THE KEELE-OXFORD-ST ANDREWS KANTIAN (KOSAK) RESEARCH CENTRE & THE FORUM FOR PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH @ THE SCHOOL OF POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT (SPIRE),
Invites you all to the final 2015/16 Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture
Kant on Misology and the Natural Dialectic
By: John Callanan (King’s College London)
On: Tuesday, 18 April 2016
From: 6-7.30 pm
In: CBA0.060, Chancellor’s Building, Keele University
All Welcome! Wine
Abstract:
This talk discusses two passages from the first section of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the first (4: 395-6) Kant talks of the danger of developing an attitude of ‘misology’ – a hatred of reason itself; secondly, Kant discusses the danger of moral corruption and analyses how it arises through what he calls a ’natural dialectic’ (4: 405). I show how both these passages have to be understood as talking directly to specific passages in Rousseau’s works (the First Discourse and Emile respectively). I argue that, despite the positive influence of Rousseau’s thought with regard to the methodological importance of ‘common moral cognition’, Kant must be understood as arguing against Rousseau here in trying to give an account of the relationship between philosophy, first-order moral attitudes and the popular conception of the role of reason in everyday life.
About the Speaker:
John Callanan is Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at King’s College London. His research focuses on Early Modern Philosophy, especially Kant. He has published on Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy, including Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s Guide (Edinburgh University Press). He is currently working on Kant’s theory of concept-acquisition as well as preparing a book on Bernard Mandeville for Princeton University Press.
On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Rousseau in England, Stephen Leach makes available two texts: his own “Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Staffordshire” and “Rousseau in Wootton“, his co-translation together with Malcolm Crook from L.-J. Courtois’s Le Séjour de Jean-Jacques Rousseau en Angleterre (1910). Texts (including several pictures) can be downloaded from this blog’s webpage of the Keele-Oxford-St Andrews Kantian (KOSAK) Research Centre:
Philosophy@Keele Weblog 