The Reasons of Motivations
For this semester I’ll offer my reflections on an introductory, freshmen-level course on western core texts that I am teaching. What should students make of Kant’s categorical…
Socratic Method and Recollection in Plato and Kant
Liberal education is struggling to maintain its place in the contemporary university. In some ways, the challenges it faces are as old as liberal education itself. Plato’s…
Idolizing the Idea: A Critical History of Modern Philosophy
Idolizing the Idea: A Critical History of Modern Philosophy. Wayne Cristaudo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. In Idolizing the Idea, Cristaudo explores the value that philosophy…
Kant’s Philosophy – Greatness and Limits
Kant is undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers in European cultural and intellectual history. Anyone who delves deeper into the philosophical thought of his works and is…
Rousseau’s and Kant’s Competing Interpretations of the Enlightenment
Introduction At the crescendo of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant famously admitted his intellectual debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kant praised Rousseau as a man possessing “an uncommon acuity…
Introduction the Subfields of Political Science: International Politics
Having considered politics from above from the Socratic perspective, and from within from the perspective of my students own regime, Canada, we now move slightly outward, to…
Scapegoating Kant
In the VoegelinView of April 2020 Arpad Szakolczai proclaimed The End of Kantian Universalism in four parts: "It is too early now to draw the balance of…
The End of Kantian Universalism: Fairground Economy, Police States, and the Permanent Apocalyptic Sacrificial Carnival (Part IV)
In the previous articles I repeatedly asserted that we ‘basically’ live inside a police state, as the police is the most basic institution of the modern state,…
The End of Kantian Universalism: The Tricks of Economic Theory: Corruption, Creative Destruction, and Existential Corruptness (Part III)
1. Corruption Economic theory, economics and the economy are not only based on generalized, even infinite, limitless exchange, but also on corruption, in the etymological sense of…
The End of Kantian Universalism: The Tricks of Economic Theory (Part II)
One of the side effects of the current pandemic is the incredibly clean air we all are having everywhere. I almost wrote ‘absurdly’ clean air, though of…
The End of Kantian Universalism: The Current Pandemic Madness (Part I)
It is too early now to draw the balance of the current pandemic madness, but certainly not too early to reflect on what is going on, and…
Kant the Fanatic
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the putative “Sage of Königsberg,” in a rare moment of lyricism states “Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever increasing admiration…
Monsters of Duty: Cordwainer Smith’s Attack on Kantian Morality and the Suppression of Feeling in Scanners Live in Vain
The Best of Cordwainer Smith. Cordawiner Smith. New York: Ballentine Books, 1975) The scanners in Cordwainer Smith’s story “Scanners Live in Vain” are heroes who have…
Kant on History and Culture as a Means to Ethical Evolution
The “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”[1] is Kant’s attempt to recast the creation story of Genesis. The procreative act of Yahweh is cooperative in the sense heaven and…
Kant’s Teaching of Historical Progress and Its Cosmopolitan Goal
Immanuel Kant provides a philosophical justification for cosmopolitanism in education and for internationalism in foreign policy. Like today’s internationalists, Kant asks teachers to promote universal perspectives in…