The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant in advance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitta Keintzel ◽  

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-663
Author(s):  
Slavenko Sljukic

The main goal of Kenneth R. Westphal?s How Hume and Kant Reconstruct Natural Law: Justifying Strict Objectivity without Debating Moral Realism is to defend the objectivity of moral standards and natural law and thus avoid the discussion about moral realism and its alternatives by interpreting Hume and Kant in a constructivistic sense. The reason behind the author?s disagreement with both: moral realism and non-realism (its alternative) is our inability to properly understand and answer one of the two parts in Socrates? question to Euthyphro: ?Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved?? Moral realists cannot provide an answer to its second part, since it is not possible to prove that moral standards are not artificial; conversely, moral non-realists cannot provide an answer to its first part, since it is not possible to avoid the relatitvity of moral standards. The author tends to solve this problem by avoiding the confrontation between moral realism and non-realism and thus choosing the constuctivistic stance that, as he argues, can be found in both Hume?s and Kant?s theories. The main point of this stance is that moral standards are indeed artificial, yet not arbitrary. He proves this by pointing out that both Hume and Kant treat the moral standards as a social fact (that is, artificial), but also as objective. Westphal points out that Hume explicitly writes about moral standards as a social fact, while showing that, at the same time, his theory of justice, which precedes all of the moral standards, is established independently of his theory of moral sentiments (potentially leading to moral relativism). In this manner, he provides the objectivity of those standards. On the other hand, Kant?s theory is interpreted as advanced, yet similar to Hume?s in its structure. The crucial similarity is that both Hume and Kant interpret the moral standards as a social fact (that is, as an artificial) and, at the same time, as the objective ones. Kant, unlike Hume, provides this objectivity by using a specific moral criterion - a categorical imperative. Those assumptions will be used as the main premises of a distinctively inspiring interpretation of Hume?s and Kant?s theories of justice.


2019 ◽  
pp. 45-55
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Astafiev

The article states that the base of the non-referent (non-address-communicational) lyrics are parts of stylistic and surrealism. Such poetry is built on principle “text like text”, the artistic world looses its referency completely and is transformed into a sign. The function of such poetry is non-referential (arbitrary). The most common for such lyrics is stimulation and continuousness of the expression plan (not the contests) that commonly is done on the phonic and graphic levels. The main semiotic classificators here are arbitrary convention and symbol sign. They are non-address and non- communicational. If index has illocutive power, then a symbol sign has a power of categorical imperative. The system of non-referential lyrics in its own way is a spere of experimants. One of them, or maybe the most principal, which made “the exploitation” of the subconsciousness possible, and often gave metaphysical results, was so called automatic writing (ecriture automatique). The main point of it was to write having maximum freedom from the control of the mind, moving in the stream of free associations, and not returning to the written text; in any case nothing should be corrected (creative work of Zinoviy Berezhan). Second is orientation on dreams. Formal distinctive mark of “hooked” to the artistic world neurospace is the image of a dreamer – the one who watches a nightdream and tells about its cotntents (it can be either a narrator, as in the majority of the poems by Boychuk, or an animal, plant or an insect as in the works of Andrievska). The image has two functions: 1. to receive and transmit the contents of a dream spiritually; 2. to associate the contents of seen in a dream with the feelings, or in the other words transform it into the concrete feeling images. Semantic variety of expressionalism against impressionalism (the antipode of which it became) has also the character of conversion, and concerning existentionalism -– inversion. The differences between the styles of non-referential lyrics we can imagine in the shape of inversion. Stylizations also pretend to autonomy. Their structure e.g., in the poem by Olexa Stephanovich “From the chronic”, is defined by not immanently “imagined” in the “reality” norms but by convention -– as if a transition from outside, in advance, only to stress the function of a speaker. In the works of Yuriy Lypa, especially in his stylization “About the seamster Kozhumiaka” the artistic shape net catches the breething of a “chronical”, inner and outer world of a character connecting it with his pseudoarchaic way of narration, the poet makes stylization not only of characters’ dialogues (“The Monk and the Death”), but also the language of a storyteller (“The Deivil”, “The demons and the catcher”), receiving in such a way harmony of languages – the vision of the world. The same was done by Euhen Malanuk in his poem “The rye in the field is spoiled by the hoofs”, in which he eliminated from the narrative language expressions, that went away from geographical-phyhological base of our 20-th century’s menthality.


