The Development of Kant`s View of Ethics

includes index and biblioraphy

THE RATIONALIST BACKGROUND Statement of general programme Early influences¿Pietism and rationalism Dilucidatio (1755); the principle of sufficient reason; the rationalist concept of God Freedom and necessity¿an early antinomy Early essays and letters¿the problem of evil in the best of all possible worlds Theory of the Heavens (1755); The Only Possible Argument for a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763); early versions of the teleological argument The Romantic vision of nature as an infinite evolu¿tionary spiritual system THE DOCTRINE OF MORAL FEELING Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1763); morality as founded on the `feeling of the beauty and dignity of human nature` Prize Essay (1764); the influence of the British moralists; formal and material elements in morality; the move from rationalism to analytic method The stages of Kant`s early philosophical development Fragment (1764); Announcement of Lectures (1765); Kant`s uneasy acceptance of moral sense theories THREE: THE DREAMS OF METAPHYSICS Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766); the influence of Swedenborg The visionary metaphysics of the Dreams; morality as the appearance of an intelligible commerce of spiritual beings; the influence of Rousseau; the origin of the formula of the categorical imperative Metaphysical scepticism; the primacy of moral action Inaugural Dissertation (1770); the return to rationalism; intellect and sensibility The discovery of the mathematical antinomies; the doctrine of transcendental idealism Morality as known by pure intellect The collapse of the Dissertation view; its failure to account for Newtonian science; the distinction of reason and intellect The visionary and dogmatic origins of the Critical view of ethics FOUR: THE LECTURES ON ETHICS Lectures on Ethics (1775-81); the early formulation of the Critical view; duty, perfection and happiness Fragment (circa 1775); virtue as the a priori form of happiness Happiness and belief in God as motives to morality Morality and religion (i): God, revelation and duty Letters to J. C. Lavater (1755); morality and religion (2): religion as helping men`s moral deficiencies and assuring final fulfilment THE CRITICAL DOCTRINES OF GOD AND THE SELF Paralogisms (1781 and 1787); the doctrine of the self (i): the rejection of spiritualism and materialism Third Antinomy (1781 and 1787); the doctrine of the self (2): the noumenal freedom of the self Transcendental Dialectic, ch. 3; Fourth Antinomy (1781 and 1787); the doctrine of God (i): God as the ideal of reason; necessary being; intellectual intuition; the author of nature The doctrine of God (2): the regulative use of ideas THE POSTULATES OF PRACTICAL REASON Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic (1788); Critique of Teleological Judgment, Appendix (1790); the postulates (i): the summum bonum The postulates (2): the relation of happiness and morality . The postulates (3): the union of reason and sensibility 91 95 The ideological nature of Kant`s ethics THE SUPREME PRINCIPLE OF MORALITY Groundwork (1785); Metaphysic of Morals (1797); the derivation of duties from the categorical imperative Reason and the ends of nature The principle of universalisability The principle of humanity The nature of the supreme principle of morality NATURE AND PURPOSE Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790); beauty as a symbol of morality; sublimity as pointing to a supersensible ground of the unity of reason and nature Critique of Teleological Judgment (1790); the regulative principle of teleology in biology; the notion of God The historical purpose of nature; through struggle to culture and a world-federation Idea for a Universal History (1784); On the Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786);