Eva Cybulska peers into Friedrich Nietzsche’s stormy psyche. Where one can no longer love, one should – pass by!Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), ‘Of Passing By’ Whatever I create and how much I love it – soon I have to oppose itThus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Of Self-Overcoming’ Few would associate Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) with love. And yet …
Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle cry of the Enlightenment. It was articulated by Immanuel Kant in his famous article ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784). Obstacles that …
Stuart Greenstreet finds that free will and determinism really do go together. Samuel Johnson got to the core of philosophy’s hardest problem in one line: “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Theory denies the will is free because science doesn’t exempt human beings from the causal laws which …
Pinhas Ben-Zvi thinks Kant was inconsistent in his revolutionary ideas about the nature of space and time. In the first and second editions of his Critique of Pure Reason (A&B) Immanuel Kant asks: “What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would …
Joshua Mozersky argues that reality itself might be accessible to us. Immanuel Kant is the grandfather of social constructivism – the theory that people construct reality out of a shared human experience. According to Kant, the world we experience of space, time, matter, and causation, is structured by the human mind. His point is not …
Thomas Morrison asks just what Kant learned from his Critique of Pure Reason. Can we know how things really are regardless of how they appear to us? Throughout history, many philosophers – known as skeptics – have argued that we can not. Part of what Immanuel Kant is attempting in his Critique of Pure Reason …
Matt McManus explains why people have absolute worth. “What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price ; that which, even without presupposing such a need, conforms with a certain taste has a fancy price ; but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in …
Samantha Neave explores how to be a good person, with the help of Immanuel Kant and the Tooth Fairy. Last night I dreamt I promised my niece a ride on a skipping giraffe. Sadly, when it came to the crunch, my car broke down half way round the safari due to some gorillas landing on …
Matt Qvortrup explains how the Enlightenment’s leading philosopher went looking for a bit of peace. The newspaper Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen was slightly sarcastic when it wrote about Immanuel Kant in 1784, “It is a favourite idea of Herr Professor Kant that the ultimate goal of the human race is the establishment of a perfect constitution.” …
Randall Curren finds that talking about humor is no laughing matter. Especially on national television. When our president asked me some weeks ago if I would be willing to prepare a philosophy commencement address on the subject of humor for national broadcast I was puzzled. I sized this up as, at best, a clumsy attempt …