Carl von Clausewitz - On War Volume 1 Audiobook

Here's another multipart LibriVox audiobook for you, Clausewitz' On War Volume 1 (Books 1-4). Check it out on the Philosophy Owl YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRBOF-xiQuRJbgA46aYV1IY7WJzDmKQVF

Introduction to Kant's Practical Philosophy, Part 1

This is part one of a two-part series. In this part I discuss practical philosophy in general and introduce Kant's practical philosophy in relation to it. In part 2 I discuss Kant's moral philosophy in light of the issues discussed in the first part.

Kant's moral philosophy has come to occupy a strange place in philosophical pedagogy. It's the area of his thought most commonly taught in intro philosophy courses and most commonly known outside of academia, but in these contexts it is almost always represented independently of Kant's theoretical philosophy, and even of his broader practical philosophy. This is understandable, because Kant is a difficult thinker, and his moral philosophy is probably the easiest area of his thought for a new student of his to get a grip on. Nevertheless, the detachment of his moral philosophy from the rest of his thought is regrettable, as it leads to a superficial and inaccurate understanding of his moral philosophy, which Kant himself saw as forming part of an organic whole along with his theoretical thought.

That said, I won't attempt the gargantuan task of investigating that unity here. What I will try to do is provide an introduction to Kant's practical philosophy that is accessible to those who have never studied him before, without being distorted or superficial. In particular, I would like to present it in a way that is relatively faithful to Kant's own arguments, so that readers can evaluate it rationally rather than by appeal to “intuition,” which is the prevailing standard in most contemporary Anglophone philosophy, where it is put to uses, including in the evaluation of Kant's moral philosophy, which Kant himself explicitly and insightfully condemned.

Kant's practical philosophy evolved throughout his career, but its first mature statement came in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1785. This text is divided into three sections, corresponding to a division which Kant made use of throughout his work. In the first two sections Kant makes use of what is called the analytic method to draw out the implications of what he calls “common moral cognition.” In other words, he analyzes commonly held moral concepts in order to understand their structure and their relations to other concepts, without making any claims about whether there is anything in the world which instantiates these concepts. Therefore, these first two sections don't make essential use of any substantive knowledge about the world. Rather, they depend only on knowledge of commonly held concepts. Kant's goal in these sections is to make explicit and to clarify the moral philosophy which he believes everyone already holds, albeit in a confused and inchoate form.

In the third section Kant turns to the synthetic method, which means that he introduces substantive claims about the world—claims which, unlike analytic claims, are true not merely by definition—in order to justify the common moral philosophy he has just elucidated. His goal here is to rule out the possibility, left open at the end of the first two sections, that common moral beliefs—or indeed, any moral beliefs at all—are mere “chimeras of the brain,” that is, concepts without objects or delusions. Moral error theorists, also called moral skeptics or nihilists, insist that this is the case, but by the end of section three Kant believes he has proven them wrong.

Throughout all three sections, both analytic and synthetic, Kant argues a priori, that is, without drawing on propositions that can only be known as a result of experience. This is easy enough to see with regard to the analytic sections. You might think that Kant must implicitly be invoking experience of people's moral beliefs in order to justify his claim to be investigating “common moral cognition,” but he sees himself as analyzing concepts that all persons possess simply in virtue of being persons, rather than making a generalization based on experience. What may seem harder to understand is how the third, synthetic section can also be a priori. How can a substantive claim about the world whose truth depends on something more than the definitions of the terms involved by knowable independently of experience? This is one of the central questions of Kant's philosophy, but it is not one that he addresses explicitly in his practical philosophy, so we won't go into it here. If you want to learn more about Kant's justification of synthetic a priori knowledge, take a look at my introduction to Kant here.

Now that we understand the basic structure of the Groundwork, let's take a look at the text itself. The best way to understand the text is not to follow its exact order, but rather to reconstruct Kant's argument from its foundations. I will, however, follow the analytic-synthetic order described above.

