2004
Volume 112, Issue 3
  • ISSN: 0002-5275
  • E-ISSN: 2352-1244

Abstract

Abstract

Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy pays little explicit attention to the concept of ‘wisdom’ in its taxonomy of the functions of human reason in its work of rendering intelligible the world and the human place in the world. On the basis of some crucial texts in Kant’s writings, this essay argues that wisdom has a role to play in the task Kant assigns to practical reason; this task is to make the world in which humans dwell intelligible morally, i.e., to make sense of the world as locus in which good and evil take form in function of the exercise of human freedom. In such a world, the function of wisdom is ‘cosmopolitan’ in that it provides a horizon of a social hope that recognizes human solidarity, vulnerability, and otherness, as signal instances of the inclusive moral relationality necessary for sustaining both an ‘outer’ world order for peace and the ‘inner’ dynamic of full moral relationality that Kant terms ‘the ethical commonwealth’.

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2020-08-01
2024-12-07
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References

  1. A note on translation and citations to the works of Kant.
  2. Citations to the works of Kant are referenced, first, to the volume and pagination of the Akademie Augabe (AA), the critical edition of Kant’s collected works (Immanuel Kants Schriften, Ausgabe der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: W. de Gruyter 1902-), and then to the pagination of the English translation (ET) in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, general editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993-2012) – e.g. Critique of Practical Reason AA 5: 30-33; ET 164-166.
  3. Kant’s works are listed in the chronological order in which they were first published. The name of the translator and the title of the volume in the Cambridge Edition in which each work appears is noted in the list of works cited.
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