34
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Is it ethical to convince someone to get vaccinated?
You approach the problem from the position that everyone knows and agrees on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. But people don't refuse it because they wish to declare that they are selfish and ...
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30
votes
Is it ethical to convince someone to get vaccinated?
When something has a label on it, it will influence how we think about it, even if the thing isn't what the label says. So I think it's important to define the terms in depth.
Suppose a pharmaceutical ...
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22
votes
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What did Kant say on the invention of new terms?
You are probably referring to the first two paragraphs of the first book of the Transcendental Dialectic (A312-13/B369). Here they are, in Guyer's translation:
"In the great wealth of our ...
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16
votes
Why did Kant, Hegel, and Adorno leave some words and phrases in the Greek alphabet?
Alasdair MacIntyre is a 20th/21st century philosopher writing in English.
Immanuel Kant was an 18th century philosopher writing in German. G.W.F Hegel was a 19th century philosopher writing in German....
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14
votes
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Why were Kant's categories used in the mathematical category theory?
The paper General Theory of Natural Equivalences by Eilenberg and Mac Lane (1945), where the terminology is first introduced, mentions neither Aristotle, nor Kant, nor even Carnap, who was still alive....
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13
votes
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Is it better to read Kant in English or Italian?
It's not necessarily the language, but the edition you should keep an eye on.
As I wrote here, translations of Kant are problematic in and of themselves, partly because even German native speakers ...
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12
votes
Hiring someone is unethical to Kantians because you're treating them as a means?
You're missing an important word. The second formulation of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork is:
Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the ...
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12
votes
Is it ethical to convince someone to get vaccinated?
John Rawls discusses this subject, albeit briefly, in A Theory of Justice. The context is the issue of public goods, for example in light of the free-rider problem. The section is #42 (pg. 237 of the ...
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11
votes
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How can Hegel call philosophy a science?
I think (and I broadly agree here with Eckart Förster, whose book The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy will be quoted here for reference) that Hegel roughly follows Kant's understanding of science. ...
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11
votes
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Where did Kant say that "happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination"?
It occurs in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, here it is in context (from 4:418-19, p.29 in the Gregor's Cambridge translation):
"He is not capable of any principle by which to ...
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11
votes
What did Kant say on the invention of new terms?
See KRV, Transcendental Dialectic. Bk.I : Of Ideas in General :
To coin new words is a pretension to legislation in language which is seldom successful [...].
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10
votes
What does Kant mean by "Existence is not a predicate"?
Mathematical logic, and the associated notion of the existential quantifier, were invented only after Kant's time. Kant used other, more traditional concepts.
The ontological proof (or at least the ...
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10
votes
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Was Kant an Intuitionist about mathematical objects?
You're right to see some resonances between intuitionism and Kant. However, there's no uncontroversial sense in which you could blithely categorize Kant as an intuitionist. I'm not sure I've ever seen ...
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9
votes
For Kant, are spider moms that eat their kids immoral?
For Kant, morality only applies to rational beings. At some points, he will use the word "humanity" as a synonym. Thus, if we look at the second group of formulations of the categorical imperative we ...
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9
votes
What are the counterexamples to Kant's argument that existence is not a predicate?
There are no counterexamples to Kant's "argument" because it is not an argument. It is a view of predication under which being/existence is not a "real" predicate discussed in ...
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8
votes
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What are the more complex/interesting examples of synthetic a priori statements?
The notion of a priori changed a lot since Kant, see Did Kant consider Newtonian mechanics a priori? Today they are seen as potentially fallible, even if not empirical.
The Austrian school, ...
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7
votes
What does Kant mean by "Existence is not a predicate"?
By predicate, I think he means a "property" of the entity, for example, the predicate of being tall. This is the meaning that I'm aware of and which is the meaning we use in mathematical logic.
...
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7
votes
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Kant's universalization explained, How does one universalize a thing?
What is a maxim?
Jens Timmermann argues in his not translated book "Sittengesetz und Freiheit" (DeGruyter, 2003), Chapter IV, that there are at least three different senses in which Kant ...
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7
votes
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Why is there only one Categorical Imperative?
I will try to reconstruct the argument of both the first and second section in detail, as they differ slightly. I freely admit that the argument in the first section is a bit obscure and seems ...
- 14.3k
7
votes
Accepted
What did Kant mean by 'courtesy of the heart'?
To begin with, Kant himself did not speak about courtesy of the heart [Höflichkeit des Herzens] in any of his texts. I made a full-text search in German on the Academy Edition over all 23 volumes - ...
- 14.3k
7
votes
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Why did Kant talk about metaphysics of ethics?
You ask:
[For Kant,] How can there be a metaphysics of ethics?
Let's start by pointing out that Kant does believe there can be Metaphysics of Morals enough so that this appears in the title two of ...
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7
votes
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Can we fit non-euclidean geometry into Kant's theory?
Kant wrote in his first critique:
Space is not a discursive, or as one says, general concept of relations of things in general, but a pure intuition.
This is simply saying we shouldn't confuse the ...
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7
votes
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Did Kant classify the same proposition as both pure and impure a priori?
This is a nice catch, Kant is indeed inconsistent in his use of "pure". Below I am quoting from the Guyer's 1998 translation of the Critique.
In Section I Kant first distinguishes between empirical ...
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7
votes
Is the proposition "I feel happy" analytic or synthetic?
When Kant tells us that in an analytic statement the predicate is contained in the subject, he intends a quite different sense of 'subject' from what you have in mind. 'A triangle has three sides and ...
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7
votes
What is the basis for Kant's misquote "If the truth shall kill them, let them die" (murderer at the door)?
This probably refers to the infamous "murderer at the door" passage from Kant's essay On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy (1797), written near the end of his life. The essay was a ...
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7
votes
What was Kant's argument for absolute space from a single hand being necessarily either left or right?
I will clarify one part, completely and solely from a spatial coordinate standpoint
From that perspective, here is what Kant did not immediately know:
Handedness, or “chirality”, is a fundamental ...
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7
votes
What is the distinction between Gegenstand and Objekt?
In German philosophy, the terms Gegenstand and Objekt are used to refer to different aspects of the concept of an object. In general, the term Gegenstand refers to the relation between a subject and ...
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7
votes
Does the Transcendental Dialectic destroy science?
A very short answer:
Kant does not put science at risk. He rather allows science to thrive as his philosophy, understood correctly, shows that science can only describe our current ability of how we ...
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6
votes
In The Critique of Pure Reason, why does Kant use 5+7=12 as an example of synthetic a priori judgment?
This is old, but in case anybody finds it again: 5 + 7 = 12 is an example used in Plato's Theaetetus. I believe others referred to it as well.
It appears at 196a in the Theaetetus:
"SOCRATES: [196a]...
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