Philosophy ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel J. Kupperman

Here are two widespread responses to Kant's categorical imperative. On one hand, one might note the absence of detailed rational derivation. On the other hand, even someone who maintains some skepticism is likely to have a sense that (nevertheless) there is something to Kant's central ideas.The recommended solution is analysis of elements of the categorical imperative. Their appeal turns out to have different sources. One aspect of the first formulation rests on the logic of normative utterances. But others can be justified only in terms of their contributions to desirable functionings of a moral order.


Author(s):  
Béatrice Longuenesse

The chapter explores the contrasting analyses of the moral standpoint offered by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, on the one hand; and, on the other, the pessimistic observer of human moral frailty, Sigmund Freud. The lecture explores the similarities and contrasts between Freud’s and Kant’s respective conceptions of the structure of mental life and the place in that structure of the categorical imperative of morality. From this confrontation, new lessons emerge concerning the relation between the radically individual nature of the first-person pronoun “I” (considered here in the phrase “I—morally—ought to”) and the claim to universal validity of at least some of the pronouncements we make in our own name or from what we call “the first-person standpoint.”


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ido Geiger

AbstractThe article defends three claims regarding the relation between the different formulas of the categorical imperative. (1) On its prevailing reading, FUL gives different moral guidance than FH; left answered, this problem is an argument for adopting a competing perspective on FUL. (2) The prohibitions and commands of the formulas should be taken to be extensionally the same; but FKE adds a dimension missing from the others, gained by uniting their perspectives, namely, bringing the variety of moral laws into systematic unity. (3) The grammatically ambiguous phrase in GMS, 4: 436.9–10 claims that FA alone unites the other formulas in itself.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (6) ◽  
pp. 1727-1732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Hoffman ◽  
Erez Yoeli ◽  
Martin A. Nowak

Evolutionary game theory typically focuses on actions but ignores motives. Here, we introduce a model that takes into account the motive behind the action. A crucial question is why do we trust people more who cooperate without calculating the costs? We propose a game theory model to explain this phenomenon. One player has the option to “look” at the costs of cooperation, and the other player chooses whether to continue the interaction. If it is occasionally very costly for player 1 to cooperate, but defection is harmful for player 2, then cooperation without looking is a subgame perfect equilibrium. This behavior also emerges in population-based processes of learning or evolution. Our theory illuminates a number of key phenomena of human interactions: authentic altruism, why people cooperate intuitively, one-shot cooperation, why friends do not keep track of favors, why we admire principled people, Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, taboos, and love.


Janus Head ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-183
Author(s):  
Ross Crisp ◽  

In this article, I begin with Kant’s notion of a “categorical imperative” as a framework from which to discuss the ontology of Franz Kafka’s writing. Since Kant’s moral law is a device for reflecting on our responses to challenging circumstances rather than one that tells us what we should always do in every situation, I draw inferences concerning Kafka’s own descriptions of his sense of being a writer in opposing phenomenal and spiritual worlds. Since Kafka cannot be understood exclusively from a Kantian perspective of autonomous will, I discuss Kafka’s experiencing in terms of the reciprocal interplay of being and non-being, and his awareness of finitude and the possibility of transcendence. I argue for a humanistic-existential vision of the reading of a literary text as an encounter that responds to the alterity of the Other and which, consistent with Kafka’s oeuvre, privileges being faithful to one’s own experiencing.


