Kant and the Possibility of Progress : : From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties / / ed. by Paul T. Wilford, Samuel A. Stoner, Samuel Stoner.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
• MitwirkendeR: Alznauer, Mark,; Ameriks, Karl,; Fisher, Naomi,; Kemp, Ryan S.,; Meld Shell, Susan,; Moran, Kate,; Pippin, Robert B.,; Sensen, Oliver,; Speight, C. Allen,; Stoner, Samuel A.,; Timmermann, Jens,; Velkley, Richard L.,; Wilford, Paul T.,; Zuckert, Rachel,
• HerausgeberIn: Stoner, Samuel A.,; Stoner, Samuel,; Wilford, Paul T.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) :; 2

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) transformed the philosophical, cultural, and religious landscape of modern Europe. Emphasizing the priority of practical reason and moral autonomy, Kant's radically original account of human subjectivity announced new ethical imperatives and engendered new political hopes. This collection of essays investigates the centrality of progress to Kant's philosophical project and the contested legacy of Kant's faith in reason's capacity to advance not only our scientific comprehension and technological prowess, but also our moral, political, and religious lives. Accordingly, the first half of the volume explores the many facets of Kant's thinking about progress, while the remaining essays each focus on one or two thinkers who play a crucial role in post-Kantian German philosophy: J. G. Herder (1744-1803), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). This two-part structure reflects the central thesis of the volume that Kant inaugurates a distinctive theoretical tradition in which human historicity is central to political philosophy.By exploring the origins and metamorphoses of this tremendously influential tradition, the volume offers a timely perspective on fundamental questions in an age increasingly suspicious of the Enlightenment's promise of universal rational progress. It aims to help us face three sets of questions: (1) Do we still believe in the possibility of progress? If we do, on what grounds? If we do not, why have we lost the hope for a better future that animated previous generations? (2) Is the belief in progress necessary for the maintenance of today's liberal democratic order? Does a cosmopolitan vision of politics ultimately depend on a faith in humanity's gradual, asymptotic realization of that lofty aim? (3) And, if we no longer believe in progress, can we dispense with hope without succumbing to despair?

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Modernity and Postmodernity: Our Temporal Orientation -- PART I. KANT ON PROGRESS -- Chapter 1. Kant on Individual Moral Progress -- Chapter 2. Should We Believe in Moral Progress? -- Chapter 3. Respect, Moral Progress, and Imperfect Duty -- Chapter 4. Loneliness and Ambiguity in Kant’s Philosophy of History -- Chapter 5. Kant’s Organic Religion: God, Teleology, and Progress in the Third Critique -- Chapter 6. Realizing the Ethical Community: Kant’s Religion and the Reformation of Culture -- Chapter 7. Kant as Soothsayer: The Problem of Progress and the “Sign” of History -- PART II. PROGRESS AFTER KANT -- Chapter 8. History, Progress, and Autonomy: Kant, Herder, and After -- Chapter 9. Language, Embodiment, and the Supersensuous in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation -- Chapter 10. Hegel on the Conceptual Form of Philosophical History -- Chapter 11. Relocating the Highest Good: Kierkegaard on God, Virtue, and (This- Worldly) Happiness -- Chapter 12. Kant and Benjamin on Hope, History, and the Task of Interpretation -- Chapter 13. The Curious Fate of the Idea of Progress -- Notes -- List of Contributors -- Index -- Acknowledgments