Hidden Antinomies of Practical Reason, and Kant’s Religion of Hope
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Rachel Zuckert
Abstract
In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that morality obliges us to believe in the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. I argue, however, that in two late essays - “The End of All Things” and “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” - Kant provides moral counterarguments to that position: these beliefs undermine moral agency by giving rise to fanaticism or fatalism. Thus, I propose, the Kantian position on the justification of religious belief is ultimately antinomial. One ought, moreover, to understand Kant’s considered position concerning the immortality of the soul and the existence of God to be similar to that he proposes concerning the theoretical ideas of reason in the Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason: they are necessary as regulative ideas guiding moral action, not endorsed or even postulated as propositions. In other words, they are subject matters not of belief, but of hope.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
- Titelei
- Table of Contents
- The Internality of Moral Faith in Kant’s Religion
- Kant’s Critical Argument(s) for Immortality Reassessed
- Evil, the Laws of Nature, and Miracles
- Kant’s post-1800 Disavowal of the Highest Good Argument for the Existence of God
- Kant on Contradiction, Conceptual Content, and the Ens Realissimum
- Kant’s Debt to Baumgarten in His Religious (Un‐)Grounding of Ethics
- The Ideal of the Highest Good and the Objectivity of Moral Judgment
- Predication and Modality in Kant’s Critique of the Ontological Argument
- God, Hypostasis, and the Threat of Paradox: Exploring Kantian And Non-Kantian Reasons for Circumspection
- Hidden Antinomies of Practical Reason, and Kant’s Religion of Hope
- List of Contributors
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
- Titelei
- Table of Contents
- The Internality of Moral Faith in Kant’s Religion
- Kant’s Critical Argument(s) for Immortality Reassessed
- Evil, the Laws of Nature, and Miracles
- Kant’s post-1800 Disavowal of the Highest Good Argument for the Existence of God
- Kant on Contradiction, Conceptual Content, and the Ens Realissimum
- Kant’s Debt to Baumgarten in His Religious (Un‐)Grounding of Ethics
- The Ideal of the Highest Good and the Objectivity of Moral Judgment
- Predication and Modality in Kant’s Critique of the Ontological Argument
- God, Hypostasis, and the Threat of Paradox: Exploring Kantian And Non-Kantian Reasons for Circumspection
- Hidden Antinomies of Practical Reason, and Kant’s Religion of Hope
- List of Contributors
- Topics of the Kant Yearbook 2019, 2020 and 2021
