Fallon, Stephen M. Review of Sanford Budick, KANT AND MILTON. NDPR (April 2011).

 Budick, Sanford.  Kant and Milton.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010.

You may be one of the many readers who do a double-take when encountering the title of Sanford Budick's Kant and Milton. I predict that Kant scholars will put down the book convinced that Milton is a seminal figure for Kant, and Miltonists will put it down heartened by this evidence of the poet's influence and armed with a new way of thinking about one of the central debates in Milton studies today, concerning the meaning of Samson Agonistes. (A preliminary word to philosophers: caveat emptor; as a Milton scholar with an interest in the history of philosophy, I cannot claim anything like Budick's intimate knowledge of Kant.)

Budick, a prominent, highly regarded Milton scholar, demonstrates an impressive philosophical sophistication. The second surprise, after the title, is that Budick, a professor of English at Hebrew University, engages intensively with Kant scholarship and only minimally with Milton scholarship. He argues that Kant, who along with other eighteenth-century German intellectuals knew Milton well and valued him highly, singles out the poet as the preeminent poet of the sublime and, as such, as a crucial predecessor making possible Kant's understanding and articulation of the attainment of freedom and moral autonomy. For Budick's Kant, aesthetics and ethics are closely related. If Budick's arguments are right, then Kant's readers will have a new resource for tracing the development of the categorical imperative, and Miltonists will have a new and powerful lens to understand Milton.

In six chapters Budick traces the development of Kant's moral and aesthetic thought as it develops out of the crucible of the constellation of German Miltonism (Budick employs a methodology of Konstellationsforschung pioneered by Dieter Heinrich), particularly in agonistic dialogue with Herder. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23249.

Zuckert, Catherine H. Review of Alan Kim, PLATO IN GERMANY. NDPR (August 2010).

Kim, Alan. Plato in Germany: Kant -- Natorp -- Heidegger. Gent: Academia, 2010.

Like Hans Georg Gadamer in his Philosophical Apprenticeships, Alan Kim suggests that we will understand Heidegger's thought better if we know more about his debates with his colleagues at the University of Marburg. In particular, Kim contends that we will not truly understand Heidegger until we understand the position Heidegger was most immediately and directly critiquing in his interpretation of Plato -- that taken by Paul Natorp in his Platos Ideenlehre. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21108.

Rohlf, Michael. "Immanuel Kant." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY May 20, 2010.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The fundamental idea of Kant's “critical philosophy” — especially in his three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — is human autonomy. He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature according to the teleological worldview of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical parts of his philosophical system. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/.

"Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives," University of Oxford, September 30-October 2, 2010.

Centre for the Study of Social Justice, Department of Politics and International Relations.

The conference will explore the relevance of Kant's critique of colonialism to an appropriate reconstruction of Kant's cosmopolitan theory in recent global justice debates. The focus will be on Kant's unusually critical stance towards European colonialism on the one hand and the uneasy relationship between contemporary liberal theory and its colonial heritage on the other. In considering Kant’s cosmopolitanism within the context of his critique of colonialism and related anthropological reflections, the conference will query the tendency among many current liberal cosmopolitans to interpret Kant's account as a version of their own favoured unrestrained ‘moral universalism’. A philosophically and historically more nuanced reading of Kant's cosmopolitan thinking against the background of emergent European colonialism may encourage a more modest, more self-critical liberal approach to current global issues, such as fair trade, migration, and humanitarian intervention.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Pauline Kleingeld, University of Leiden, “Kant on race and economic globalization: On just trade and free trade”
Prof. Dr. Peter Niesen, Technische Universität Darmstadt, “Restitutive justice in international and cosmopolitan law”
Prof. Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago, “World citizenship and global connections in Enlightenment political thought”
Prof. Howard Williams, “Tensions in Kant's theory of colonialism”

If you would like to give a paper, please submit electronic copies of the title and a summary (350-500 words) of your proposed contribution to Lea Ypi (Lea.Ypi@nuffield.ox.ac.uk) and Katrin Flikschuh (K.A.Flikschuh@lse.ac.uk); please also include an abbreviated CV with your submission. Analytical and historical approaches to the conference theme are equally invited. The deadline for submission is 31 May 2010. We aim to reach a decision within 6 weeks of the deadline.

