 | A Course with Professor Thomas Patrick Burke
September 2007 to January 2008Listen to the audio recording:
Session 1 from September 12, 2007 is unavailable
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Session 5 - Part I & Part II
Session 6 - Part I & Part II
Session 7
Session 8 - Part I & Part II
Session 9
Session 10
Session 11 - Part I & Part II
Session 12
Session 13 - Part I & Part II
Session 14 - Part I & Part II
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Immanuel Kant is considered by many who know his work the greatest of philosophers. He is also the outstanding philosopher of both freedom and individual responsibility. His philosophy represents in many ways the high point of classical liberalism. This shines through especially in his account of morality. Living most of his life before the French Revolution, he was the last great Western thinker whose mental universe was untouched by its gospel of "equality" or the notion it gave rise to of "social justice." His understanding of morality plumbed depths that no other thinker has rivalled, and that, once understood, are unforgettable.
Kant's moral philosophy is a brilliant solution for a profound problem. The problem was to find a rational foundation for morality. This has been a difficulty from time immemorial, for although morality plays a central role in our lives, there has never been a generally accepted criterion for what was right and wrong. Any of us can claim that anything is moral or immoral depending on nothing more substantial than how we happen to feel at that particular moment, and it has been difficult to refute even extravagant claims by means of rational arguments that most people would find persuasive. The problem became more acute after the rise of science in the seventeenth century, for the physical sciences owe their immense success to their skepticism: they are unwilling to accept any hypothesis as true unless it can be demonstrated by hard evidence, and it is impossible to find hard empirical evidence, of the sort that science is compelled to accept, for beliefs about right and wrong.
Many philosophers after Galileo took refuge therefore in utilitarianism, attempting to show that the principles of morality were right because in the long run they led to the best consequences. This had the appearance of being something observable and therefore scientific. But it also left many feeling uneasy, for, as Cicero had argued in a splendid book ( De Officiis: On Duties), there is a vast gap between morality and expediency. True morality means acting on principle, but acting on expediency means sacrificing principle. In the course of daily life, probably most people would agree with this. But where can we find a foundation for our moral principles that reasonable people can agree on?
Kant arrived at a very ingenious solution to this problem, which is in harmony with our general feelings about morality, but rejects the concern for utility that so many thinkers have settled for. Along the way he struck a great blow for the free society. If you would like to discover Kant's solution, join us in this course.
Reading List:
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
The Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)
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