The first thing to understand is the basic framework within which Kant conducts his investigation. This is not an uncontroversial issue, but I believe that the best way to understand Kant's practical philosophy, as well as his philosophy as a whole, is to see it as presupposing that all human activity, theoretical as well as practical, philosophical as well as nonphilosophical, is carried out from an inescapable first-personal perspective. In other words, all human activity must begin with and remain oriented and constrained by the features and limitations of the human mind, considered from the perspective of a subject who (very roughly speaking) is such a mind. In asking any question, philosophical or otherwise, a person must start with “I”—what should I think?, what should I do?—and whatever answer he or she arrives at must be one that can be adopted from that perspective—I should think x, I should do y.

This may sound like a trivial thesis, but it is far more controversial than it may seem, and understanding it is essential to understanding Kant. As I have stated it, it is vague enough that it could probably be interpreted in a form that would make it acceptable to most contemporary philosophers, excepting only the most radical skeptics about subjectivity, that is, those who don't believe that subjects or persons exist in any sense at all. However, in the sense in which Kant holds it, it is a distinctly minority position. Most contemporary Anglophone philosophy presupposes an essentially third-personal perspective, and considers the first-personal perspective, if at all, only at the end of inquiry, when it comes time to issue prescriptions—one should believe x, one should do y. What's at issue is the application of a conclusion arrived at third-personally to the demand by a subject or group of subjects for action-guiding advice. Even in this context the judgement is only trivially first-personal, as I have suggested by using “one” rather than “I.” It is not essentially guided or constrained by any feature of the subject considered first-personally; rather, it is mechanically derived from a conclusion which takes no account of the first-personal perspective.

To see how this works in practice, consider one standard argument for utilitarianism, which is the moral theory that holds that only well-being is intrinsically good (good in itself rather than as a means to an end), and that the fundamental moral imperative is to maximize well-being. This argument invites us to consider our intuitions about the goodness of various things that people take to be good. Take money, for instance. People don't value money for itself, the argument claims, but only as a means to happiness or well-being. If acquiring more money didn't contribute to well-being, people would no longer want to do it. Therefore, money is only instrumentally good, that is, it is only good as a means to well-being. The same can be said for any other thing we value other than well-being. Therefore, well-being is the only good which is intrinsically valuable, and all other goods are good merely to the extent that they contribute to it. For that reason, one ought always to act so as to maximize well-being.

This is a simplified version of the argument, but it is good enough for our purposes. As you can see, it begins with a third-personal premise about the things that people value, then analyzes the way in which they value those things in order to reach the conclusion that they value them only as means to the end of well-being. The argument might be recast in terms of what “we” value or what the reader values, but this would be a merely verbal change, as the argument would still not depend on any features of the subject other than the structure of his or her desires, which is in principle just as accessible from a third-personal as from a first-personal perspective. Therefore, the argument is essentially third-personal, and only first-personal in the trivial sense that it results in an action-guiding conclusion which can be applied from a first-personal perspective.

As I have said, most of contemporary Anglophone philosophy is conducted in this manner, that is, from an essentially third-personal perspective, drawing on the intuitions of the reader or the philosophical community. The problem with this perspective is that it tends to lead to either dogmatism or skepticism, because it fails to address one of the fundamental problems of philosophy: the problem of normativity. I alluded to this problem above in discussing Kant's turn to the synthetic method in section III of the Groundwork, which was necessary in order to prove that morality isn't a mere “chimera of the brain.” In other words, Kant's challenge is to justify the belief that morality has legitimate authority over us. More generally, the problem of normativity is to determine whether not only morality but reason in general has any legitimate authority over us. The question is, do we have any reason to believe or do anything at all, and if so, why?

Put this way, the question may seem trivial. It may seem obvious that we have reason to do all sorts of things, including most basically whatever we want to do, assuming there is no countervailing reason not to do it. However, this response begs the question by assuming that desire itself is normative. This assumption is so common in both philosophy and common discourse as to be almost invisible, but it is not in any way obvious or exempt from the need for justification. The problem of normativity is not that of justifying the authority of any particular reason by showing how it can be reduced to some other reason-giving source, such as desire, but rather that of showing how any claim of reason whatsoever can be justified.

