remarks on behalf of welfare‐prior eudaimonism.     

Excellence‐Prior Eudaimonism

Eudaimonism is often regarded as egoistic. If it recommends that agents pursue their own good because it is their own good, it is guilty as charged. But excellence‐prior eudaimonism offers a non‐egoistic alternative to this welfare‐prior eudaimonism. Excellence‐prior eudaimonism recommends that an agent live in a way that is in fact good for the agent, but it does not regard the agent’s own good as necessarily that for the sake of which the agent acts, nor does it regard living well as justified by the fact that it is good for the agent, but simply because it is good. The Christian eudaimonisms of Augustine and Aquinas are best understood as deepened forms of excellence‐prior eudaimonism.     

Kierkegaard's Critique of Eudaimonism: A Reassessment

Interpreters are less univocal than one might think in assessing Søren Kierkegaard's attitude toward eudaimonism. Through an analysis of several key texts from across Kierkegaard's authorship, I argue that existing interpretations do not convincingly address the relationship between Kierkegaard's critique of eudaimonism and his mid‐nineteenth‐century context, which was dominated by post‐Kantian idealists. While I am sympathetic to aspects of deontological and aretaic interpretations, a contextual reading shows that his critique centers on what he diagnoses as the enclosure of the modern self. This puts his critique of eudaimonism in the purview of his moral psychology and in continuity with his critique of romanticism.     

On Sellars' exam question trilemma: are Kant's premises analytic,or synthetic a priori,or a posteriori?

ABSTRACT

Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of what I claim is Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s ‘analytic’ transcendental method in the first Critique, based ultimately on non-trivial analytic truths concerning the concept of an object of our possible experience. Kant’s ‘transcendental proofs’ thereby avoid a certain methodological trilemma confronting the candidate premises of any such proof, taken from Sellars’ 1970s undergraduate exam question on Kant. In part II of the essay I conclude by highlighting in general terms how Kant’s method, as interpreted in the analytic manner explained in part I, was adapted by Sellars to produce some of the more influential aspects of his own philosophy, expressed in terms of what he contends is their sustainable reformulation in light of the so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy.     

“After you,sir!”: Substitution in Kant and Levinas

This paper compares the later Levinas’ notion of “substitution” with Kant’s account of substitution in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kant’s account is modelled on the Christian doctrine of the vicarious substitution of Christ, and some recent commentators on Levinas have argued that Levinas’ account is also similar to this Christian doctrine. By bringing out what I see as major differences between the two accounts, I show that Levinas’ notion of substitution should not be understood in this way.     

EUDAIMONIA AND AGAPE IN MACINTYRE AND KIERKEGAARD'S WORKS OF LOVE

This essay explores connections and divergences between Alasdair MacIntyre's eudaimonistic ethic and Søren Kierkegaard's agapeistic ethic—perhaps the greatest proponents of these ethical paradigms from the past two centuries. The purpose of the work is threefold. First, to demonstrate an impressive amount of convergence and complementarity in their approaches to the transcendent grounds of an ethic of flourishing, the rigors necessary for a proper self‐love, and the other‐directed nature of proper social relations. Second, given the inapplicability of common dichotomies, to pinpoint more precisely where Kierkegaard departs from eudaimonism, and where MacIntyre departs from agapeism. Finally, to show that both Kierkegaard's and MacIntyre's grounds for departure are inadequate, and thus that the most central insights of eudaimonist and agapeist ethics can be harmonized to a greater extent than either Kierkegaard's or MacIntyre's framework can allow.     

Kant on Construction,Apriority, and the Moral Relevance of Universalization

This paper introduces a referential reading of Kant’s practical project, according to which maxims are made morally permissible by their correspondence to objects, though not the ontic objects of Kant’s theoretical project but deontic objects (what ought to be). It illustrates this model by showing how the content of the Formula of Universal Law might be determined by what our capacity of practical reason can stand in a referential relation to, rather than by facts about what kind of beings we are (viz., uncaused causes). This solves the neglected puzzle of why there are passages in Kant’s works suggesting robust analogies between mathematics and ethics, since to universalize a maxim is to test a priori whether a practical object with that particular content can be constructed. An apparent problem with this hypothesis is that the medium of practical sensibility (feeling) does not play a role analogous to the medium of theoretical sensibility (intuition). In response I distinguish two separate Kantian accounts of mathematical apriority. The thesis that maxim universalization is a species of construction, and thus a priori, turns out to be consistent with the account of apriority that informs Kant’s understanding of actual mathematical practice.     

