MORALITY, RELIGION, AND OUR BASIS IN THE WORLD: PROBLEMS AROUND KANT

My thesis is divided into three closely interconnected essays. In this abstract I give a brief description of each chapter.;One way to see if Kant can become a part of our current cultural life is to try to find an example of a moral view, espoused by an English-speaking philosopher, that is an authentic appropriation of Kant's moral theory. It is in this role that I cast John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.;Chapter Two. Kant believed that the traditional relation between morality and religion must be inverted, thus basing religion on morality, and this belief and its consequences form the core of his view of the religious life. Not only did he argue, in the Critique of Pure Reason, for the claim that we cannot have theoretical knowledge of religious matters, but he thought that, even if we could have it, such knowledge would undermine morality by forcing us into forms of irrational religiosity. This latter argument is contained in its most thorough and developed form in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.;Chapter Three. If any twentieth-century philosopher can be said to have inherited Kant's philosophical problems, that philosopher is likely to be Martin Heidegger. But Heidegger's way of inheriting Kant, his way of inheriting the activity of philosophy, is in terms of a wish to overturn it, to pass beyond it. Heidegger, early in his philosophical career, himself proclaimed, "I am a Christian theologian," and I take these words as the expression of both an intention and a prediction. Yet Heidegger's prophecy about himself must be read against the backdrop of Kant's moral religion. No self-proclaimed Christian theologian, who was born a philosopher, can any longer hope to have a pre-Kantian theology. And yet, in a sense, this is exactly what Heidegger would like to have. Heidegger's desire is to be a pre-Kantian after Kant. My primary aim, though, is to show that Heidegger does stand in a long line of thinkers who fight the battle of philosophy and theology.;Chapter One. Immanuel Kant's moral theory has suffered a discouraging fate at the pens of English-speaking philosophers. Or perhaps I should say that this fate is discouraging for one who believes, as I do, that Kant's moral conception contains something distinctive and distinctively valuable. From Sidgwick to Bradley to Hare, Kant's view has been interpreted as merely formal, correct enough perhaps but without sufficient content to provide any distinctive moral conception.