Still, it may be hard to understand why the problem of normativity is a genuine problem. Almost all of us believe that we have reason to do at least some things, and there's no obvious reason to believe that we're mistaken, so why should we doubt our commonsense belief in normativity? There are a variety of ways to motivate the problem, some of which presuppose some degree of commitment to Kantianism, but there is also a motivation that should be compelling to non-Kantians, at least those who endorse what has been called the “modern scientific worldview.”

The modern scientific worldview is a loose collection of views including the following: nontheism, or the view that gods do not exist or at least that we have no reason to believe in them; physicalism, or the view that everything that exists is physical or in some sense reducible to something physical; and naturalism, or the view that science is the paradigm method of knowledge acquisition, and its results are therefore generally to be believed and its methods imitated in other domains whenever appropriate. The modern scientific worldview or something like it is increasingly hegemonic among philosophers and nonphilosophers alike, and yet it does not seem, at least superficially, to leave any room for normativity. In ancient and medieval philosophy, god was often identified as the source of normativity, on the ground that the will of a supreme being is authoritative at least for finite beings. This view is called metaethical divine command theory (metaethical because it concerns the foundations of ethics or moral philosophy). However, the nontheism of the modern scientific worldview excludes divine command theory. If no gods exist, then of course they cannot be the source of normativity.

Other philosophers, from antiquity through the present, have thought that normativity arises from properties such as pleasure or pain, goodness or badness, or rightness or wrongness, which supposedly exist independently of any mind or subject at all, whether human or divine. This view is called metaethical realism. However, the modern scientific worldview leaves no room for realism, as the properties in question, with the possible exception of pleasure and pain, do not seem to be physical, and in any case science does not make essential reference to any of them. Psychology makes reference to pleasure and pain, of course, but not as normative properties. Nothing in the content of scientific theories supports the idea that there is any way the universe “ought” to be, and indeed it seems as though this is not the kind of belief that science could ever reach even in principle, since normative properties are not empirically confirmable, at least not in anything like the way in which other scientific properties are.

If neither divine command theory nor realism can justify belief in normativity, what can? A third theory which rose to prominence in the early modern era is called voluntarism, because it holds that normativity arises from human acts of will or volition. Unlike realism, this theory does not posit the existence of mind-independent normative properties, but rather locates the source of normativity in the will, a prima facie plausible place to locate it. The assumption which I mentioned above in motivating the problem of normativity—that desire is unproblematically normative—is a kind of voluntarism, and its pervasiveness testifies to the plausibility of the theory. What's more, unlike divine command theory, voluntarism does not posit the existence of any suprahuman or divine will, so it is compatible with nontheism.

As it is usually formulated, however, voluntarism has similar problems to those of the the desire-satisfaction theory already discussed, as well as more loosely to those that undermine realism. Although it may be plausible to suppose that the will is the source of normativity, this intuition does not suffice in place of an argument. Furthermore, voluntarism, again as it is usually formulated, does not really fare any better than realism when evaluated by physicalism and naturalism. For one thing, the will itself is not obviously a physical thing or an essential concept in any science, though there may be theories of the will which make it physicalistically and naturalistically acceptable.

More importantly, however, regardless of the status of the will itself, the normative properties which supposedly arise as a result of its acts are not any more acceptable to the modern scientific worldview than those which moral realism posits as existing mind independently. Even if it is more plausible in the eyes of common sense to locate such properties in the will, this does not render them any more empirically verifiable or otherwise acceptable to science, let alone necessary to it. Again, psychology and the other social sciences theorize the will in some sense—they describe the structure and content of people's desires and preferences, they investigate what people believe about rationally and morality and how these beliefs affect their actions—but all of this is a purely descriptive enterprise which makes no essential reference to the purported normativity of the phenomena in question. Most people certainly believe in normativity, including moral normativity, but from the perspective of science their beliefs may perfectly well be “chimeras of the brain.” This does not entail that normativity positively does not exist from the perspective of science, only that science provides no evidence for its existence, which leaves it without support from the perspective of the modern scientific worldview.

