21 research outputs found

    The Right vs. the Good: Kant vs. Rawls

    Get PDF
    Rawls regarded the priority of the right over the good as the characteristic feature of Kantian constructivism. I have four goals in the paper. First, I try to refute Rawls’s reading of Kant on the relation between the right and the good. Second, I fill out Kant’s picture of the rational natures that have intrinsic value: They have the law of duty within, are predisposed to respect themselves and others who have the law of duty within, and belong to a community of rational natures. Third, I argue that because Kant thought that the right and the good were coeval, he is not a constructivist, but a kind of realist. Finally, I use my examination of the good, the intrinsically valuable in Kant, to reject any temptation to regard his ethics as dependent on his teleological claim that human nature is the end of nature

    Kant’s Unconscious ‘Given’

    Get PDF
    Kant appeals to unconscious representations for reasons that are deeply connected to his distinctive theory of cognition. He is an empirical realist, accepting the Empiricist claim that cognition must be based in sensory data. He is an idealist about spatial and temporal representations. He believes that human perception is always of objects or events with temporal and spatial properties. It follows from these three claims that the sensations that must begin the process of cognition lack spatial and temporal properties and so are not perceived, but unconscious

    Precis of Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature

    Get PDF
    The debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both dcfieieneies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet the methodological standards appropriate to evolutionary research. I contend that the efforts of E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Charles Lumsden, and others to generate conclusions about human nature are flawed, both because they apply evolutionary ideas in an unrigorous fashion and because they use dubious assumptions to connect their evolutionary analyses with their conclusions. This contention rests on analyses of many of the major sociobiological proposals about human social behavior, including: differences in sex roles, racial hostility, homosexuality, conflict between parents and adolescent offspring, incest avoidance, the avunculate, alliances in combat, female infanticide, and gene-culture coevolution. Vaulting Ambition thus seeks to identify what is good in sociobiology, to expose the errors of premature speculations about human nature, and to prepare the way for serious study of the evolution of human social behavior

    Kant’s Unconscious ‘Given’

    No full text
    Kant appeals to unconscious representations for reasons that are deeply connected to his distinctive theory of cognition. He is an empirical realist, accepting the Empiricist claim that cognition must be based in sensory data. He is an idealist about spatial and temporal representations. He believes that human perception is always of objects or events with temporal and spatial properties. It follows from these three claims that the sensations that must begin the process of cognition lack spatial and temporal properties and so are not perceived, but unconscious

    What Can Humans Cognize about the Self from Experience? Comments on Corey Dyck’s “The Development of Kant’s Psychology during the 1770’s”

    No full text
    I agree with Dyck’s basic claim that Kant follows the methodology of Rational Psychology in setting up his critique of it: He starts as it starts, with an existential proposition ‘I think.’ On the other hand, I am not convinced of Dyck’s use of the Dreams essay in establishing a timeline for the development of Kant’s views on inner sense. That essay is evidence that Kant thinks that Schwendenborg’s metaphysics is ungrounded, because he has a crazy sort of inner sense, but it does not show that Kant rejected a more standard internal sense at this time. I also suggest that some of Kant’s vacillation about inner sense depends on an unusual feature of his doctrine of the representations of space and time: They are composed of both sensory and a priori elements. My hypothesis is that the seeming vacillation about inner sense may be a reflection of whether whether he is considering it broadly, as a faculty that provides intuitions with a particular form, or whether he is restricting what it provides to what can be sensed

    Natural Kinds and Unnatural Persons

    No full text

    Testing sociobiological hypotheses ethnographically

    Get PDF
    Satisfactory tests of sociobiological theory using data on humans suffer from many problems, many of which are cogently argued by Kitcher. Other obstacles derive from the fact that cultural anthropology itself is undergoing a paradigm shift, in which people are no longer considered to be influenced by the normative environment with a high degree of predictability. Information about human behavior guided by this new set of assumptions is far more likely to yield the type of data necessary to test sociobiological ideas. Once the construct of culture is abandoned (or at least not assumed to have much power for predicting behavior), social scientists will approach the study of humans in ways that are increasingly similar to the approaches of biologists to nonhuman animals
    corecore