Cfp: "After Kant: Beyond Idealism and Naturalism," Late German Philosophy Project, Institute of Philosophy, University of London, December 2-3, 2010.

The departure point of the conference is the attitude of some British and German philosophers of the period 1860-1950 towards idealism and naturalism—an attitude at once of contempt and dependence still found among some contemporary British and German philosophers. We invite submission of papers discussing this legacy. For example: How successfully did British and German philosophers of the period challenge idealist and naturalist interpretations of Kant’s critical philosophy? Papers, prepared for a 40-minutes presentation, to be followed by a 10-minutes discussion, should be sent to afterkant@inbox.com. Further information may be found here: http://lategermanphilosophy.com/.

"Kant and Hegel," UK Kant Society and Hegel Society of Great Britain, St. Edmund's Hall, University of Oxford, September 1-3, 2010.

Joint Annual Conference. Keynote Speakers: Karl Ameriks Karin De Boer Katrin Flikschuh Sebastian Gardner Pauline Kleingeld Robert Stern Howard Williams Papers of around 6500-7000 words are invited from faculty members and graduate students across the broad theme of the conference. Papers can be on any aspect of the thought of Kant, Hegel or Kant and Hegel. The deadline for submitting papers is 30th April 2010. A selection of papers from the conference will be published in the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain. For further details, to register your interest and to submit papers please e-mail Lea Ypi (lea.ypi@nuffield.ox.ac.uk) or Thom Brooks (t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk). Further information is available at the UK Kant Society website (http://www.keele.ac.uk/UKKS) and the Hegel Society of Great Britain website (http://www.hsgb.group.shef.ac.uk/).

"Yes We Kant! Critical Reflections on Objectivity: its Meaning, its Limitations, its Fateful Omissions," University of Ghent, May 27-29, 2010.

