"The Lectures remain the richest document we have for understanding the history of the most important ethical theory of modern times...They let us see Kant in the role his students & colleagues saw--not as the author of almost unreadable books, but as the galanter Magister, with a style as polished & sharp as the dagger he wrote on the podium."--Lewis W. Beck Foreword to the Torchbook Edition-L.W. Beck Introduction-J. MacMurray Universal Practical Philosophy Ethics
Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from K枚nigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.
Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources & limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality鈥搘hich he concluded that it does鈥搕hen we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it's possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, & so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. So the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind. Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists & the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired thru experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason. Kant鈥檚 thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists & empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding Kant's system, thus bringing about various forms of German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental philosophy.
Vorlesung Kants 眉ber Ethik = Lectures on Ethics, Immanuel Kant
This volume contains four versions of the lecture notes taken by Kant's students of his university courses in ethics given regularly over a period of some thirty years.
The notes are very complete and expound not only Kant's views on ethics but many of his opinions on life and human nature.
I read this book in preparing a paper on Kant's theory of ethics along with everything else by him on the topic. The paper, which is posted on this, the 欧宝娱乐, site, was more an attempt to constructively appropriate his work as valid ethical teaching than an academic paper.
Kant in the vein of the essays of Montaigne and Bacon - now there's something I never imagined before! This is a great book for anyone interested in Kant's moral theory who might be intimidated or inexperienced with his obtuse terminologies and dry style. There's lots of scatterings of Latin untranslated here, so it's only plain sailing in comparison with Kant's typical writings, but anyone with a decent grasp of etymologies can understand what is meant by the context.
This book is an old edition I picked up in the library - the new Cambridge edition is double its size, so I have no idea what is said in those pages missing here, but there is a decent mix of Kant's own moral principles relayed with relative ease and, in the second half, a series of short reflections on a topic, such as 'Friendship', 'Innocence', 'Vengeance' and 'Duties towards the body in respect of sexual impulse', in case you've ever wanted to know what Kant thought on incest (nothing unorthodox). Unless you're already somewhat conservative you're unlikely to be swayed by Kant's opinions on various ethical issues nor will you be shaken by his argumentative brilliance - these passages are generally short and didactic, as lecture notes generally are. Nonetheless the candor of addressing all sorts of things unlikely to have generally mentioned in public life at the time is notable; one can admire Kant's dedication to building a rational-minded ethical system without agreeing with him on everything.
If you only want to read one work by Kant, this is a viable choice. You'll be missing out on the formulation of the categorical imperative (though one can certainly see signs of it here) and Kantian aesthetic theory, but you'll also be missing out on dense, systematized, difficult philosophical language. It might be well worth your while attend the lectures without doing the exam, so to speak.
Forget the Groundwork, the Lectures on Ethics should be everyone's starting point for learning Kant's ethics. Unlike Groundwork, the Lectures are not weighed down with implicit references to the critical project. Each of the lectures here stands alone, addressing a specific ethical issue without requiring background knowledge, or even any knowledge of previous lectures. Whereas the groundwork is extremely difficult to appreciate in all its depth without knowledge of the massive, highly intricate system it belongs to, the Lectures on Ethics aim to grapple with common ethical problems we face in everyday life. The issues Kant tackles here are weighty and specific - everything from self-mastery to duties towards animals, but presented in a relatively conversational manner. Kant does not come off as a pedant in these lectures, but as a wise and affable friend, attempting to impart well-earned insight.
As such, if you're a philosophy professor, and you're teaching Kant's ethics to undergraduates, I'd strongly recommend that you at least consider using this text. It's a much more sympathetic presentation of Kant's work for the neophyte.