Allen W. Wood Quotes
I think the term "Kantian constructivism" as an oxymoron. Kant was a constructivist about mathematics, but not about ethics.
Many who are committed to reason and science have turned against religion altogether and treat it with fear and contempt.
What is central to morality is rational self-constraint (acting from duty), in cease where there is no other incentive to do your duty except that the moral law commands it.
If being "iron headed" is to be lacking such feelings, then Kant's position is that an ironheaded person could not be a moral agent because such a person would not be rational.
Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it; the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.
Kant did think he had a moral route back to rational faith in God, for those who need it, and he thought that at some level, we all do need something like it.
Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter than the former.
Consequentialist theories begin with a very simple and undoubtedly valid point: Every action aims at a future end, and is seen as a means to it.
Sometimes when a philosopher's views are widely rejected by the world, the fault is not with the philosopher but with the world.
Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.
Kant attempted to work out a view of religion and religious belief according to which existing religions could be brought into harmony with modernity, science and reason.
I don't think Kant's approach to religion is any longer viable in its original form. But that does not mean it is simply wrong or that we cannot learn from it.
Reason necessarily expresses itself through emotions and emotions are healthy only insofar as they are expressions of reason.
No theory about our bodies as mere objects of observation and calculation (as distinct from partners in communicative interaction, assumed to be free) can comprehend human nature.
Fichte would identify all states of our minds with states of our body - perhaps not merely of our brain, but the whole body as an acting organism.
Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts that reciprocally imply each other. Fichte thinks they are the same thought.
Fichte takes an I or free will to be not a thing or being but an act which is not undetermined but self-determined, in accordance with reasons or norms rationally self-given.
The species of anti-Enlightenment religion we find among evangelical protestants is far more impoverished, anti-intellectual and downright wretched.
Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific methodology.
If the problem of free will is to see how freedom fits into the order of nature, then Kant's basic view about the free will problem is that it is insoluble.
We can never prove that we are free or integrate our freedom in any way into our objective conception of the causal order of nature.
We can treat human responses to cognitions as involving law-like connections grounded on free choices which show themselves in our character.
We can establish empirical criteria for free actions, and investigate human actions on the presupposition we are free.
Not only our moral life, but even our use of theoretical reason - on which we rely in rationally inquiring into nature - presupposes that we are free.
Some empirical feelings, such as sympathy, are indispensable parts of certain moral virtues.
Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized.
We are generally forced to choose one way or the other of distancing ourselves from Kant. I suppose I tend to choose the irreligious way. But I regret that Kant's path has not been followed.
Kant was a rational theologian. He did not pretend to be a biblical or revealed theologian.
Kant does not regard freedom as an item of faith because it is too basic to our agency to be related to any end.
Kant considers belief in God and immortality to be items of "faith" because he relates faith to the pursuit of ends - in this case, the highest good.
It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't.
What I most fear now is that within a century or so there may not be any human future at all.
In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.
It seems to me self-evident that it is worthwhile to understand the best thoughts of the past, to appropriate them, to criticize them.
Clearly no working class movement ever came about that was able to do what Marx was hoping for.
I do not know how much my own work has achieved, and I must not pretend it has done more than it has.
I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do, and independent of any procedures we might use in making such decisions.
In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.
We can make mistakes about what we ought to do, and these are not the same as making bad decisions about what to do.
Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience and practice.
It is probably not a good idea to ask someone to expound a position they do not accept and do not feel they even fully understand.
Teaching and writing about philosophy is about the only thing I've ever been really good at.
Marx's writings still have something to teach us about capitalism. They have little or nothing to teach us about any alternatives to it. Anyone who had read them knows that.