Hosted by the Centre for Critical Philosophy. In the Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl points out that scientific objectivity, as it gradually took shape through the modern sciences in the form of a mathematization of nature, rests on a "fateful omission", the one namely of forgetting to inquire back into the subjective-historical, dynamic and living context out of which it first of all emerged. This omission is of the essence, so he says, because without it, modern science would not have been able to realise what it has until this day. The production of objectivity intrinsically rests on the possibility to exclude that which is seen, from there on as historically subjective. Its fate is sealed in these terms, and it thus determines as such a specific space in which the necessary, the possible and the contingent are mutually defined. Descartes was perhaps the first to have pointed out this intimate connection, in acknowledging the need for a subjectivity – albeit as a res cogitans – in the midst of an overwhelming machinery of production of objectivity. Kant, however, more poignantly bears witness to this intimate relation between subjectivity and objectivity. In our view, he is the philosopher par excellence for having explored, throughout his three Critiques, but also in his pre-critical works, the idea that there can be no objectivity without subjectivity, and vice versa, that there can be no subjectivity without objectivity. It is indeed through the developments in modern science that subjectivity can appear in its capacity to contribute to the constitution of objectivity, as well as in its capacity to fail in this endeavour. And vice versa, it is through the articulation of subjectivity that objectivity can appear as intrinsically dependent on very specific subjectively grounded constitutive procedures. Most of the time, Kant has been read from a determinative, constitutive angle, and has as often been turned into a static, detached, and even obsessive thinker. His aim is considered to be to determine the limits and the range of the newly identified cognitive capacities as a neutral referee, without having to genuinely try them out. A divergent perspective is possible, however, that attempts to argue for a more dynamic view on objectivity, one in which objectivity is not seen as ultimately detached and static, but in which it is on the contrary the precarious and ever questionable result of dynamic processes of co-constitution. In this regard, there is certainly much to be learned from Kant’s third Critique, because that is the place where Kant most explicitly deals with the issue of coconstitution, and faces this problem in terms of the ways in which objectification encounters failure or disappointment (Enttäuschung). In the third Critique, his basic question is indeed the one about the meaning of a determinative or constitutive ambition, in the principled absence of the means to carry it through. What does this principled resistance, the encounter with an impossibility, that Kant so stubbornly exposes through the beautiful, the sublime and the living, mean? What is its place in his critical system and in critical thinking generally? What are its implications for a conception of objectivity that is, perhaps too hastily, conceived of in terms of neatly acquired and well defined capacities of subsumption under universal concepts? What are its implications for a conception of subjectivity that is, perhaps too quickly also, conceived of in terms of the subjective-relativecontingent. Clearly, Kant’s work, and most definitely his third Critique, is incompatible with a marked and static opposition between two terms, the subjective and the objective, leading to an oppositional space of subjectivism versus objectivism. But does this mean that the issue of resistance and failure, in the process by which objectivity and subjectivity are time and again codetermined and co-defined, is already sufficiently articulated? Is the figure of the “fateful omission” Husserl is referring to, and by which he also points at the historical dimensions of objectivity as well as subjectivity, already sufficiently explored? The aim of this three-day international workshop is to present and exchange various critical viewpoints on objectivity and subjectivity, and to more specifically focus on the various interpretations of necessity in its relation to contingency. This approach on the matter can find inspiration in Kant’s third Critique, that works out the idea that the need and the possibility to articulate the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity emerges to the extent that something resists the anticipative procedures of a living, actively engaged being. This need and this possibility are by him interpreted from within the background of contingently based feelings of pleasure and displeasure, that Kant considered as the constraining and enabling context – the horizon – within which eventually all processes of cognition and morality are to be situated, and in relation to which the faculty of judgment has a specific unifying role to play. But this source of inspiration should certainly not be considered as the only possible one. Husserl's gesture to extrapolate the coconstitutive relation between objectivity and subjectivity to history is but one example of objectivity seen from a dynamical, contingently, historically and subjectively grounded background, the lifeworld. The meeting is certainly open to explore other backgrounds. To realize that end, we invite speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds – physics, mathematics, biology, psychology, … – and embedded in quite divergent philosophical contexts – continental/analytical, in as far as this distinction is a relevant one. This meeting is not in the first place about critically, exegetically, discussing Kant’s texts. Its aim is rather to inquire whether, and in what sense, a return to Kant and to neo-Kantianism can be important to open certain unsuspected perspectives on objectivity (and subjectivity). We conjecture that this approach can be relevant for (i) a contemporary reading of basic texts in the tradition of transcendental philosophy, (ii) a conception of objectivity that can have a relevance in current philosophy and in philosophy of science in particular, (iii) for the development of a transcendental viewpoint in philosophy of science, supplementing and challenging current dominant analytical viewpoints. Invited and confirmed speakers: Michel Bitbol (CREA, Paris) Mario Caimi (Buenos Aires) Paul Cobben (Utrecht) Arnaud Dewalque (Uliège) Arran Gare (Melbourne, Australia) Jasa Josifovic (Germany) Hans-Herbert Koegler (Un. Of North Florida) Koichiro Matsunu (Nagaoka, Japan) Lenny Moss (Exeter, UK) Frank Pierobon (Brussels) Jaco Rivera de Rosales (Madrid) Norman Sieroka (Zürich, Sw.) Serguei Spetchinsky (ULB, Berlin) Joan Steigerwald (York University, UK) Maarten Van Dyck (Ugent) Of the Centre for Critical Philosophy: Emiliano Acosta Liesbet De Kock Boris Demarest Anton Froeyman Filip Kolen Eli Noé Frank Rottiers Gertrudis Van de Vijver Joris Van Poucke Visit the conference website here: http://www.criticalphilosophy.ugent.be/events.

Osteric, Lara. Review of Robert Clewis, THE KANTIAN SUBLIME AND THE REVELATION OF FREEDOM. NDPR (December 2009).

