Repository | Book | Chapter
(2002) Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer.
Even more than his theoretical works, Immanuel Kant's ethical writings can be said to effect a break with traditions of philosophy going back to the ancient Greeks. In particular, his "Copernican Revolution" in metaphysics, purporting to show that reason is incapable of gaining theoretical knowledge of ultimate reality, rules out the approach to ethics most common in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy—one that depends on a metaphysical theory of the good, specifically the human good. In contrast to such "eudaimonistic" 460 theories, Kant provides an alternative conception, often called "deontological," of how reason functions in ethics, one that treats issues of right—of duty, obligation, and law—as amenable to formal or procedural solutions that do not presuppose any metaphysical theory of what material goods are. "Kantianism," then, generally refers to ethical theories that emphasize the need to justify moral and other norms under modern conditions of interest-pluralism—that is, in the absence of agreement over which material values ought to be preferred.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_3
Full citation:
Crowell, S. (2002). Kantianism and phenomenology, in Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 47-67.
This document is unfortunately not available for download at the moment.