Kant's Practical Philosophy Reconsidered

That Kant's ideas remain vitally present in ethical thinking today is as impossible to deny as it is to overlook their less persisting aspects and sometimes outdated idiom. The essays in this volume attempt to reassess some crucial questions in Kant's practical philosophy both by sketching the lines for new systematic interpretations and by examining how Kantian themes apply to contemporary moral concerns. In the previous decade, when Kant was primarily read as an answer to utilitarianism, emphasis was mainly laid on the fundamentals of his moral theory, stressing such concepts as universalization, duty for its own sake, personal autonomy, unconditional imperatives or humanity as end-in-itself, using the Groundwork and its broader (ifless popular) systematic parallel, the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason, as main sources. In recent years, however, emphasis has shifted and become diversified. The present essays reflect this diversification in discussing the extension of Kantian ethics in the domains of law, justice, politics and moral history, and also in considering such meta-philosophical questions as the relation between the various "inter­ ests of reason" (as Kant calls them), above all between knowledge and moral practice. The papers were first presented at the Seventh Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in December 1986. The Jerusalem Philosophical Encounters are a series of bi-annual international symposia, in which philosophers of different backgrounds meet in Jerusalem to discuss a common issue. Organized by the S. H.

I: Fundamentals of Moral Action.- Empirical and Intelligible Character in the Critique of Pure Reason.- Morality as Freedom.- On the Formalism of Kant's Ethics.- Agency and Anthropology in Kant's Groundwork.- The Submission of our Sensuous Nature to the Moral Law in the Second Critique.- II: Moral Practice and Knowledge.- Theory as Practice in Kant.- Autonomy, Omniscience and the Ethical Imagination: From Theoretical to Practical Philosophy in Kant.- The Interests of Reason: From Metaphysics to Moral History.- III: From Morality to Justice and History.- Kant's Principle of Justice as Categorical Imperative of Law.- Histoire et Guerre chez Kant.- Freedom as a Regulative Principle: On Some Aspects of the Kant-Herder Controversy on the Philosophy of History.- IV: Kant in Contemporary Contexts.- How Kantian is Rawls's "Kantian Constructivism"?.- The Ideal Speech Situation: Neo-Kantian Ethics in Habermas and Apel.- Kant: Respect, Individuality and Dependence.