Things do not look good, then, for voluntarism as it is normally formulated. However, as you may have guessed, Kant offers a kind of voluntarism which is different from the normal formulations, precisely because it is formulated from the first-personal rather than the third-personal perspective. This is where the radical nature of the first-personal perspective emerges. Remember that in introducing this perspective I characterized it by saying that all enquiry conducted from the first-personal perspective must begin with and remain constrained by features of the human subject, considered from a first-person point of view. This means that no other perspective, including the modern scientific worldview, can supplant the first-personal perspective. The modern scientific worldview and other third-personal perspectives may perfectly well be added on to the first-personal perspective, but they can never become fundamental, and if they conflict with the first-personal perspective they cannot be endorsed, at least not in any simple or obvious manner.

Now, this does not mean that Kant is a theist in any traditional sense, and it certainly does not mean that he absolutely rejects the authority of science. It only means that he rejects the claims of science to be absolute or fundamental, that is, to supplant the first-personal perspective. Scientific investigation plays an essential role in Kant's philosophy, but like all other human activity, it can only be conducted from the first-personal perspective and in accordance with whatever commitments, beliefs, and norms this perspective entails. The investigation of just what these commitments, beliefs, and norms are will be the subject of the next post, which will lead us into Kant's moral philosophy proper.

Jeremy Bentham - An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Audiobook

Just finished uploading another audiobook to the Philosophy Owl YouTube channel. This is one of the founding texts of utilitarianism, Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRBOF-xiQuRI1ow3DhtKTnp6VtTI1Y65n

Immanuel Kant - Critique of Practical Reason Audiobook

Just finished uploading Kant's Critique of Practical Reason to the Philosophy Owl YouTube Channel. Here's the playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRBOF-xiQuRLvKb4NHXK_sA21EFCdPjd-

And here's a PDF of the translation the audiobook is based on: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/jimspdf.htm

Introduction to Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the Prussian city of Konigsberg, where he lived until his death in 1804. His work is divided into two basic periods: the precritical years of 1747 to 1770, and the critical years of 1770 to his death in 1804. In his precritical period he was a rationalist in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz, the great 17th century philosopher whose students dominated the Prussian philosophical scene of Kant's school years. In order to understand Kant, we'll first have to take a quick look at Leibniz and his followers.

Leibniz was committed to the idea that the world of phenomena, or the world of everyday experience, is in some sense ideal or dependent on the human mind, and therefore not fully real. Rather, what is fundamentally real is the world of what Leibniz calls metaphysical reality, which consists of things called monads. Monads are simple immaterial substances with varying degrees of consciousness, each of which contains all of its determinations within itself. That is to say, it contains the power to determine its entire "life history" without interacting with any other monad. Indeed, monads never do interact with each other, and the apparent interaction that a monad such as a human subject experiences in the world of appearances is just a phenomenon resulting from its own self-determination in the world of metaphysical reality.

Because space and time are relational properties—that is, they involve relations between objects, such as “prior to,” “later than,” “to the left of,” etc.—they too are merely ideal abstractions from the nonrelational properties of monads. This can be called a kind of material idealism, because the “matter” of everything that exists is in fact mental or ideal. Metaphysical reality consists of mental substances, and phenomenal reality consists of mental abstractions from their determinations.

Due to the limitations of our cognitive capacities, we humans can merely grasp indistinctly at knowledge of metaphysical reality. Only god can know that world fully as it is in itself. However, we do have innate ideas, or concepts which we possess prior to any experience and which enable us to know things a priori, that is, independently of experience. In particular, Leibniz believes we can know the truths of mathematics, geometry, logic, metaphysics, morality, and theology a priori. By means of innate ideas and conceptual analysis—that is, breaking concepts down into their constituent parts—we can increase the clarity and distinctness of our knowledge, though we can never have absolutely clear and distinct knowledge like god.

In his precritical period Kant's philosophy was structurally Leibnizian, in the sense that it was based on Leibniz' basic conception of the distinction between metaphysical reality and the world of appearances. Already in this period Kant rejected various substantive Leibnizian principles, most notably the principle of metaphysical noninteraction, but we don't need to go into that for our purposes. In the 1760s, however, Kant read the work of David Hume, one of the greatest philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the seeds were planted in his mind for a radical break with the Leibnizian tradition.