Clewis, Robert R. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. Clewis's book The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom presents a new challenge for those who criticize Kant's moral theory for its "rigor" and its insufficient recognition of the relevance of sensibility and emotions in human moral life. While being, as he himself admits, less interested in the logical features of the judgment of the sublime, Clewis examines how the feeling of the sublime and aesthetic enthusiasm share phenomenological and structural affinities with the moral feeling of respect, and thus prepare us for the exercise of our moral agency. Clewis also reconsiders the widely accepted typology of the Kantian sublime, its standard division into the "mathematical" and "dynamical" sublime, and suggests that there is a third type of the sublime, namely, the "moral sublime". By the moral sublime Clewis understands the effect on consciousness that the realization of the moral law has when observed aesthetically. On Clewis's view, "aesthetic enthusiasm" is a subset of the moral sublime elicited by an empirical event that serves as a sign of a moral tendency of humanity. Clewis argues that aesthetic enthusiasm may help us understand better how Kant's discussion of the sublime contributes to the central concern of the third Critique, that is, the so-called transition problem from freedom to nature. Thus, Clewis's book attempts to show that for Kant the sublime does not only make us aware of our purposiveness as autonomous moral agents (i.e., our moral vocation), but also, just like aesthetic and teleological judgments, of nature's purposiveness. Thus, I take it that Clewis's book attempts to convince us that the sublime does not remain "a mere appendix" to Kant's systematic interests in the third Critique as some commentators have argued. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18327.

Lambert, Gregg. Review of Steven Shapiro, WITHOUT CRITERIA. NDPR (October 2009).

Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. I often enjoy those books of philosophy that begin like good science fiction. In this vein, Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria begins: "I imagine a world in which Whitehead takes the place of Heidegger." In other words, he poses the question, "What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought?" (ix). Starting from this "philosophical fantasy", Shaviro sets out to describe a possible world without Heidegger, which I take to be a sort of Leibnizian wager that is bound up with the "turn to Whitehead" today. Accordingly, "a world in which Whitehead takes the place of Heidegger" must be understood as a divergence from the image of thought that belongs to a tradition of post-Kantian critical philosophy, the recurrent features of which have been an obsessive concern over the limits of representation and the critique of subjectivity, and by an allergic reaction to modern science and technology. The main objective of this tradition has been the exposure of the limits of all representational systems by a regressive procedure of critical reason that leads them into a state of crisis as an anticipatory step to their radical reconstruction; the second objective is the laying bare of all naïve and subjectivist constructions of identity, which leads to the production of difference introduced from the critical perspective of "otherness" (as in the case, most recently, in the critical perspectives surrounding the animal and the post-human). The shortcomings of this tradition of post-Kantian philosophy have been found in the fact that the anticipated radical phase of "construction" has never become a positive event as such, and the actual discovery of new possibilities for subjectivity have been through a glass darkly. The philosophies of this tradition have never fully been able to depart from a negative or deconstructive phase; as a result, the future is posited as a static and essentially "empty form of time", often accompanied by a highly speculative image of the event itself as the undetermined and the ungrounded, hence "radical", commencement of an entirely new ontological order. In short, we have merely replaced one metaphysics with another, namely, with a metaphysics of difference; moreover, we have supplanted the universal pretentions of the Kantian Subject with a progressive number of new radical subjectivisms. What, after all, is the recent turn to the animal (or to the nakedness of zoe itself) if not yet another in a series of attempts to "de-center the metaphysics of the Western [human] subject" that is already pre-programmed by this tradition of critique (epoké)? But let us stop here! In positing "a world without Heidegger", retracing our steps backward to a point of deviation where Whitehead takes his place, inevitably we must begin somewhere. According to Shaviro, we must start from Kant, whose transcendental philosophy takes up the first half of Without Criteria; more specifically the "Transcendental Dialectic" of the second section of the First Critique and "the Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Third Critique, which are then drawn into comparison with Whitehead's system. Beginning all over again from Kant seems like one possible solution to the impasse brought about by the previous tradition of post-Kantian critical philosophy, and it is here that Shaviro's own intentions are most clear, since we are presented with the image of philosophy at the crossroads, so to speak. Following Kant's transcendental reduction, we are given two possible routes for a philosophy of the future to take: one leads via Heidegger straight to "Derrida and his epigones" (which Shaviro implies is a dead-end for philosophy in this century); the other, offered in Without Criteria, leads to Deleuze via Whitehead, even though this route remains "virtual", that is to say, still under construction (by Shaviro and other Deleuzians, including Isabelle Stengers and Brian Massumi, who might also add James and Pierce along the way). Thus, it is not by chance that Without Criteria is the second volume of the MIT series edited by Massumi and Erin Manning, Technologies of Lived Abstraction, which proposes to publish works not content to rest with the habitual divisions (between "aesthetics" and "politics", for example, central to Shaviro's notion of "critical aestheticism") and "to catch new thought and action dawning at a creative crossroad". This could even be said to signal a "Whiteheadian revolution" that is taking place in some quarters of the Deleuzian camp, if not in the general field of continental philosophy today. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17906.