1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sally Sedgwick

Even for those who have struggled with Hegel long enough to discover that he is neither a positivist nor a communitarian, nor (at the other end of the spectrum) a Platonist, the fact that he also insists upon distinguishing his approach to practical philosophy from Kant's may seem deeply puzzling. After all, the two philosophers share in common the same principal opponents. Both set out to undermine the sceptic's doubts about the possibility of objective practical judgments and requirements; both in addition reject positivist derivations of law, exclusively empiricist accounts of human behaviour, and intuitionist forms of justification. The two philosophers furthermore seem to share the same conception of the conditions of human freedom. For Hegel as well as Kant, a theory of morality and political right devoted to advancing the cause of freedom must require more than just the absence of obstacles preventing the satisfaction of our animal passions. For Hegel as well as Kant, freedom requires in addition the respect of the ends we have as rational natures. We achieve this kind of freedom when our actions are motivated by the legislation of reason and when the social norms which constrain us are norms we can rationally endorse.Despite these similarities, Hegel tells us in the Philosophy of Right that the conception of freedom he associates with Kant and discusses under the heading of “Moralität” must give way to the more adequate conception of “Sittlichkeit” or “ethical life”. It is clear that Hegel finds unacceptable what he calls the “empty formalism” of Kant's practical philosophy; it is also clear that he thinks that Kant's practical philosophy is “formal” because its supreme law or categorical imperative is an a priori law of reason. But this doesn't yet tell us why, for Hegel, these features of the Kantian approach are objectionable. In my view, we do his critique little justice if we say that it is aimed at a consequence which presumably follows from Kant's preoccupation with providing an a priori foundation for law and morality: namely, the failure to give sufficient moral weight to the empirical particulars which individuate persons and situations and need to be taken into account in the practice of moral assessment. As I shall argue below, the suggestion that Kant's formalism requires us to ignore empirical content in this way is neither plausible as a critique of Kant nor accurate as a representation of what troubles Hegel about Kant. We go more to the heart of the matter, I believe, if we say instead that Hegel is out to challenge the very distinction between the “empirical” and the “pure” or “a priori” so fundamental to both Kant's practical and theoretical philosophy. Hegel's critique of Kant's practical philosophy is an instance of his critique of Kant's idealism more generally, and of the assumptions about reason and nature upon which that idealism rests. Or so I shall argue here.


1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (03) ◽  
pp. 411-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin W. Stearn

Stromatoporoids are the principal framebuilding organisms in the patch reef that is part of the reservoir of the Normandville field. The reef is 10 m thick and 1.5 km2in area and demonstrates that stromatoporoids retained their ability to build reefal edifices into Famennian time despite the biotic crisis at the close of Frasnian time. The fauna is dominated by labechiids but includes three non-labechiid species. The most abundant species isStylostroma sinense(Dong) butLabechia palliseriStearn is also common. Both these species are highly variable and are described in terms of multiple phases that occur in a single skeleton. The other species described areClathrostromacf.C. jukkenseYavorsky,Gerronostromasp. (a columnar species), andStromatoporasp. The fauna belongs in Famennian/Strunian assemblage 2 as defined by Stearn et al. (1988).


1967 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 207-244
Author(s):  
R. P. Kraft

(Ed. note:Encouraged by the success of the more informal approach in Christy's presentation, we tried an even more extreme experiment in this session, I-D. In essence, Kraft held the floor continuously all morning, and for the hour and a half afternoon session, serving as a combined Summary-Introductory speaker and a marathon-moderator of a running discussion on the line spectrum of cepheids. There was almost continuous interruption of his presentation; and most points raised from the floor were followed through in detail, no matter how digressive to the main presentation. This approach turned out to be much too extreme. It is wearing on the speaker, and the other members of the symposium feel more like an audience and less like participants in a dissective discussion. Because Kraft presented a compendious collection of empirical information, and, based on it, an exceedingly novel series of suggestions on the cepheid problem, these defects were probably aggravated by the first and alleviated by the second. I am much indebted to Kraft for working with me on a preliminary editing, to try to delete the side-excursions and to retain coherence about the main points. As usual, however, all responsibility for defects in final editing is wholly my own.)


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