“Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist” in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Brooks Atkinson (New York: the Modern Library, 1940), 87-103.
However, both a materialist and an idealist can choose the “middle way” of Critical Idealism without succumbing to the illusions/delusions of materialist or rationalist metaphysics, AND by doing so one possibly can contribute to making a better world.
13 November 2016
“Die größeste Angelegenheit des Menschen ist zu wissen wie er seine Stelle in der Schöpfung gehörig erfülle und recht verstehe was man seyn muß um ein Mensch zu seyn.” (Immanuel Kant, Bemerkungen in den ‘Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen,’ neu herausgegeben und kommentiert von Marie Rischmüller, Hamburg 1991, 36)
“The most important issue is to know how one properly fulfills one’s place in creation and correctly understands what one must be in order to be a human being.” (Immanuel Kant, Comments in ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime,’ ed. by Maria Rischmüller, Hamburg 1991, 36) [McGaughey translation]
1 February 2017
The Site’s Goal!
This site’s aim, above all, is to contribute in the English-speaking world to a thinking with (rather than thinking against or seeking to improve) the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Critical Idealism). The task to think with Kant constitutes the tradition of Critical Idealism and includes in the German-speaking world, among others to be sure, Benno Erdmann (skeptical methodology and Copernican Revolution), the Marburg Neo-Kantians that include Hermann Cohen (epistemology and mathematical sciences, religion), Paul Natorp (truth as unconcealment, Being as ontological root, and religion), and Ernst Cassirer (functionalism and symbolic forms) to the renewed interest in Kant that one finds in Germany today especially around Otfried Höffe (Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, Kant’s philosophy of history and cosmopolitanism) and Dieter Henrich (subjectivity and epistemology), as well as Birgit Recki (reason and feelings). … read more
