Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Interview

Paul Guyer

Paul Guyer is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of both Immanuel Kant and aesthetics. AmirAli Maleki interviews him about Kant’s political and moral vision.

Why study Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and German Idealism in the modern world? Can this philosophy have any lessons for us?

I think that the metaphysics of the school we call ‘German Idealism’, culminating in Hegel (1770-1831), is fanciful and of no particular use. I do think that German Idealism continued Kant’s emphasis on the foundational value of freedom, but not always as clearly expressed as Kant expressed it himself. The basic idea of Kant’s moral philosophy in general, and his philosophy of Recht – the enforceable part of morality – in particular, is that everyone should have as much personal freedom, freedom of belief, and freedom to set and pursue their own ends, as is compatible with everyone else having an equal degree of freedom. This is a simple idea, but many people, individually or collectively, don’t seem to get it. I actually think that some of the best philosophers in the British and American post-Hegelian tradition, such as T.

…