Immanuel Kant Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

How to Move Beyond Our Endless Disagreements over Abortion Policies

A Kantian solution to what seems an insoluble moral conflict

November 8, 2023 • by Helga Varden

Philosophy can help us understand why such laws do not and, in fact, cannot depend upon our deeply personal beliefs. The Kantian philosophical tradition, for instance, has the advantage of appealing to anyone who is committed to each person’s right to freedom....

How to Move Beyond Our Endless Disagreements over Abortion Policies

Gender

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

October 11, 2022 • by Skye C. Cleary and Luis Jaramillo

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

Philosophy

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

A series of lectures belatedly published in English sheds new light on the mind of a moralist

September 14, 2021 • by Laura Nelson

1 Richard Rorty, the American philosopher and public intellectual who died in 2007, is perhaps best known as “the philosopher who predicted Donald Trump.” In Achieving Our Country, a book articulating his reflections on the possibilities and prospects for democracy in the United States, Rorty worried that economic inequality, coupled with ...

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

Politics

Expendable Bodies

What Sophocles can teach us about our political moment

June 25, 2020 • by Daniel Schillinger

An ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Philoctetes, can help us to think holistically about our own political moment. What Sophocles shows us is that the same bodies the polity dominates, annihilates, or consigns to suffering in isolation it also tends to use for its own ends. That political communities too often view ...

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Telescopes for our Senses

The Interstellar Imagination of Alexander Kluge

March 29, 2019 • by Max L. Feldman

In his Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant said two things fill the mind with awe: “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” This image, bridging the vast gap between our inner lives and outer space, is vital for Alexander Kluge, too. We need to develop “the ...

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Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto

An Excerpt

January 30, 2018 • by Bryan W. Van Norden

The following article is an edited excerpt from Chapter 1 of ‘ Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto’(2017), by Bryan W Van Norden, with a foreword by Jay L Garfield, published by Columbia University Press. The canon of mainstream philosophy in the Anglo-European world is narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even xenophobic. I know ...

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In the Spirit of Disruptive Action

A Stand Against Torture

September 22, 2017 • by Charles E. Snyder

The protests against Yoo and the APSA in San Francisco this week revealed the way in which universities and college campuses are entangled within broader systems of violence, torture, and oppression. In other words, universities and college campuses in the U.S. are not what they so often claim to be: ...

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A Pre-History of Post-truth

East and West

September 1, 2017 • by Marci Shore

The end of “The End of History” arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter ...

Power and Crisis

Moral Sentiment and Moral Judgment after the Paris Attacks

On the problem of selective solidarity

November 18, 2015 • by Michael Weinman

Ever since the dust began to clear after what President Hollande rightfully called "the horror" of Friday night, my media consumption -- yes, especially my Facebook feed (constantly refreshed with reflections from Public Seminar) ...

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Power and Crisis

The Ethics and Politics of Responsible Belief

On liberalism and faith

August 18, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Prior to his death in June 2007, Richard Rorty turned his attention to religious belief and its place in the public sphere. Rorty had long been presenting himself as the “village atheist” in the domains both of academic philosophy and public intellectualism: he viewed religious belief as the ...