Kant was one of the inventors of anthropology, and his lectures on anthropology were the most popular and among the most frequently given of his lecture courses. This volume contains the first translation of selections from student transcriptions of the lectures between 1772 and 1789, prior to the published version, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which Kant edited himself at the end of his teaching career. The two most extensive texts, Anthropology Friedländer and Anthropology Mrongovius, are presented here (...) in their entirety, along with selections from all the other lecture transcriptions published in the Academy edition, together with sizeable portions of the Menschenkunde, first published in 1831. These lectures show that Kant had a coherent and well-developed empirical theory of human nature bearing on many other aspects of his philosophy, including cognition, moral psychology, politics and philosophy of history. (shrink)

Toward a Genealogy of 'Deontology' ROBERT B. LOUDEN [A]ny choice of a conceptual scheme presupposes values. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History tN Va'HICS AS ELS~.WHEI~, the basic categories used by writers to mark the conceptual terrain of their field profoundly affect readers' understanding of what is important within the field. And in ethics , most writers who habitually employ the currently accepted categories of their discipline have no knowledge of the particular history of these categories -- of who (...) first coined them, of the purposes for which they were originally intended, of how their meanings have shifted over the years, of how ascending categories have displaced descending ones, of who is primarily responsible for their current meanings, etc. As an illustration of this claim, I propose to examine the history of'deontology' in ethics, with an aim to making the recent topographical shifts within the field less "unknown to ourselves. ''~ Who was the first author to employ "the general, ugly, and familiar head- 1Cf. Nietzsche's opening remark in The Genealogy of Morals: "We are unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge [w/r Erkennendon]" . It is perhaps worth noting at the outset that the following exercise in moral genealogy is not terribly Nietzschean -- I myself accept very little of the specifics of his attack on morality. However, I do concur with Nietzsche's general conviction that moral philosophers.. (shrink)

R.G. Collingwood defined historical knowledge as essentially ‘scientific’, and saw the historian's task as the ‘re-enactment of past thoughts’. The author argues the need to go beyond Collingwood, first by demonstrating the authenticity of available evidence, and secondly, using Namier as an example, by considering methodology as well as epistemology, and the need to relate past thoughts to their present context. The ‘law of the consumption of time’ encourages historians to focus on landmark events, theories and generalisations, thus breaking from (...) Collingwood's emphasis on fidelity to past ideas and interpreting the past from the concepts of the present. This conflict can only be reconciled by the study of historiography. (shrink)

Park and Davies (2024) have conducted impressive work on synthesizing the discussion of vaccination-sensitive rationing and relevant theoretical approaches. In this commentary, we build upon their...

Professor Card is not disposed to object to the main argument of my paper, which was intended to reply to Professor Lyons’ suggestion that a utilitarian cannot explain how legal rights have moral force, and at the same time to urge that the particular form of utilitarianism espoused by Professor Hare in his recent work does seem to be open to the difficulty Professor Lyons alleges. Professor Card says she is ‘not dissatisfied’ with this reasoning. I suspect that Card views (...) my criticism of Professors Lyons and Hare as part of an in-house squabble among philosophers all of whom have utilitarian leanings of one sort or another; and she is not disposed to intervene in this. She does, however, have serious reservations about utilitarian views of rights in general, and about mine in particular; her paper consists almost entirely of her statement of these reservations. I find her remarks very welcome, since they express some objections which may be widely felt, and a response to which may therefore contribute to philosophers’ thinking about these issues. (shrink)

The modern theoretical physicist is a strange creature. Perhaps in every age the theoretical physicist has seemed so to his contemporaries who took the trouble to observe and think about him. There seems, for example, something almost too magical in the uncanny way in which he pulls a brand new atomic particle out of a theory, a way that reminds us of a rabbit being produced out of a hat. This is usually done in an off-hand manner with a considerable (...) amount of patter of a highly abstract symbolic character but with a few words inserted in the right places for the benefit of the experimental physicist and a final prediction that if the experimenter does thus and so in the laboratory he will find a certain result. No wonder the observer marvels when the answer comes out right. But as he thinks further he is inclined to wonder whether it is necessary or desirable for the details of the process which led to the result to be so unintelligible. For unintelligible they seem to be to a great many people who are directly concerned with their understanding, to the people who for years have been laboring under the belief that they are engaged in the task of finding out how Nature works. What is this curious process whose whole task, according to one distinguished exponent of it, is merely to predict experimental results, and what is its future likely to be? These are the questions we are setting for ourselves in the present discussion. It is unlikely that the answers given here will satisfy everybody, but it is reasonably certain that nobody who aspires to an interest in science can fail to attach some meaning to them whether or not he agrees. (shrink)

Scholarly work in the area of the wisdom movement and its literature has opened up, in the last half-century, new vistas in Old Testament religion and theology. The research has progressed on such different fronts and intensified so rapidly that a survey charting its movement and achievement is necessary to appreciate the achievement and sense its implications.

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