Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard

by Kosch, Michelle

• ISBN13: 9780199289110
• ISBN10: 0199289115
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-07-27
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

The book traces a complex of issues surrounding moral agency from Kant through Schelling to Kierkegaard. It aims to clarify the contours of German idealism as a philosophical movement by examining the motivations not only of its beginning, but also of its dissolution in the work of the later Schelling, and tracing both to the same complex of issues in Kant. It then builds a new understanding of Kierkegaard's theory of agency and his criticisms of idealist ethics and metaphysics upon this revised account of the historical background. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Michelle Kosch is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
List of Abbreviations	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
1. Kant's Account of Freedom	15	(29)
I. Outline of Kant's View of Freedom	16	(13)
II. Kant's Two Strategies for Demonstrating the Reality of Transcendental Freedom	29	(8)
III. Unifying the Claims of Theoretical and Practical Reason	37	(7)
2. Kant on Autonomy and Moral Evil	44	(22)
I. Causes and Laws	46	(11)
II. Kant's View in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (and its Partial Retraction)	57	(9)
3. Idealism and Autonomy in Schelling's Early Systems	66	(21)
I. The Early Systematic Project	67	(9)
II. Fate as Freedom	76	(11)
4. Freedom against Reason: Schelling's Freiheitsschrift and Later Work	87	(35)
I. 'freedom for good and evil': Freedom and System in the Freiheitsschrift	90	(15)
II. A New System: Schelling's Positive Philosophy of the 1830's and 1840's	105	(17)
Excursus: Late Idealism and Schelling's Influence	122	(17)
5. 'Despair' in the Pseudonymous Works, and Kierkegaard's Double Incompatibilism	139	(40)
I. The Aesthetic View of Life and the First Incompatibilism	141	(14)
II. The Ethical View, Religiousness A, and the Second Incompatibilism	155	(24)
6. Religiousness B and Agency	179	(38)
I. The Structure of Religiousness B	179	(8)
II. A Brief Case against a Voluntarist Understanding of Faith in the Climacus Works	187	(13)
III. Agency in The Sickness unto Death and in The Concept of Anxiety	200	(17)
Conclusion	217	(4)
Bibliography	221	(12)
Index	233