Schiller on Evil and the Emergence of Reason

Schiller was one of many early post-Kantians who wrestled with Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, a doctrine that continues to puzzle commentators today. Schiller’s own explanation of why we are prone to pursue happiness without restriction is, I argue, subtle and multilayered: it offers us a new genealogy of reflective agency, linking our tendency to egoism to the first emergence of reason within human beings. On the reading I defend, our drive for the absolute does not lead us directly to moral autonomy; rather, it misleads us to seek the absolute in the field of our own impulses and inclinations. However, since this detour is the result of cognitive error, it involves no willful subordination of the moral law to self-love, and so nothing that bears the guilt of evil

Kant’s Neglected Objection to the Ontological Argument

This paper argues that Kant’s most famous objection to the ontological argument -- that existence is not a real predicate -- is not, in fact, his most effective objection, and that his ”neglected objection’ to the argument deserves to be better known. It shows that Kant clearly anticipates William Rowe’s later objection that the argument begs the question, and discusses why Kant himself seems to have overlooked the force of this criticism in his attempt to demolish the traditional proofs for God’s existence

Cosmopolitanism and Human Reason

Over and above the modalities with which it is expressed in the domains of Kant’s system, the theme of cosmopolitanism embodies the meaning of a philosophy seen as a plan to build on the connection between man, polis and reason; an essential connection that in human reason identifies not a simple endowment which everyone has by nature but a form of life to be realized in the world, a purpose whose binding strength is only fully expressed in the public dimension

Why do we need 14C inter-comparisons?: The Glasgow 14C inter-comparison series, a reflection over 30 years

Radiocarbon measurement is a well-established, routinely used, yet complex series of inter-linked procedures. The degree of sample pre-treatment varies considerably depending on the material, the methods of processing pre-treated material vary across laboratories and the detection of 14C at low levels remains challenging. As in any complex measurement process, the questions of quality assurance and quality control become paramount, both internally, i.e. within a laboratory and externally, across laboratories. The issue of comparability of measurements (and thus bias, accuracy and precision of measurement) from the diverse laboratories is one that has been the focus of considerable attention for some time, both within the 14C community and the wider user communities. In the early years of the technique when there was only a small number of laboratories in existence, inter-comparisons would function on an ad hoc basis, usually involving small numbers of laboratories (e.g.Otlet et al, 1980). However, as more laboratories were set-up and the detection methods were further developed (e.g. new AMS facilities), the need for more systematic work was recognised. The international efforts to create a global calibration curve also requires the use of data generated by different laboratories at different times, so that evidence of laboratory offsets is needed to inform curve formation. As a result of these factors, but also as part of general good laboratory practice, including laboratory benchmarking and quality assurance, the 14C community has undertaken a wide-scale, far-reaching and evolving programme of global inter-comparisons, to the benefit of laboratories and users alike. This paper looks at some of that history and considers what has been achieved in the past 30 years

Freedom, Morality, and the Propensity to Evil

In Book I of the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant offers an explanation of freedom and moral good and evil that is different from that offered in the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. My primary goal in this paper is to analyze and elucidate this new theory. My secondary goal is to contrast this new theory with the older one that it is replacing. I argue that the new theory, which centers on the idea that evil involves a sort of misprioritizing, enables Kant to get around two problems associated with the older theory

On the Concept of Creal: The Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle

Sermon on Psalm 46

Delivered in the Münster of Basel, Switzerland, My 10 1998; translated by Allen G. Jorgenso