Kant was wrong: we can know things as they are in themselves
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- Is human dignity a religious idea that secular law borrowed?
The drafters of the Basic Law deliberately left the foundation open. Some were Christian, some Kantian, some socialist. They agreed on the principle and agreed not to agree on why. Perhaps that's…
- Reading group: Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784)
I think Kant would protect it, yes, provided she still does her job while she criticises it. That is exactly the bargain he offers Frederick the Great: argue as much as you like, but obey.
- Reading group: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, propositions 1–3
I'll read along in the German, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung. It first appeared in 1921 in Ostwald's Annalen der Naturphilosophie, with many misprints, which Wittgenstein hated. The numb…
- Teaching the Euthyphro to sixteen-year-olds: what works and what doesn’t?
Leibniz is useful here too. At the start of the Discourse on Metaphysics he criticises the view that things are good only because God wills them, on the grounds that it would make praising God empty.…
- What were Mencius and Xunzi arguing about when they disagreed about human nature?
Both are Confucians who agree that people need education and ritual. They disagree about the raw material. Mencius (4th century BCE) holds that human nature is good in the sense that it contains…