PHIL 2014 - Thinkers Who Changed the World: Kant Seminar

Assignment Task

Question 1

a) What is the ‘motto of the Enlightenment’ according to Kant (8:35)?

b) How is this motto connected to Kant’s critique of people who might as well have turned themselves into ‘domesticated animals’ (8:35)?

c) What is the difference between the private and the public use of reason according to Kant, and how is this connected to his favoring ‘slow reform’ over ‘swift revolution’?

Question 2

Unpack the title “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Aim” for me: what methodological role does an ‘idea’ for thinking about problems play, according to Kant; what is a ‘universal history’ and how is this related to ‘stadial history’ (we see a version of this historical framework in his ‘Conjectural Beginning’ essay too) ; and finally, what does it mean to say that this historical account is aiming toward ‘cosmopolitanism’ as its final end?

Question 3

a) What is Kant’s critique of ‘laziness’ (epitomized in these readings by the example of the ‘South Sea Islanders’) and how is this connected to ‘the motto of the Enlightenment’? 

b) What role does ‘antagonism’ play methodologically as an ‘idea’ for thinking about historical events for Kant , and explain why ‘war’ provides a central example of this for him? 

Question 4

Reflecting upon Kant’s comment that: “We are civilized, perhaps to a point of being overburdened, by all sorts of decorum and propriety. But very much is still lacking before we can be held to be already moralized” (8:26), how is this connected to the fact of inequality in society (see e.g., 8:114-120)?

Question 5 

Kant routinely employs a contrast between organic and mechanical metaphors, with frequent use of terms like: ‘germs,’ ‘seeds,’ ‘trees,’ ‘wood,’ ‘grafts,’ and ‘wombs,’ on the one hand, and ‘automatons’ and ‘mechanics’ on the other. The metaphors speak to a division of labor, and indeed a conjectural division of history, according to Kant, between the work done by nature on behalf of an essentially passive species, on the one hand, and the active work done by the individual in preparation for a period when the moralization of the species can take place. Taking some examples from the readings, explain what this all means

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