Philosophy class Kant's Critical Philosophy
In collaboration with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to announce a new edition of Kant's Critical Philosophy, a class presented in collaboration with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research as part of an ongoing partnership.
Immanuel Kant's "critical philosophy," which begins with the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, is an attempt to understand no less than the scope and limits of human reason, science, and morality. Kant wrote that the purpose of philosophy is to answer the following fundamental questions: "What can we know? What should we do? What can we hope for?" In other words: can we really know what reality is like, independent of our individual perspectives and ways of conceiving it? Is scientific inquiry a legitimate, or the only legitimate, way to know reality? Do we have genuine moral obligations to others and to ourselves, and what reasons do we have for fulfilling those obligations? What does it mean to say that a work of art or a landscape is beautiful, and what does it say about the type of creatures we are that these things can evoke such aesthetic experiences in us?
Kant says that answers to all these questions presuppose an answer to another, even more fundamental question: "What is a human being?" In this class, Kant's theoretical, ethical, and aesthetic views will be surveyed, with particular concern to understanding how they fit together into a unified picture of human subjectivity and purpose. Kant's account of human beings, or persons, grants them "a rank and dignity infinitely above all other things, including all other living beings, on earth." This view seems profoundly at odds with a common modern conception in which, as Nietzsche describes it, "man has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification." Accordingly, we can only understand human nature, behavior and potential through evolutionary theory and the neurophysiology of the brain. This class will discuss if Kant's picture, in contrast, is still viable today, and whether it offers a compelling or attractive alternative account of human beings and their place in nature.
Texts:
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Critique of Judgment
This class will be taught by Michael Robert Stevenson. Please note that enrollment is required for participation.
The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research was established in 2011 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Its mission is to extend liberal arts education and research far beyond the borders of the traditional university, supporting community education needs and opening up new possibilities for scholarship in the 21st century.
Michael Robert Stevenson teaches philosophy at Columbia University. He earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MPhil and a PhD from Columbia University. He specializes in the German philosophical tradition, especially Kant, post-Kantian Idealism, and 20th century phenomenology.