Hamawaki, Arata. Review of Fiona Hughes' KANT'S AESTHETIC EPISTEMOLOGY. NDPR (August 2009).

Hughes, Fiona. Kant's Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Kant, as is well-known, held that the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, are conditions of the possibility of the "experience" of objects. By this, he appears to have meant not just that the categories are conditions of the possibility of thought, or judgment, regarding objects, but also of the possibility of the sensory experience, or perception, of objects. This impression is, perhaps, strongest in the climactic section 26 of the second-edition Transcendental Deduction, in which Kant seems intent to close off the possibility that, despite the fact that all thought must conform to the categories, there may nonetheless be "rogue" intuitions or appearances that fail to so conform. So he seems to argue that the categories are conditions even of the sensory apprehension of objects. However, success in closing such a potential gap between mind and world can strike one as a pyrrhic victory. This is how I think Fiona Hughes, in her book Kant's Aesthetic Epistemology, sees it. She does so because it promotes a picture of the mind's relation to the world she calls "impositionalist": the view that anything that can come to us through our sensibility is necessarily stamped from the outset with the "imprint" of the forms of the understanding. As Hughes argues, if it is guaranteed in advance of any actual experience that anything that we experience must conform to the categories, then it is hard to credit what we receive from experience as knowledge of an "extra-mental world". Even if the objects of our knowledge have an existence that is independent of us, it will seem, she thinks, that what we know of the object would be nothing more than the "imposition" of our own forms of thought. Ultimately, the dualism between sensibility and thought with which Kant started would seem to be abolished in favor of a view on which sensibility has been co-opted by the understanding. Hughes's aim in her book is to show that while there are isolated passages in Kant that invite an "impositionalist" reading, careful consideration of the entirety of his corpus, particularly in light of the third Critique, reveals a more complex account of the relation between mind and world, one that she describes alternately as "pluralist" or "dynamic". On a "dynamic" reading the categories can have application to objects only through a cooperative engagement between the separate faculties of sensibility and understanding, an engagement that requires the mediation of the imagination. On an "impositionalist" reading, since it is a "fait accompli", as Hughes puts it, that the categories are involved even in the reception of an object through sensibility, there is no mediating work for the imagination to perform. Thus, for Hughes the difference between the two readings hinges on the different roles that each reading envisions for the imagination. For the impositionalist, the imagination is nothing more than the faculty of the understanding itself, considered under one of its aspects, namely, under the aspect of its application to intuition, as opposed to its employment in mere thought as such. For Hughes, however, the imagination must be accorded some independence from the understanding, and so must possess an independent standing as a genuine third faculty, one that serves to mediate the relation between the world, as it is received by us through our sensibility, and the faculty of understanding. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17125.

"Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics," Department of Philosophy, University of Southampton, April 2-3, 2009.

Workshop Speakers: Lanier Anderson (Stanford), Kevin Hill (Portland), Paul Katsafanas (New Mexico), Seiriol Morgan (Bristol), David Owen (Southampton). Places are very limited but anyone interested in attending should contact Professor Aaron Ridley, at amr3@soton.ac.uk This forms art of an ongoing series of conferences, workshops and public talks as part of the Nietzsche & Modern Moral Philosophy Project. Previous project participants include: Julia Annas (Arizona), Simon Blackburn (Cambridge), Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside), Robert Guay (Binghampton), Ken Gemes (Birkbeck / Southampton), Edward Harcourt (Oxford), Nadeem Hussain (Stanford), Chris Janaway (Southampton), Peter Kail (Oxford), Brian Leiter (Chicago), Sabina Lovibond (Oxford), Simon May (Birkbeck), David Owen (Southampton), Peter Railton (Michigan), Bernard Reginster (Brown), John Richardson (NYU), Aaron Ridley (Southampton), Simon Robertson (Southampton), Richard Schacht (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), John Skorupski (St. Andrews), Michael Slote (Miami), Robin Small (Auckland), Henry Staten (Washington), Christine Swanton (Auckland), Christopher Williams (Nevada, Reno).

