Kant Trouble: Obscurities of the Enlightened

by Diane Morgan

Overview

Kant Trouble offers a highly original and incisive reading of some of the lesser known and less lucid aspects of Kantian thought. Diane Morgan focuses her investigation on a radical reappraisal of Kant's writings on architecture, monarchy and faith in progress. She challenges the widely held view of Kant as the exponent of concrete and rigid rationality, and argues that his airtight "architectonic" mode of reasoning, which Kant identified in The Critique of Pure Reason, overlooks certain topics which destabilize it. Exploring such topics as temporary forms of architecture and the concept of radical evil, Morgan arrives at a fresh and ground-breaking perspective on Kant not as a concrete rationalist but as a daring thinker--willing to entertain subversive themes that threaten his own system and the humanistic legacy of the Enlightenment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415183536
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/06/2000
Series:	Warwick Studies in European Philosophy Series
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.53(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Preface; List of Illustrations; Introduction; a. Freemasonry and the Unfinished Project; b. Landscape Gardening: the 'Folly of Flimsy Construction'; c. The Egyptians, those Obscure Beginners; d. Architecture: Monumentality and Mortality-the ruinous act of foundation; 1: Three Cases of Doubling; Egyptians Groping and the Duplicity of the 'Ka'; Kantorowicz: Kingly Duplicity; Kant: the Founding of the Sovereign and Regicide; General Implications; 2: The Architectonic in Kantian Philosophy I: Of an Uncertain Affinity; 3: The Architectonic in Kantian Philosophy II: Kant, Goethe and Benjamin; 4: Devilish Dissimulations in Human Nature: Radical Ethics and the Evil Abyss; Conclusion: The Revelation of the Impossibility of Revelation : Kant, Hamann, Hegel; Kant-Hamann-Hegel; Conclusion: Kant-Haman-Hegel