PROGRAM
All talks will be in the Eisenberg Room, Sensenbrenner Hall, except the last talk, which will be in Marquette Hall, room 105. Maps here.
All talks will be in the Eisenberg Room, Sensenbrenner Hall, except the last talk, which will be in Marquette Hall, room 105. Maps here.
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8:30 am - 8:45 am
Welcome + Light Breakfast Heidi Bostic (Dean, Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, MU) |
Please register by 12 noon on Friday, Feb 23 if you would like to join us for breakfast or lunch.
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8:45 am - 9:45 am
Slavery and Enthusiasm in the German Enlightenment Michael Olson (Teaching Associate Professor, Philosophy, MU) |
Late eighteenth-century conceptions of enlightenment in German intellectual life often emphasize its connection with a liberation from prejudice and blind adherence to tradition. It was thus common for opponents of slavery in the German Enlightenment to draw on notions of human equality and natural rights in support of their criticisms of institutions of servitude, including both serfdom and chattel slavery. The sense that the spirit or principles of the Enlightenment are fundamentally liberatory has generated valuable scholarly—and occasionally public—debate over how to reconcile that liberatory spirit with the gruesome realities of Atlantic slavery. This presentation will seek to contribute to that debate by examining how the Göttingen philosopher Christoph Meiners drew on Humean ideas about superstition and enthusiasm to contest what he took to be the mistaken claims of natural human equality made by dangerously enthusiastic advocates of a false enlightenment. We will see that Meiners’s intervention in debates about slavery and enlightenment raises questions for modern scholars about how to balance the descriptive and normative dimensions of the history of philosophy.
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9:45 am - 10:45 am
The Categorical Imperative, Socially Inflected: "There Is To Be No War" Philip J. Rossi, SJ (Professor Emeritus, Theology, MU) |
Kant invests the maxim, "There shall be no war," with the moral power and status of a categorical imperative. In making this claim, Kant does so with emphatic rhetorical directness: "...reason, from the throne of the highest morally legislative power, delivers an absolute condemnation of war" (Perpetual Peace. ZeF: GS 8:356/ET 3). "Now morally practical reason pronounces in us its irresistible veto: there is to be no war, neither war between you and me in a state nor war between us as states..." (Metaphysics of Morals MdS, GS 6: 354/ET 491). In an earlier essay, "War as Morally Unintelligible" (The Monist 99, 2016), I argued that, under this stern prohibition, "war," holds overarching significance for humanity's main moral task: establishing of "the highest good possible in the world." For Kant, war poses more than an array of complex moral challenges. Beyond thorny issues confronting military and political leaders making decisions about armed hostilities, stands an issue, more fundamental for all humanity, embedded in Kant's treatment of war. This issue arises from Kant's articulation of a deeply rooted moral unintelligibility within the very concept of war. War holds central conceptual significance for the reciprocal relationality constitutive of the very structure of finite human moral agency. Kant thus affirms war as morally unintelligible: the expression of a collective withdrawal from the relationality constitutive of moral community. He comes to see war as the fundamental social expression of the "radical evil" portrayed in Religion as embedded within the structure of autonomous human moral agency. On Kant's account, "war" aptly serves as the encompassing social trope for the moral unintelligibility of human radical evil. I call this a fundamental social inflection that Kant gives to his account of the moral significance of war. Such an inflection provides a distinctively social qualification to human moral endeavors to extirpate war, the social form of radical evil and its consequences.
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11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Neither God Nor Nature: Kant on the Duty of Peace Luigi Filieri (DAAD Postdoctoral Scholar, Philosophy, Mainz/MU) |
The aim of this talk is to argue that neither God’s will (or providence) nor nature can take the role of freedom in the development of human species’ dispositions. By focusing on freedom as the subject of history, I will argue for a comprehensive account of right: not only as the remedy to non-moral practices but also as the organ of freedom, that is the means through which freedom progressively establishes its domain in the course of history. These two steps lead us to understanding cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace as historical duties to be constantly fulfilled. What would allegedly be caused by nature or granted by providence, is indeed an entirely human responsibility. The assumption of a regular course of nature, then of history, towards a rightful condition and cosmopolitanism in turn leads us to see that these two tasks represent the goals we ought to achieve in order to make “a moral whole” out of “a pathologically compelled agreement to society” [IaG, 8: 21].
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12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Box Lunch |
Please register by 12 noon on Friday, Feb 23 if you would like to join us for breakfast or lunch.
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1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Kant's Highest Goods: Personal and Political Dustin Trampe (PhD candidate, Philosophy, MU) |
It is sometimes assumed that the idea of a perpetually peaceful society represents the perfect society for Kant and the culmination of history. I intend to argue that, for Kant, a perpetually peaceful society is only a stage on the way toward the final destiny of humankind; it is not that final end of history itself. Indeed, I will argue that even a perfectly lawful and peaceful society is in itself of no intrinsic moral value at all; its goodness comes only through its potential moralizing influence on humankind. The true final end of mankind is a morally perfect community, wherein everyone’s good maxims contribute to the earned well-being of all. The upshot of this is that virtue and right bear a much closer relationship in Kant’s thought than is sometimes acknowledged. The moral vocation is not a politically quietist one, nor can an individual be virtuous without an ample regard for the moral condition of her community. Likewise, Kant’s political philosophy cannot be read apart from the final moral end of humankind, as programs of political liberalism sometimes do.
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2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Kant's Practical Ideal of Perfect Virtue Nataliya Palatnik (Assistant Professor, Philosophy, UWM) |
One of the questions of the Dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason is: how is moral perfection possible? Kant’s moral argument for the immortality of the soul speaks to this question. Yet, this argument is generally considered to be one of the weakest points in Kant’s practical thought. One important and often cited worry is that it relies on an illegitimate substitution of the idea of holiness for the idea of virtue in the concept of the highest good. It is only because the moral demand to be holy cannot be satisfied in any finite length of time that the argument for immortality even begins to get off the ground. I take steps to mitigate this worry by focusing on the relationship between the perfection of virtue and holiness in the second Critique and clarifying the role of the idea of holiness in Kant’s argument. I then argue that in the last decade of his work, Kant’s conception of the practical ideal of moral perfection shifts away from the idea of holiness and towards that of a perfectly virtuous humanity, providing him with the resources to clarify and strengthen his moral argument for immortality.
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3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Kant's Philosophy of History as Stoic Consolation Rachel Zuckert (Professor, Philosophy, Northwestern) |
At least since Pauline Kleingeld’s defining work, scholars recognize that Kant’s aims in his philosophy of history are practical as well as theoretical: not just to describe history, but also to provide a view of it that supports moral action. Often scholars understand this support to be similar to that provided by the postulates of practical reason: the progressive view of history Kant articulates is taken to be a belief necessarily presupposed in moral agency, supporting the more general belief that the agent’s moral ends are realizable. Prompted by Kant’s description of his view as “consoling” (Idee, 8: 30), I consider whether his view in Idee may instead be interpreted as a form of Stoic consolation on the model of Seneca’s consolatory writings, with a different practical import: to relieve the moral agent from entangling grief concerning large-scale historical events that are out of her control, thereby freeing her to act effectively within her own sphere.
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