Oksala, Johanna. Review of Marc Djaballah's KANT, FOUCAULT, AND FORMS OF EXPERIENCE. NDPR (January 2009).

Djaballah, Marc. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. London: Routledge, 2008. In this erudite study, Marc Djaballah analyses the specific character of Foucault's Kantianism. Despite the title suggesting that equal weight is given to Kant and Foucault, the book is primarily a contribution to Foucault scholarship attempting to show the extent of Foucault's proximity and debt to Kant. The main argument about their relationship takes the form of a structural reconstruction: Djaballah argues that the formal structure of their discursive practice -- the practice of criticism -- is the same. He analyses Foucault's Kantianism in formal terms by identifying his historical studies as an exercise of Kantian criticism. . . . Foucault's relationship to Kant is an important and timely topic that has received surprisingly little attention. Foucault's relationship to Nietzsche has been analysed repeatedly and even his cursory remarks about the importance of Heidegger have spawned a host of articles, but the scholarly treatment of his Kantianism has been sparse. Yet, it is beyond doubt that Kant was a central figure for Foucault. One of his earliest publications was a translation of Kant's lectures on anthropology including an extensive introductory monograph. In his late essays on the Enlightenment Foucault presented his whole project as a version of Kantianism -- an ontology of the present. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15127.

Walker, James R. Review of Daniel Dahlstrom's PHILOSOPHICAL LEGACIES. NDPR (January 2009).

Dahlstrom, Daniel O. Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and their Contemporaries. Washington: Catholic U of America P, 2008. Philosophical Legacies is a collection of essays by Daniel Dahlstrom focusing on the legacies of Kant, Hegel, and some of the more important, yet less heralded, figures serving to connect, and also extend, the thought of these two canonical titans. Indeed, Dahlstrom's insightful treatment of these less heralded figures alone would serve to recommend this collection, especially his treatments of F. H. Jacobi, J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder, and Friedrich Schiller. Dahlstrom does a fine job of demonstrating that a full comprehension of the philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel requires an appreciation of the contributions made by these less heralded figures whose polemics and own positive philosophical theories serve to not only connect, but also lay the hermeneutical context for their more heralded idealist contemporaries. Dahlstrom also makes some fine, more direct, contributions to the scholarship on Kant and Hegel. Dahlstrom balances presenting overarching systematic notions and issues fundamental to their entire philosophical thought (e.g., essays one, seven, ten, and fifteen), and also focusing in on some of the finer details constituting those systems (e.g., see essays two and three on Kant, and essays eight, nine, and eleven on Hegel). Indeed, as I will comment more on below, his treatment of Hegel's concern with the problem of the objectivity of thought in the seventh essay is quite insightful and serves to correct many a common error interpreters have made on this extremely thorny issue. Quite simply put, with this collection Dahlstrom has provided a must-read for anyone truly interested in understanding the extremely rich and fertile philosophical period in German philosophy that begins with Kant and runs through Hegel. Yet there is much more to Dahlstrom's work then pure historical exegesis. He not only presents a faithful historical rendering of the thought of those figures he deals with, but he does so in a manner that forces the reader into philosophical engagement with those historical figures. As Dahlstrom indicates in the above quote, the very attempt to determine a philosophical legacy requires one to bring one's own contemporary philosophical concerns and notions to the exegetical table. This allows us, as contemporary philosophers, to engage the historical figure in philosophical dialogue on those very issues that matter most to us as philosophers. Here historical scholarship meets an active pursuit of philosophical insight, and Dahlstrom masterfully balances the two without succumbing to anachronism. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15006.

"Kant: Morality and Society," Annual Meeting, UK Kant Society, Lancaster University, August 27-29, 2009.

