Quotes About Kantian

The utopian is the one who thinks that the ideal can be realized, and who therefore sets out to destroy the obstacles that stand in its way. The Kantian believes that ideals cannot be realized, since we live in an imperfect world, impeded by empirical circumstances. Ideals must be construed as regulative principles, which guide us down the path of amelioration. Hence we must strive always to amend things, and never to tear them down.

The moral motive comes from setting all my interests aside, and addressing the question before me by appealing to reason alone—and that means appealing to considerations that any rational being would be equally able to accept. From that posture of disinterested enquiry we are led inexorably, Kant thought, to the categorical imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim which we can will as a law for all rational beings.

I call the Platonic mode "misintegration"—M. I call the Aristotelian mode simply "integration"—I. I call the Kantian mode "disintegration"—D.

Moral laws, according to Kant, are a set of orders issued to man by a nonheavenly, nonearthly entity (which I shall discuss shortly), a set of unconditional commandments or "categorical imperatives"—to be sharply contrasted with mere "counsels of prudence.

In the classical liberal order, there was an arbitrary desire to hang the rights of man on a great big invisible sky hook. But whenever you bolt this sky hook into the azure blue, it does not much matter how many extra Kantian bolts you use-the thing simply will not stay up there.

Philosophy is an odd thing... There is no particular Socratic or Dimechian or Kantian way to live your life. They don't offer ethical codes and standards by which to live your life.

Our whole science is still, in spite of all its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself").

Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions.

I do not want to suggest that utilitarianism and Kantian deontology are incorrect as moral theories just because they were founded by men who may have had Asperger's syndrome. That would be an ad hominem argument, a logical error, and a mean thing to say.

Il realismo, per come lo propongo, è una dottrina critica in due sensi. Nel senso kantiano del giudicare che cosa è reale e che cosa non lo è, e in quello marxiano del trasformare ciò che non è giusto.

This leads to a veritable Kantian Antinomy of the aesthetic under late capitalism. Aesthetics must be simultaneously promoted beyond all measure, and yet reduced to nothing.

Kantian philosophical caution is thus not actually as cautious as it pretends to be, for it rests on assumptions that it takes for granted.

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.

There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.

This new philosophical psychology can in this respect be traced back to Maine de Biran, for even if in his time scientific psychology was unaware of its autonomy, and even if Biranian psychology was only critical of that of the empiricists, Biran believed in the Kantian distinction of noumena and phenomena and took care to limit his inquiry to the latter alone, which did not prevent him from extending it in the form of idealist speculations.

I got Jackie into the suite without any outbursts of Kantian Dialectic, and as we settled into our chairs on the balcony and waited for mojitos, Kathy knocked on the door, bustling past me with a haughty glare when I let her in, and heading straight out to Jackie, her hands full of papers and her eternal phone and Starbucks cup.

There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics.

For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality—neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades.

But this 'structural' or concrete a priori is neither a Kantian category nor even a Hegelian idea; it is the universal ground of sense=the sense funally, far fro, being an idea, is a ground. Philosophy seeks in the archeology of the ground, in the depth and not in the height (the ideas)...the ground in the literal sense: the earth.

Strauss's later judgment on the Kantian-Cohenian idea of ethical socialism was dispositive: Cohen's thought belongs to the world preceding World War I. Accordingly, he had a greater faith in the power of modern Western culture to mold the fate of mankind than seems warranted now. The worst things he had experienced were the Dreyfus scandal and the pogroms instigated by Czarist Russia; he did not experience Communist Russia and Hitler's Germany.