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Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century Philosophy PDF

311 Pages·2022·2.501 MB·English
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century Philosophy OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century Philosophy CATHERINE WILSON OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Catherine Wilson 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930148 ISBN 978–0–19–284792–8 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847928.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1. Discoveries and Controversies 23 2. The Laws of Nature and the Origins of the World 51 3. The Background: Problems of Life and Matter 68 4. The Veil of Perception and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism 87 5. The ‘Physiologists’ and Material Minds 110 6. The Penchant for Determinism and Kant’s Response 132 7. Obligation and the Moral Sentiments 156 8. The Puzzles of Purposiveness 178 9. Kant on Humanity, Diversity, and Human Value 200 10. Civilization, Extinction, and Moral Effort 230 11. Futility and Transcendence: Kant’s Arguments of Hope 249 Epilogue 261 Editions Cited and Concordance of Translated Passages 269 Bibliography 273 Index of Names 295 Index of Subjects 297 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support and the resources made available by a number of institutions for the completion of this book. I am especially grateful to All Souls College, Oxford in 2017; the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2018; the Max-P lanck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin in 2020; and the collaborative project on Human Abilities run from the Institute for Advanced Study by the Freie Universität and Humboldt Universität in Berlin in 2020–1. A Visiting Professorship at the Graduate Center, CUNY afforded generous time for research, and my graduate students in the Fall of 2019 were stimulating discussants of much of the material presented here. Editors, referees, and colleagues, amongst them Ursula Goldenbaum, Angela Breitenbach, Michela Massimi, John Zammito, Abraham Anderson, Thomas Sturm, and Alix Cohen, have helped me with comments, criticisms, and sug- gestions, and my longtime OUP editor, Peter Momtchiloff, lit the way. My gratitude extends further to institutions that provided online access to texts and data for research in the pandemic years 2020– 1, when libraries were closed, travel was restricted, and my own books were stuck in transit. They include the University of Duisburg, which maintains the Bonner Kant- Korpus; the University of York Library; the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Liberty Fund; Google Books; Project Gutenberg; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Wikipedia, and other open publishing initiatives that disdained paywalls. Robot helping human—and somewhere behind it all human helping human—brought me many moments of relief, not to mention discovery. My husband, Gregor Koebel, lightened my hours in between with wit and energy. This book is dedicated in a spirit of love and friendship to Alex Rueger who has shared his expertise on Kant with me for over 30 years. With the exception of the first item, the following previously published articles and chapters of my own have been extensively reworked for this volume. My thanks to the editors and to Cambridge University Press for permission to use substantial portions of the first item verbatim: ‘Kant’s Almost Complete Rejection of British Moral Theory’. In Kant’s Moral Philosophy in Context, ed. Stefano Bacin and Oliver Sensen, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi viii Acknowledgements ‘What (Else) was behind the Newtonian rejection of Hypotheses?’ In Experiment, Speculation, and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter Anstey and Alberto Vanzo, London: Routledge, 2021. ‘Leibniz’s Influence on Kant,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant- leibniz/ (accessed 26 January 2022). ‘Hume and Vital Materialism’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24:5 (2016): 1002–21. ‘Managing Expectations: Locke on the Material Mind and Moral Mediocrity’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 78 (2016): 127–46. ‘The Building Forces of Nature and Kant’s Teleology of the Living’. In Michela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach, eds., Kant and the Laws of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016: 256–74. ‘The Presence of Lucretius in Eighteenth- Century French and German Philosophy’. In Lucretius and Modernity, ed. Liza Blake and Jacques Lezra, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 107–32. What was Kant’s Critical Philosophy Critical of? In Tamas Demeter, Kathryn Murphy, and Claus Zittel, eds., Conflicting Values of Inquiry: Ideologies of Epistemology in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 2015: 386–406. ‘Kant on Civilisation, Culture and Morality’. In Alix Cohen, ed., ‘A Companion to Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 191–210. ‘Kant and the Speculative Sciences of Origins’. In The Problem of Animal Generation in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Justin E.H. Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005: 375–401. ‘Interaction with the Reader in Kant’s Transcendental Theory of Method’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1993): 87–100. ‘Savagery and the Supersensible: Kant’s Moral Univeralism in Historical Context’, History of European Ideas 24 (1988): 315–30. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi ‘You, philosophers, support me: dare to speak the truth, and may childhood not be man’s age forever.’ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Anti- Senèque ‘Enlightenment is the release of a human being from the immaturity that they have imposed on themselves . . . Sapere aude! Dare to put your own reason into operation. That is the motto of Enlightenment.’ Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?” ’

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