Kant on Practical Life
From Duty to History

This book offers a comprehensive account of Kant's practical philosophy that highlights the unity across its disparate themes.

Kristi E. Sweet (Author)

9781107037236, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 July 2013

236 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.52 kg

'It is a testament to the philosophic integrity of Sweet's work that it concludes by spurring the reader to reconsider the essential premise of her inquiry.' Paul T. Wilford, The Review of Metaphysics

Kant's 'practical philosophy' comprehends a diverse group of his writings on ethics, politics, law, religion, and the philosophy of history and culture. Kristi E. Sweet demonstrates the unity and interdependence of these writings by showing how they take as their animating principle the human desire for what Kant calls the unconditioned - understood in the context of his practical thought as human freedom. She traces the relationship between this desire for freedom and the multiple forms of finitude that confront human beings in different aspects of practical life, and stresses the interdependence of the pursuit of individual moral goodness and the formation of community through the state, religion, culture and history. This study of Kant's approach to practical life discovers that doing our duty, itself the realization of our individual freedom, requires that we set for ourselves and pursue a whole constellation of social, political and other communal ends.

Introduction
1. Freedom of the self as such: the good will, duty, and moral feeling
2. Freedom of the self over time: virtue
3. Freedom of the self and the moral world: the highest good
4. Enacting the moral world: founding and promoting a civil condition
5. Enacting the moral world: joining the ethical community
6. Human finitude undone: culture and history
Conclusion: practical reason's 'peculiar fate'.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD], Philosophy [HP]