Dudley Will - Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts

Key Concepts

Key Concepts

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Michel Foucault: Key Concepts

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Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts

Edited by Bret W. Davis

Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts

Edited by Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard

Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts

Edited by Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds

Jacques Rancire: Key Concepts

Edited by Jean-Philippe Deranty

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Edited by Kelly Dean Jolley

First published 2011 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Editorial matter and selection, 2011 Will Dudley and Kristina

Engelhard. Individual contributions, the contributors.

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ISBN: 978-1-84465-238-9 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-84465-239-6 (paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Designed and typeset in Classical Garamond and Myriad.

Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard

Gnter Zller

Emily Carson

Dietmar Heidemann

Michelle Grier

Paul Guyer

Kenneth R. Westphal

Georg Mohr and Ulli F. H. Rhl

Katrin Flikschuh

Kirk Pillow

John Zammito

Stephen Houlgate

Patrick Frierson

Emily Carson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University.

Will Dudley is Professor of Philosophy at Williams College.

Kristina Engelhard is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cologne.

Katrin Flikschuh is Reader in Modern Political Theory at the London School of Economics.

Patrick Frierson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Whitman College.

Michelle Grier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego.

Paul Guyer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dietmar Heidemann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Luxembourg.

Stephen Houlgate is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.

Georg Mohr is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bremen.

Kirk Pillow is Interim President of Corcoran College of Art and Design.

Ulli F. H. Rhl is Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Bremen.

Kenneth R. Westphal is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent.

John Zammito is Professor of History at Rice University.

Gnter Zller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich.

Unless stated otherwise, the translations used by the authors are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation (20 vols), Paul Guyer & Allen W Wood (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). See .

Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard

Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy. He spent the first half of his career as a prominent rationalist in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz, before his mid-life encounter with the empiricism of David Hume spurred him to reconsider his most basic beliefs. Kant subsequently undertook a thorough critique of reason, in order to specify its capacities and limitations. The result was a truly novel philosophical position, transcendental idealism, with which Kant claimed to save the possibility of knowledge from Humes scepticism, and to establish the reality of human freedom and moral agency.

Kants achievements transformed philosophy immediately and irrevocably. The initial consequence was the German idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Subsequent movements indebted to Kant (if sometimes primarily as an inspiration for criticism) included Romanticism, naturalism and existentialism. Anglo-American philosophy, which early in the twentieth century defined itself in sharp distinction from the German tradition, has more recently incorporated Kantian insights in every domain. A thorough understanding of Kant is thus indispensable to contemporary philosophers of every stripe.