Hume had attacked the kind of a priori knowledge which Leibniz claimed to have established, arguing that we can only have a priori knowledge of what he called "relations of ideas," never of "matters of fact." These categories correspond to what Kant would call analytic and synthetic judgements. Analytic judgements, or relations of ideas, have truth values that depend solely on the meanings of the terms involved. For instance, the judgement "all bachelors are unmarried men" is analytic, because "unmarried man" is just the definition of bachelor. Synthetic judgements, on the other hand, or matters of fact, have truth values that depend on more than just the meanings of the terms involved. For instance, the judgement "it is raining today" is synthetic, because nothing in the definition of "today" implies that it is raining, or vice versa.

Hume's argument was that there can be no synthetic a priori knowledge of any sort. Rather, all a priori propositions must be analytic, and all synthetic propositions must be a posteriori. Hume's rejection of synthetic a priori knowledge was based on his empiricism, that is, his belief that all of our ideas are derived from experience. For Hume, there is nothing comparable to Leibniz' innate ideas which could give us a priori cognition of matters of fact. Without such a faculty we have no way of knowing substantive truths about the world independently of experience. As a result, Hume concluded that all philosophical truths are merely a posteriori and justified, if at all, on the basis of psychological habit.

Kant saw this conclusion as a threat to the very possibility of philosophy. If philosophical cognitions were based on mere habit, Kant believed, they would lose their normativity and necessity. That is, we would have no reason to believe that they were true at all, much less that they were true in all possible worlds, which Kant considered an essential feature of philosophical truths. We might as a matter of psychological fact be unable to cease believing them, but that is no substitute for the traditional aim of philosophy, that is, to investigate what we ought to believe rather than just what we do believe.

Kant had been gradually moving away from his Leibnizian heritage since the beginning of his career, but his reading of Hume brought him to the conclusion that a radical break was needed with what he would come to call the dogmatism of the rationalists. This didn't mean that the rationalist heritage was to be rejected entirely, but it did mean that it would have to be critically reassessed and placed within strict boundaries to prevent the excessive and unjustifiable claims that had rendered it vulnerable to Hume's critique.

This was the project that Kant undertook in his Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781 after a decade of near-total philosophical silence (his so-called "silent decade"). As Kant described it, his fundamental project in the Critique of Pure Reason, also known as the first Critique, was to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements. In order to do this, he needed to introduce a fundamentally new perspective or metaphilosophy, which he called transcendental idealism.

Transcendental idealism is to be contrasted with Leibnizian or material idealism, which as we saw is the doctrine that the matter or stuff of appearances is an ideal or quasi-illusory abstraction from fundamental metaphysical reality. Rather than being a material idealism, transcendental idealism is a kind of formal idealism, meaning that what is ideal is not the matter of experience but only its form, that is to say its spatiotemporal and conceptual characteristics. To understand what this means, it will help to look at the other word in the term, namely, "transcendental."

Transcendental is a term of art that Kant uses to characterize his fundamental subject of inquiry in the Critique: the investigation of how a priori knowledge of objects is possible. His fundamental move in this regard was to introduce a conception of knowledge that marked a radical break with all philosophers who had come before him, both rationalist and empiricist. This radical break consisted in arguing that the objects of our knowledge are not things in themselves, but only phenomena, or things as they appear to us. This may sound like Leibniz' idealism after all, but there are several features of Kant's theory which make it fundamentally different. The most important difference concerns the possibility of knowledge of things in themselves. For Leibniz, as you'll recall, we can attain some knowledge of things in themselves by means of conceptual analysis, although this knowledge can never be as clear and distinct as god's knowledge is. For Kant, by contrast, we can never have any knowledge of things in themselves at all, not even unclear or indistinct knowledge.

To understand why Kant believed this, we need to examine another fundamental break that he made with the rationalist tradition 11 years before writing the first Critique. In his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, Kant distinguished between two basic faculties of the mind: understanding and sensibility. Understanding is the faculty of concepts, or general representations, whereas sensibility is the faculty of intuitions, or singular representations. Kant claims that we need both faculties for cognition, and that neither can be understood as a merely deficient form of the other. The Leibnizians were his targets here, as they understood sensibility as a merely confused form of understanding. That was how they made room for finite creatures like us with limited faculties of understanding to have some grasp of the world of metaphysical reality. We might not have god's perfect or intellectual understanding, but we do have a faculty that is fundamentally continuous with it—namely, a sensible understanding—which can be improved through conceptual analysis, granting us some knowledge of metaphysical reality.

