Kant's Elliptical Path

by Ameriks, Karl

• ISBN13: 9780199693696
• ISBN10: 0199693692
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-12-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Kant's Elliptical Path covers several of the main stages and key concepts in the development of Kant's Critical philosophy, from the early 1760s through the 1790s. Karl Ameriks provides a detailed and concise account of the main ways in which the later Critical works provide a plausible defence of the conception of humanity's fundamental end that Kant turned to after reading Rousseau in the 1760s. Separate essays are devoted to each of the threeCritiques, as well as to earlier notes and lectures and several of Kant's later writings on history and religion. A final section devotes three chapters to post-Kantian developments in German Romanticism, accounts of tragedy up through Nietzsche, and contemporary philosophy. The theme of an elliptical path is shown to be relevant to these writers as well as to many aspects of Kant's own life and work.

Author Biography

Karl Ameriks completed his PhD in Philosophy at Yale University. He has held positions in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame since 1973, and is now McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy. He has acted as President of the North American Kant Society, and President of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division. Ameriks is the co-editor of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, and author of Kant's Theory of Mind (Clarendon, 2000), Interpreting Kant's Critiques (Clarendon, 2003), and Kant and the Historical Turn (Clarendon, 2006).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations
Introduction: Our Elliptical Path
Part I. Before the Critiques: Kant's Self-Recovery
1. Kant, Human Nature, and History after Rousseau
2. Reason, Reality, and Religion in the Early Development of Kant's Ethics
Part II. Kant's Critiques
First Section. The First Critique (1781, 1787) and Reality
3. Kant's Idealism on a Moderate Interpretation
4. On Reconciling the Transcendental Turn and Kant's Idealism
5. Idealism and Kantian Persons: Spinoza, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher
Second Section. The Second Critique (1788) and Morality
6. Kant's Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism
7. Is Practical Justification in Kant Ultimately Dogmatic?
8. Ambiguities in the Will: Kant and Reinhold, Briefe 2
Third Section. The Third Critique (1790) and Purpose
9. The Purposive Development of Human Capacities
10. Kant's Fateful Reviews of Herder's Ideas
11. The End of the Critiques: Kant's Moral "Creationism"
12. Kant and the End of Theodicy
Part III. After the Critiques
13. On the Extension of Kant's Elliptical Path in Holderlin and Novalis
14. Kant, Nietzsche, and the Tragic Turn in Late Modern Philosophy
15. Interpretation After Kant
Bibliography
Index