The event is organized by KanDem -- The Kantian Foundations of Democracy. For a zoom link, contact reidar.maliks@ifikk.uio.no
4. February GM652
10:00-11:30 Olivier Higgins, (University of Oxford) Kant and the Politics of Progress
Among its signature achievements, Kant’s political philosophy situated the real state on a historical continuum with the ideal republic, the two separated by a process of uninterrupted reform. In Kant’s day, this process called upon a republicanizing king, tasked with initiating top-down political change that averted the turmoil of revolution. This vision of a rights-minded monarch drew scrutiny from Kant’s early readers, many of them defenders of a right to revolution, but it has more often vanished from view in contemporary treatments of Kantian political philosophy. This paper returns to Kant’s outlook on progress and dynastic rulers, rooted in eighteenth-century discourses on theodicy and enlightened monarchy. Kant’s earliest political remarks sought to reclaim princely honour, so often directed at war and conquest, for the peaceful human fate willed by providence. This was the beginning of a decades-long argument by which Kant, far from simply relying upon the moral compunction of rulers, would confront them with human progress and the corresponding judgment of posterity. By the 1790s, Kant famously found proof of progress in the developments of the French revolution. This confronted his powerful readers with the honour that ordinary citizens bestowed upon the concept of right (Recht), and with it a vision of popular sovereignty developed in Kant’s own political works. By illuminating Kant’s place in a tradition of moral Machiavellianism, this paper presents him as an underappreciated and unusually astute thinker on the politics of progress. For historians, this helps to situate Kant as an important hinge figure between eighteenth-century appeals to the enlightened monarch and the nineteenth-century politics of constitutional monarchy. For theorists, this Kantian legacy illuminates how democratic majorities can draw the future into acts of political judgment that push for political change.
11:45-13:15 Antonino Falduto, (University of Ferrara) On human freedom as reason’s embodiment – from a Kantian standpoint
In my paper, my aim is to challenge the traditional interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom, which typically locates its core understanding within the noumenal sphere. Instead, I will argue that positive human freedom is grounded in the living human body with its distinct beginning (birth) and end (death). In this way, I will show how the human body provides the temporal existence for infinite reason and, conversely, how the embodiment of reason is the condition to bring autonomy in the natural, phenomenal world.
13:15-14:15 Lunch
14:15-16:00 Micheal Kryluk, (University of Fribourg) Kant and Democracy: Republicanism versus Despotism, Representation versus Populism
Despite Kant’s considerable influence on contemporary political philosophy and democratic theory, his precise stance on democracy remains uncertain and controversial. This essay aims to clarify and evaluate Kant’s views on democracy by examining two overlapping distinctions in his political theory: (1) the difference between republican and despotic governance; and (2) the difference between representative democracy and populism. This results in not only a better understanding of Kant’s complex stance on democracy, but also lays the foundations for a novel Kantian analysis of populism.
5. February GM 452
10:00-11:30 Chiara Mosti, (University of Oslo), Choosing and wishing
In the presentation, I will consider the difference between choosing and wishing in Kant’s practical philosophy. My thesis is that, through that difference, Kant’s philosophy of history – and so the concept of a Bestimmung of the human being – proves its relevance in Kant’s practical philosophy and in defining the act of choice. As Kant writes in the Metaphysics of Morals: ‘Insofar as [the faculty to do or to refrain from doing as one pleases] is joined with one’s consciousness of the ability to bring about its object by one’s action it is called choice [Willkür]; if it is not joined with this consciousness its act is called a wish [Wunsch]’ (6:213). Engaging with the scholarship, I will argue that Kant’s account of choice and wish distances him from contemporary ones. I consider choosing and wishing as two acts of the faculty of choice, and ask what kind of consciousness is connected to them: Do we choose when we have a belief in our abilities? Some theoretical knowledge of our abilities? Is wish then connected to a lack of that belief or knowledge? I will argue that we choose when we have a practical self-consciousness of our abilities grounded in the concept of the human being as presented in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and teleological writings. By contrast, we wish when our desiderative representation does not correspond to an engagement of our empirical character, as it is reflected in Kant’s given examples of wishes throughout his works.
11:45-13:15 Luigi Caranti, (Università degli studi di Catania) Seven Democratic Pathologies. A Kantian Diagnosis and a quasi-Kantian Cure
What can be learned from Kant’s complex—and arguably ambivalent—view of democracy? This paper argues that Kant’s analysis identifies at least seven major “diseases” to which democratic systems are especially prone: 1) partisanship, 2) privatization of politics, 3) dictatorship of the private, 4) conflation between the electorate and the people, 5) threat to the separation of powers, 6) illusion of an unlimited mandate, 7) democratic nationalism These “diseases” are understood as tendencies toward despotism that are internal to democracy’s own logic: intrinsic, yet not irremediable, particularly when they are recognized as such. After delineating these seven pathologies, the paper turns to the question of remedies. It contends that although Kant offers valuable insights—some of which are especially illuminating for understanding the contemporary crisis of democracy—his political thought remains insufficiently attentive to the ways in which unbounded material inequality can convert a pathological tendency into a full-blown disease, thereby transforming a republican democracy into a despotic regime.
13:15 Lunch
14:15-16:00 Pauline Kleingeld, (University of Groningen), Republicanism in Kant’s Groundwork
- Organized under the aegis of Philosophical Seminar
Many key aspects of Kant’s Groundwork, from the Categorical Imperative to his conception of autonomy and freedom of the will, have long been the subject of heated debates. One resource for understanding the Groundwork has thus far gone virtually unused, however: the transcript of Kant’s lectures on legal and political philosophy from the very months in which he was writing the Groundwork. In this paper, I argue that the ‘republican’ features of the political theory that Kant defends in these lectures shed important new light both on Kant’s conception of the supreme moral principle and on his understanding of freedom and autonomy.
6. February GM 452
10:00-11:30 Jens Timmermann, (University of St. Andrews), Kant’s theory of sympathy
Kant’s theory of sympathy is puzzling. There is a tension between his dismissal of sympathetic action in the Groundwork (1785) and his recommendation that we act sympathetically in § 35 of the Doctrine of Virtue (1797). Kant appears to have changed his mind, abandoning the motivational rigorism of his earlier works to adopt a more pluralistic, perhaps realistic theory of the moral value of actions. In my lecture, I argue that that is not the case. In the later work, Kant does tell us to make strategic use of sympathy to compensate for any remaining imperfections. But this is no more than a temporary substitute for the genuine moral motive. What is to be cultivated is not sympathy but pure moral interest or respect for the law, which will take over from sympathy as a motive as we progress on our path towards virtue. And yet, sympathy as a motivational substitute has its benefits, particularly in imperfect political systems.
11:45-13:15 Antonino Falduto, (University of Ferrara), Kant on education: realising the moral vocation of humankind
Kant’s thoughts on education are often taken to be a minor contribution in the history of thought. Nevertheless, based on his belief that the vocation of the human being is to live the law of reason, Kant considered education a constitutive part of ethical thought, in that it brings humans closer to their supreme goal of realising themselves as rational beings. In my paper, I aim to offer a new interpretation of Kant’s theory of education. First, I will underline the importance of engaging with practices that allow autonomous individuals to materially realise their self-determination; second, I will show why education is the necessary element in fostering the subjective side of ethics. In doing so, I will conclusively shed some light on education’s capacity to foster independent thought, individual responsibility, and its potential for fostering the political progress of humanity.
13:15 Lunch
14:15-16:00 Advisory session for PhD scholars (closed session)