This book joins the contemporary recovery of Kant’s empirical works to highlight the relevance of his concept of culture for understanding the sources of various characteristic modern dilemmas, such as the tension between culture and happiness, the morally ambivalent nature of cultural progress, or the existing conflicts between a factual plurality of cultures and the historical forces pressing toward a universal civilization. The book will be of special interest for Kantian scholars, moral and political philosophers, as well as philosophers of culture.

This book joins the contemporary recovery of Kant’s empirical works to highlight the relevance of his concept of culture for understanding the sources of various characteristic modern dilemmas, such as the tension between culture and happiness, the morally ambivalent nature of cultural progress, or the existing conflicts between a factual plurality of cultures and the historical forces pressing toward a universal civilization. The book will be of special interest for Kantian scholars, moral and political philosophers, as well as philosophers of culture.

This book joins the contemporary recovery of Kant's empirical works to highlight the relevance of his concept of culture for understanding the sources of various characteristic modern dilemmas, such as the tension between culture and happiness, the morally ambivalent nature of cultural progress, or the existing conflicts between a factual plurality of cultures and the historical forces pressing toward a universal civilization. The book will be of special interest for Kantian scholars, moral and political philosophers, as well as philosophers of culture.

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to Kant's lectures on anthropology and their philosophical importance.

In Kant's Human Being, Robert B. Louden continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in his highly acclaimed book, Kant's Impure Ethics. Drawing on a wide variety of both published and unpublished works spanning all periods of Kant's extensive writing career, Louden here focuses on Kant's under-appreciated empirical work on human nature, with particular attention to the connections between this body of work and his much-discussed ethical theory. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question, "What is the human being" is philosophy's most fundamental question, one that encompasses all others. Louden analyzes and evaluates Kant's own answer to his question, showing how it differs from other accounts of human nature. This collection of twelve essays is divided into three parts. In Part One (Human Virtues), Louden explores the nature and role of virtue in Kant's ethical theory, showing how the conception of human nature behind Kant's virtue theory results in a virtue ethics that is decidedly different from more familiar Aristotelian virtue ethics programs. In Part Two (Ethics and Anthropology), he uncovers the dominant moral message in Kant's anthropological investigations, drawing new connections between Kant's work on human nature and his ethics. Finally, in Part Three (Extensions of Anthropology), Louden explores specific aspects of Kant's theory of human nature developed outside of his anthropology lectures, in his works on religion, geography, education ,and aesthetics, and shows how these writings substantially amplify his account of human beings. Kant's Human Being offers a detailed and multifaceted investigation of the question that Kant held to be the most important of all, and will be of interest not only to philosophers but also to all who are concerned with the study of human nature.

(Dover thrift editions).

Kant's early defense of the contemplative life -- The two vocations of humanity in Kant's anthropology -- The worthlessness of human life -- Kant's genealogy of morality -- Kant's view of the meaning of life -- The purposes of politics (1) : culture -- The purposes of politics (2) : civilization -- The purposes of politics (3) : right -- Kant's perfectionist liberalism -- Kant's political liberalism -- The meaningfulness of the liberal project.

It is the purpose of these essays to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of the philosopher Max Scheler. On this centennial occasion it may be appropriate to recall the first two major works of the philosopher's life. Scheler is known mostly as the author of a monumental work on ethics, entitled: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values), which is the only existing foundation of ethics written by a European philosopher in this century. Although its two parts were published separately (1913/1916) because of circumstances during World War I, all manuscripts had been finished by Scheler prior to the outbreak of the war. His ethics has been translated into various languages, including a recent translation in English. In the same year (1913) Scheler also published another major work which dealt with the phenomenology of sympathetic feelings, and which is translated into English under the title of the enlarged second and following editions: The Nature of Sympathy.

The first comprehensive examination in English of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.