Keynote Speakers: Stephen Darwall (Yale University) Onora O'Neill (University of Cambridge) (to be confirmed) Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto) Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/kant/.

Schmidt, James. "Review of Jane Kneller's KANT AND THE POWER OF IMAGINATION." NDPR (July 2008).

Kneller, Jane. Kant and the Power of Imagination. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Kant tends to be viewed as one of the most stalwart defenders of the Enlightenment, Romantic writers like Novalis have long been cast in the role of the Enlightenment's most vigorous critics, and the relationship of German idealism to Kant's philosophy has always been troubled -- though Fichte saw himself as completing Kant's system, Kant rejected his efforts in no uncertain terms. Not the least of the virtues of Jane Kneller's fine study is that it unsettles the conventional picture of late eighteenth-century German thought by introducing readers to a Kant who had far more in common with Novalis and his colleagues than with Fichte and his. Along the way she explores the ambiguous function of the imagination in Kant's critical enterprise, untangles the philosophical commitments of the first generation of Romantics, and sheds a good deal of light on the extent to which the Jena Romantics might be seen as advancing at least some of the ideals associated with the Enlightenment. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13665.

Brueckner, Anthony. "Review of Michael Forster's KANT AND SKEPTICISM." NDPR (July 2008).

Forster, Michael N. Kant and Skepticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Forster begins by asking: which forms of skepticism is Kant most worried about in the first Critique? Bucking the trend of much Anglo-American Kant commentary, Forster maintains that Kant's concern with what Forster calls "veil of perception" (hereafter vop) skepticism is something of a side show, nothing more than a "secondary concern" for Kant. VOP skepticism is what Kant calls "problematic idealism" in the Refutation of Idealism: it is Cartesian skepticism about knowledge of outer objects (e.g., cats) located in space. The problematic idealist "pleads the incapacity to prove, through immediate experience, any existence except our own". Forster makes a fairly reasonable textual case for downplaying the role of vop skepticism in Kant's thought. Further, there has always been the prima facie worry about how to square a concern with refuting Cartesian skepticism with a full embrace of transcendental idealism. But even so, in a book entitled Kant and Skepticism, one would have expected, for the sake of completeness, more than Forster's perfunctory treatment of the Refutation of Idealism and at least some discussion of the bearing of the Transcendental Deduction on vop skepticism. I will return to the latter issue later, and regarding the former, I note briefly the following criticism from Forster. Kant's premise in the Refutation of Idealism is "I am conscious of my own existence as determined in time". One plausible construal is that I know that I have had "mental states in a certain order over a stretch of time" (fn. 22, 97). However, according to Forster, "no 'veil of perception' skeptic worth his salt will concede this claim" (97). Against this, Cartesian skepticism is not about memory and does not challenge the sorts of knowledge about our own minds to which common sense lays claim (such as knowledge of the temporal ordering of at least some of our mental states). As Kant saw it, the Cartesian problem is about how to move from knowledge of our own minds to knowledge of the world apart from our minds. Kant claims to have solved that problem in the Refutation of Idealism. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13545.

Neiman, Susan. "Can and Kant." GLOBE AND MAIL May 10, 2008.

Kant was a terrible writer. He was honest enough to admit it, and gracious enough to publish his longing for the elegance and clarity of style with which two of his contemporaries – David Hume and Moses Mendelssohn – were born. Kant knew The Critique of Pure Reason was a problem, and his later attempts to revise or summarize it only made things worse. Still, the book is the single greatest work of modern philosophy, and has but one rival – Plato’s Republic – in the history of thought. It’s not only general readers who are put off by its clumsy, sluggish writing; most university courses spend so much time on the first half that they stop before reaching what Kant said was the point. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.susan-neiman.de/docs/kant_globe08.pdf.

