Kant's System of Nature and Freedom Selected Essays

by Guyer, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780199273478
• ISBN10: 0199273472
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-06-30
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

The concept of systematicity is central to Immanuel Kant's conception of scientific knowledge and to his practical philosophy. But Kant also held that we must be able to unite the separate systems of nature and freedom into a single system: on the one hand, morality itself requires that we beable to see its commands and goals as realizable within nature, while on the other hand our experience of nature itself leads us to see it as a system with the goal of human moral development. The essays in this volume, including two published here for the first time, explore various aspects ofKant's conception of the system of nature, the system of freedom, and the system of nature and freedom. The essays in the first part explore the systematicity of concepts and laws as the ultimate goal of natural science, consider the implications of Kant's account of our experience of organisms for the goal of the unity of science, and examine Kant's attempts to prove that the existence of an ether isa necessary condition for a physical system of nature. The essays in the second part explore Kant's view that morality requires a systematic union of persons as ends in themselves and of the ends that persons set for themselves, and examine the system of duties and obligations necessary to realizesuch a systematic union of persons and their ends. These essays thus examine both the general foundations of Kant's moral philosophy and his final account of the duties of right or justice and of ethics or virtue in his late work, the Metaphysics of Morals. The essays in the third part examineKant's attempt, in the last of his three great critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment., to unify the systems of nature and freedom through a radical transformation of traditional teleology as a theory of the creation of organic nature into an account of our experience of organic nature andof nature as a whole.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	vii
Introduction	1	(8)
PART I. The System of Nature	9	(104)
Reason and Reflective Judgment: Kant on the Significance of Systematicity	11	(27)
Kant's Conception of Empirical Law	38	(18)
Kant on the Systematicity of Nature: Two Puzzles	56	(18)
Kant's Ether Deduction and the Possibility of Experience	74	(12)
Organisms and the Unity of Science	86	(27)
PART II. The System of Freedom	113	(162)
Kant on the Theory and Practice of Autonomy	115	(31)
The Form and Matter of the Categorical Imperative	146	(23)
Ends of Reason and Ends of Nature: The Place of Teleology in Kant's Ethics	169	(29)
Kant's Deductions of the Principles of Right	198	(45)
Kant's System of Duties	243	(32)
PART III. The System of Nature and Freedom	275	(98)
The Unity of Nature and Freedom: Kant's Conception of the System of Philosophy	277	(37)
From Nature to Morality: Kant's New Argument in the `Critique of Teleological Judgment'	314	(29)
Purpose in Nature: What is Living and What is Dead in Kant's Teleology?	343	(30)
Bibliography	373	(6)
Index	379