By rejecting this single-spectrum theory of the relation between understanding and intuition, Kant foreclosed on the possibility of knowing things in themselves. This is because the understanding requires intuitions to work on in order to produce cognition, but our sensible faculty of intuition is passive with respect to its matter. That is, it can only receive its contents as a result of being affected by things in themselves; it cannot actively grasp them as they are in themselves. In other words, we can only know things as they appear to us or as they are in the phenomenal world, not as they are in the world of things in themselves. Rather than drawing a continuum between knowledge of the phenomenal and metaphysical worlds like Leibniz did, Kant placed a precise barrier between the two. The project of placing this barrier and investigating its implications for knowledge is what Kant means by “transcendental.”

Armed with this understanding of the first term in “transcendental idealism,” we can now return to the second and see how Kant's idealism is fundamentally different from Leibniz'. What is ideal in transcendental idealism are the spatiotemporal and conceptual forms that objects in the phenomenal world have as a result of interacting with formal features of our faculties of intuition and understanding. The matter we use to constitute phenomenal objects is not ideal—it comes from things in themselves affecting our faculty of intuition—but in order for us to form a cognition on the basis of that matter, it must pass through the spatiotemporal forms of our intuition and the fundamental conceptual forms of our understanding. This makes the resulting object (the phenomenal object, the object of our cognition or knowledge) ideal in the sense that its form depends on features of the human mind. Whereas for Leibniz both the form and the matter of the phenomenal world are ideal, for Kant only the form is ideal; the matter is "real" in the sense that it is given by the thing in itself. This is the essence of transcendental idealism.

So how does transcendental idealism help Kant achieve his fundamental aim of explaining the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition? The answer lies in what is called Kant's "Copernican turn," which Kant describes in the introduction to the second edition of the Critique as follows:

"Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition."

What Kant's suggesting is that we use what we've just discussed about transcendental idealism as the grounds for a fundamental reorientation of philosophy comparable to Copernicus' revolution in astronomy. Just as Copernicus reoriented the center of the universe from the earth to the sun, Kant was suggesting that we reorient philosophy from a position that takes objects as they are in themselves as its starting point to one which takes human cognitive capacities as its starting point. Rather than attempting to cognize things in themselves—which we've just seen to be impossible, and which leads to the dogmatic excesses of the rationalists—philosophy, Kant suggests, should turn instead to investigating the cognition of objects of experience, or what I've been calling phenomenal objects.

Because these objects are formally ideal—because they depend on forms of the human mind—they are in a sense "ours," and that allows us to know truths about them a priori, including synthetic truths. The rationalists' attempt to justify synthetic a priori cognition fails because they have no way of explaining why it is that the objects they are concerned with (things in themselves) should conform to anything accessible a priori to humans. If the objects rationalists are concerned with exist independently of the human mind, what grounds do we have for believing that they conform to innate ideas in the mind? Our innate ideas, if such things exist at all, might just as well be what Kant calls "chimeras of the brain," totally unrelated to things in themselves.

If, however, the objects of philosophy are not things in themselves but rather things as they appear to us, or phenomena, this danger disappears. Because these objects are produced in accordance with the forms of our mind, we can cognize them using those same forms. If some forms of the mind are necessary to have any experience of objects at all, then they must be accessible to us a priori—otherwise we wouldn't be able to have any experience with which to acquire them—and thus we can use them to attain synthetic a priori knowledge. The bulk of the Critique is dedicated to exploring precisely this possibility, that is, to showing that certain forms of intuition and understanding are necessary for experience, and therefore do provide us with synthetic a priori cognition.

Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason Audiobook

Just finished uploading the full LibriVox audiobook of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to the Philosophy Owl YouTube channel. Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRBOF-xiQuRJKo-XaTvttJLXdJWcw3hqx