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Kant's Concept Of Freedom In The Metaphysics Lectures, Alin Paul Varciu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

I argue that we can make use of Kant's metaphysics lectures to have a better understanding of the concepts of practical and transcendental freedom used within the Critique of Pure Reason. Based on Kant's metaphysics lectures I will argue that practical freedom and transcendental freedom are different predicates that apply to our power of choice and that each comprises different sorts of abilities. Practical freedom concerns the abilities we use in choosing the motives for our actions, while transcendental freedom concerns the ability to act otherwise than what nature necessitates through its causal laws. In terms of Kant's free …

Cognition Without Construction: Kant, Maimon, And The Transcendental Philosophy Of Mathematics, Nicholas A. J. Birmingham

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant takes the ostensive constructions characteristic of Euclidean-style demonstrations to be the paradigm of both mathematical proofs and synthetic a priori cognition in general. However, the development of calculus included a number of techniques for representing infinite series of sums or differences, which could not be represented with the direct geometrical demonstrations of the past. Salomon Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy addresses precisely this disparity. Maimon, owing much to G. W. Leibniz, proposes that differentials of sensation achieve what Kantian constructions could not. More importantly, Maimon develops a kind of symbolic cognition that …

Moral Sense Theory And The Development Of Kant's Ethics, Michael H. Walschots

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates a number of ways in which an eighteenth century British philosophical movement known as “moral sense theory” influenced the development of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral theory. I illustrate that Kant found both moral sense theory’s conception of moral judgement and its conception of moral motivation appealing during the earliest stage of his philosophical development, but eventually came to reject its conception of moral judgement, though even in his early writings Kant preserves certain features of its conception of moral motivation. In the mature presentation of his moral philosophy Kant offers detailed objections to moral sense …

The Modern Secularization Of Just War Theory And Its Lessons For Contemporary Thought, Aviva Shiller

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Just war theory is a family of views that has undergone many important changes throughout its development in the Western philosophical tradition. The following is an historical analysis of the transition from a religious to a secular conception of just war theory in the Early Modern period. My main argument is that the secularization of the theory led to the separation of jus ad bellum from jus in bello, a major change that had positive consequences on the theory and its application. One important consequence of this change was to place combatants on both sides of a conflict on …

Two Kinds Of Ends In Themselves In Kant’S Moral Theory, David Hakim

2015 Undergraduate Awards

Immanuel Kant argues that rational beings are bound by an unconditional moral requirement to treat humanity always as an end and never as mere means. Kant derives this requirement from the principle that humanity is an end in itself. The purpose of my essay is to provide an interpretation of Kant’s concept of an end in itself that is consistent with the other features of his moral theory and that does not have morally repugnant consequences. To be consistent, Kant must identify a good will with an end in itself. I provide two independent arguments to demonstrate that this follows …

A Space Without Memory: Time And The Sublime In The Work Of Janet Cardiff And George Bures Miller, Margherita N. Papadatos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The central question of my investigation is: how do artists present the unpresentable when presentation itself is impossible? Concentrating solely on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s artworks Opera For a Small Room (2005) and The Killing Machine (2007), I redevelop Jean François Lyotard’s concept of the sublime as put forth in his The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, in order to ask how Cardiff and Miller give shape to the unpresentable in their work. Opera and Killing are works that dynamically problematize and play with ideas of presentation, subjectivity, memory, and time. Thus, I explore my central question of …

From Mirror To Mirage: The Idea Of Logical Space In Kant, Wittgenstein, And Van Fraassen, Lucien R. Lamoureux

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the origin, intellectual development and use of a semantic variant of the idea of logical space found implicitly in Kant and explicitly in early Wittgenstein and van Fraassen. It elucidates the idea of logical space as the idea of images or pictures representative of reality organized into a logico-mathematical structure circumscribing a form of all possible worlds. Its main claim is that application of these images or pictures to reality is through a certain conception of self.

The first chapter presents a novel interpretation of Kant’s semantic theory of schemata in the Critique of Pure Reason, …

Kant And The Fact Of Reason, Kenneth Kh Chung

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It is often thought that Kant abandoned his argument for the justification of morality in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals for a radically different argument in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the Groundwork, Kant appears to try to justify our commitment to the moral law on the basis of our freedom, but in the Critique, he tries to justify that commitment on the basis of what he calls the fact of reason. I assess and reject influential interpretations of both arguments as being philosophically unsound, and I propose, what I take to be, a …