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Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics

Julian Wuerth

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Description for Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics Julian Wuerth offers a radically new interpretation of major themes in Kant's philosophy. He explores Kant's ontology of the mind, his transcendental idealism, his account of the mind's powers, and his theory of action, and goes on to develop an original, moral realist account of Kant's ethics. Num Pages: 368 pages. BIC Classification: HPCD1; HPM; HPQ. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 240 x 158 x 26. Weight in Grams: 698.
In this book Julian Wuerth offers a radically new interpretation of Kant's theories of mind, action, and ethics. As the author of a Copernican revolution in philosophy, Kant grounded his philosophy in his positive theory of the mind, which remains an enigma two centuries later. Wuerth's original interpretation of Kant's theory of mind consults a far wider range of Kant's recorded thought than previous interpretations, revealing a fascinating evolution in Kant's thought in the decades before and after his 1781 Critique. Starting in the 1760s, Kant recognized the unique status of our epistemic contact to ourselves. This is the ... Read moresole instance of our immediate epistemic contact with a substance, of being a substance, and it is the sole instance of epistemic contact with something other than the particular states of inner sense. Contrary to empiricists, Kant thus rejects the reduction of the self to a bundle of mental states of inner sense. But Kant also rejects the rational psychologists' assumption that the souls substantiality and simplicity implies its permanence, incorruptibility, and immortality. As Kant developed his transcendental idealism, he eventually pinpointed the source of their errors, a source neither unique to a particular, historical school, nor random. It is instead a deep, natural, and timeless transcendental confusion. Kants new account of substance allows him to draw new distinctions in kind between sensibility and understanding and between phenomenal and noumenal substance, setting the stage for a transcendental argument that only at the phenomenal level do substantiality and simplicity imply permanence and incorruptibility. Wuerth next undertakes a groundbreaking study of Kant's theory of action and ethics. He first maps Kant's notoriously vast and complex system of the minds powers, drawing on all of Kant's recorded thought. This system structures Kant's philosophy as a whole and so provides crucial insights into this whole and its parts, including Kant's theory of action, a persisting stumbling block for interpreters of Kant's ethics. Wuerth demonstrates that Kant rejects intellectualist theories of action that reduce practical agents to pure reason. We are instead irreducibly both intellectual and sensible, exercising a power of choice, or Willkür, subject to two irreducible conative currencies, moral motives and sensible incentives, as Kant makes clear long before his 1785 Groundwork. Immoral choices at odds with the former can thus nonetheless be coherent choices in harmony with the latter. Wuerth applies these new findings about Kant's theory of mind and action to an analysis of the foundations of Kant's ethics. He rejects the dominant constructivist interpretation in favor of a moral realist one. At the heart of Kant's Enlightenment ethics is his insistence that the authority of the moral law ultimately rests in our recognition of its authority. Kant guides us to this recognition of the authority of the moral law, across his works in ethics and his various formulations of the moral law, using a single elimination of sensibility procedure. Here Kant systematically rejects the pretenses of sensibility to isolate reason and its insights into moral right and wrong. Precisely because immoral choice remains a coherent alternative, however, moral virtue demands our ongoing cultivation of our capacities for cognition, feeling, desire, and character. Show Less

Product Details

Publication date

2014

Publisher

Oxford University Press United Kingdom

Number of pages

368

Condition

New

Number of Pages

368

Format

Hardback

Place of Publication

Oxford, United Kingdom

ISBN

9780199587629

SKU

V9780199587629

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days

Ref

99-6

About Julian Wuerth

Julian Wuerth is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Wuerth's recent publications include 'The Paralogisms of Pure Reason', in The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (CUP, 2010) and Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics ... Read more

Reviews for Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics

This title is a hefty read, no doubt, but I recommend it to those who have interests in Kant's philosophy and also to those who possess interests in philosophy of mind more broadly.
Bradford McCall, The Review of Metaphysics
[F]or those of us hungry to expand our appreciation of Kant's corpus overall, this book is a gold-mine of ... Read more

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Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics

Julian Wuerth

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