Auto-affection and the Curvature of Spacetime: Derrida Reading Heidegger Reading Kant

ABSTRACT

This paper has a twofold objective. First, it engages with the interrelation of time, space, and matter in Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida and questions whether and how this interrelation effects the possibility of self-relation. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger suggests that the very structure of subjectivity is constituted by what he calls the ‘pure self-affection’ of time and thus the possibility of self-relation is intimately bound up with the temporalizing of time. In his 1964–65 seminar, Heidegger: the Question of Being and History, Derrida translates this pure affection of time into the more generic term ‘auto-affection,’ which will remain a pivotal reference point for his deconstruction of the metaphysical privileging of time as presence. Derrida shows how the (im)possibility of auto-affection is bound up not only with time but also with space, or rather with the ‘spacing of time’ that he also refers to as ‘the trace.’ Second, the paper moves across the frontiers of philosophy and physics posing anew the question concerning the interrelations of temporality, spatiality, and materiality. With reference to what in general relativity is called ‘the curvature of spacetime,’ the efficacy of materiality in the movement of auto-affection is called into question.     

Korsgaard on Hypothetical Imperatives

I argue that rationalists need not adopt Kant’s method for determining what one has reason to do, where by “Kant’s method” I mean the view that normative guidance comes only from directives imposed on the agent by the agent’s own will. I focus on Kant’s argument for “imperatives of skill,” one sort of hypothetical imperative. I argue, against Korsgaard, that Kant’s argument is neither better nor significantly different than the sort of argument non-Kantian rationalists offer. I close by arguing that Korsgaard is wrong to think that her question “why should I care about performing the means to my ends?” is a serious worry.     

Kant's Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals

A definitive feature of Kant's moral philosophy is its rationalism. Kant insists that moral theory, at least at its foundation, cannot take account of empirical facts about human beings and their circumstances in the world. This is the core of Kant's commitment to ‘metaphysics of morals’, and it is what he sees as his greatest contribution to moral philosophy. The paper clarifies what it means to be committed to metaphysics of morals, why Kant is committed to it, and where he thinks empirical considerations may enter moral theory. The paper examines recent work of contemporary Kantians (Barbara Herman, Allen Wood, and Christine Korsgaard) who argue that there is a central role for empirical considerations in Kant's moral theory. Either these theorists interpret Kant himself as permitting empirical considerations to enter, or they propose to extend Kant's theory so as to allow them to enter. With some qualifications, I argue that these interpretive trends are not supported by the texts, and that the proposed extensions are not plausibly Kantian. Kant's insistence on the exclusion of empirical considerations from the foundations of moral theory is not an incidental feature of his thought which might be modified while the rest remains unchanged. Rather, it is the very centre of his endeavours in moral philosophy. If we disagree with it, I argue, we have grounds for moving to a distinctly different theoretical framework.     

从“幻相的逻辑”到“现象学的逻辑”——探讨胡塞尔对辩证法的处理方式

本文研究胡塞尔的现象学与辩证法的关系。尽管胡塞尔没有把辩证法作为一个专题来研究,但从他谈到过辩证法的那些段落中,我们仍能从中发现胡塞尔对辩证法的基本态度和处理辩证法问题的基本思路。胡塞尔对辩证法的理解受到康德很大影响,但他采取不同的方式处理康德在《纯粹理性批判》中作为一个专题来讨论的所谓先验逻辑中的"辩证幻相"问题。胡塞尔批评康德的先验逻辑缺乏对逻辑概念和知性范畴的起源的论述。胡塞尔的现象学则追问它们的发生过程,描述它们在生活世界中的起源和分析主体际的意向的意识活动对它们的构成作用,这实际上是为辩证法奠定一个现象学的基础。