All posts tagged: kant

Why Engage with the Past? Philosophy and Its History

Why Engage with the Past? Philosophy and Its History

In philosophy, you quite immediately notice a striking difference between content taught and philosophical research, for example, when looking at how philosophy departments are structured in European universities. There are courses and research projects that deal with current topics usually associated with the chairs of theoretical philosophy (philosophy of nature, metaphysics) and practical philosophy (ethics, feminist philosophy, political philosophy), respectively. And there are those that deal with philosophical theories of philosophers who lived long ago, that is, content that belongs to the field of the history of philosophy, often associated with chairs of history of philosophy. While the former research and teaching content addresses current issues and topics, such as climate change or polyamory, the latter deals with questions and problems that may seem somewhat outdated at first glance. These include, for example, Descartes’s mechanistic view of nature, which includes (outdated) mechanistic descriptions of the human body, and Kant’s philosophical argument for why space is necessarily Euclidean (which has been proven false). Of course, there are still contemporary philosophical concepts of nature that can be …

What May We Hope for After Thirty Years of Failed Climate Summits?

What May We Hope for After Thirty Years of Failed Climate Summits?

In his 1795 essay Towards Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant prophesied that the “spirit of commerce” would drive countries to unite in perpetual peace, not driven by morality, but profit. Since trade is incompatible with war, Kant thought, our self-interested nature would lead us to form a rule-based world-order. Two-hundred years later, globalization coincided with the development of the United Nations, the European Union, international human rights law, and other international institutions and treaties, from the World Health Organization to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. For many readers of Kant, at the end of the twentieth-century, human history seemed to be approaching its end, like a flower preparing to blossom after a cold winter. This spirit of commerce now risks destroying the very same world-order it promised. Global trade and the Scientific Revolution, with the “slight help” of colonization, served to rapidly industrialize the Global North. Humanity would soon discover that fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—could multiply its economic productivity. In the process, we released tons of gases into the atmosphere, cranking …

Rick Rubin, Kant, and the Tasteful Genius

Rick Rubin, Kant, and the Tasteful Genius

What does it mean to be a creative genius? The following clip is from a 2023 60 Minutes interview with legendary music producer Rick Rubin. In it, Rubin describes his creative process and provides an excellent occasion to discuss the relationship of genius and taste in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of art. In my Philosophy and the Arts course, we spend a significant amount of time reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment. I show this video on the day we discuss Kant’s theory of artistic genius. At this point, students are familiar with Kant’s account of taste, the ability to recognize and appreciate the aesthetic quality of beautiful art. In §46, Kant defines genius as “the inborn predisposition of the mind through which nature gives the rule to art” (5:307). Because beautiful art cannot be created according to fixed rules, the artistic genius is a kind of channel for the way beauty appears spontaneously in nature. (My slideshow includes Angelus Silesius’s “Die Rose” on this point: “The rose is without why.”) For Kant, genius has a talent …