Rorty, Amelie. "Review of Kant's ANTHROPOLOGY, HISTORY AND EDUCATION." NDPR June 30, 2008.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology, History and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. This collection of Kant's reflective essays on human nature -- its history and future prospects, its uniformity and variety, its achievements and foibles -- covers the period from 1764 to 1803. The essays range from book reviews and notes for physicians to "Lectures of Pedagogy" (1803) and "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View" (1798). To those who know Kant primarily from the complexly structured and abstract arguments of the Critiques, these essays come as a surprise. In contrast to the conceptual apparatus articulated in the Critiques, they are full of detailed observations, empirical speculations, and pithy, shrewd -- even homely -- practical suggestions. Most of the essays are 'pragmatic' rather than -- in Kant's technical sense -- 'practical.' They characterize and counsel a wide range of human activities, ranging from advice on the systematic and principled methods of empirical observation to maxims on how best to control the exercise of the imagination in art and ordinary life. . . . The views expressed in these essays are sometimes as surprising as their scope and detail. The high-minded enlightenment rationalism that emerged in the first two Critiques as a transcendental regulative 'Idea' is introduced as a guiding principle for an historical process of human development. The moral autonomy -- the rational morality of self-legislation -- that is the fulfillment of human nature is argued to be approached historically, painstakingly by many unexpected twists and turns of human effort. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13391.

CFP: "Politics and Metaphysics in Kant," 5th Conference, European Consortium for Political Research, Potsdam, September 10-12, 2009.

The past three decades have witnessed the emergence, at the forefront of political thought, of several Kantian theories. Both the critical reaction to consequentialism inspired by Rawlsian constructivism and the universalism of more recent theories informed by Habermasian discourse ethics trace their main sources of inspiration back to Kant’s writings. Yet, much of what is Kantian in contemporary theory is formulated with more or less strict caveats concerning Kant’s metaphysics. These range from radical claims that theories of justice must be political, not metaphysical, to more cautious calls for replacing Kant’s metaphysics with a more modest ontology, for instance, one informed by the relatively recent linguistic turn in philosophy. Given the current “legitimation crisis” of modern liberal democracies, the purpose of this section is to explore the relationship between politics and metaphysics in Kant and Kantian political philosophy, in order to revisit the question concerning the role of metaphysics in political theory. We welcome papers on these and related issues, whether their primary focus is on Kant’s philosophy or on the relevance of Kant’s philosophy for contemporary political philosophy and theories of justice. After the success of last year’s section on ‘Politics and Metaphysics in Kant’ at the 4th ECPR Conference in Pisa, we are planning to put forward again a section proposal on the same theme for the 5th ECPR Conference in Postdam 10-12 September 2009. We would like to know whether anyone would like to express at this stage an interest in suggesting a panel title, chairing a panel or giving a paper. The section proposal has to be submitted by the15th of April 2008, and the more details we can give on the number and content of potential panels, the better our chances might be to be awarded a high number of panel slots for the conference. The previous section outline is copied below to give you some more information about the problems and questions which this section hopes to address, although at this stage we are also open to further suggestions. Please email Kerstin at BuddeK@Cardiff.ac.uk if you think you might be interested to chair a panel, suggest a panel title or present a paper.

CFP: "Kant's Transcendental Logic and Idealism," Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, May 15-17, 2008.

Convenors: Dennis Schulting (Universiteit van Amsterdam ), Jacco Verburgt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) The philosophy department of the University of Amsterdam, with the support of ASCA, organises a three-day international conference dedicated to Kant's idealism. The conference seeks to explore new lines of interpretation of Kant's notorious doctrine, in particular the relation between his transcendental logic and idealism.Papers are solicited which address any central aspect of Kant's idealism from a broadly historically informed perspective. Papers that present novel readings of Kant's idealism in relation to his transcendental logic are especially welcome. Complete papers in English suitable for a maximum of 45 reading time, accompanied by an abstract of approx. 100 words, are to be sent, preferably in PDF, by email to d.schulting@uva.nl and should be received prior to 1 January 2008. Clearly indicate name, academic status and affiliation. Notification of acceptance will follow shortly afterwards. For further details and a list of scheduled speakers go to: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/d.schulting/page1.html Details regarding registration and registration fee will be made available from above website in due time. D. Schulting, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 151012 CP Amsterdam, The Netherlands mailto:d.schulting@uva.nlhttp://home.medewerker.uva.nl/d.schulting/ +31 (0)20 525 45 27 (office)+31 (0)6 2896 8832 (mobile)