Philosophy 178

The course will provide an examination of Kant’s critical philosophy. The first part will be devoted to the peculiarity of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, understanding transcendental idealism to be a necessary condition for empirical realism. In this part we will be primarily concerned with Kant’s his relationship to Leibniz and Wolff, his view of philosophy’s proper ‘method’, and the proof structure of the ‘transcendental deduction”. The readings will include in addition to sections from the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics extracts from his dissertation. The second part of the course will deal with what is for Kant a condition for a subject to exhibit one’s freedom, i.e. his understanding of autonomy and its development from the lecture notes on moral philosophy by Kaehler via the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to the Critique of Practical Reason. In the end of the course the relationship of these two critiques will be discussed and questions will be raised about the whole system that is supposed to be the outcome of the combination of Kant’s three critiques.