My Stuff

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





Total Pageviews

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS

In the past few days, I have posted here an exchange between two people named R. Wolff about the proper interpretation of the theories of Karl Marx.  That was of interest, I hope, to the readers of this blog for whom Marx is an important figure.  I should like now to post something even longer that will, I also hope, be of interest to readers of this blog for whom Kant is a major figure.  Some words of explanation are called for.

I began my career as a student of Kant's philosophy.  Eventually I published two original books about Kant's thought [and several edited books, but they do not count.]  The first dealt with the arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason.  The second was a commentary on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.  

I found in the First Critique what I believed to be a coherent, connected argument for Kant's central thesis, namely that the validity of the Causal Maxim can be derived from the premise: "The 'I Think' attaches to all my representations."  In my own mind, if not that of my readers, my first book on Kant was thus a success.

But I struggled for years to find an argument in the Groundwork that could be construed, however generously, as a coherent defense of the claim that the Moral Law is unconditionally binding on all rational agents as such.  In the end, therefore, I thought of my second book as a failure.

Many years later, while reading a work I had always considered one of Kant's lesser productions, namely the Metaphysics of Morals, I more or less stumbled on an argument by Kant that I believed finally went a long way to completing the unsatisfactory argument of the Groundwork.  By this point [the late 1990s] I had long since stopped publishing in Philosophy journals or in other ways participating in the social life of the profession.  I had even transferred to an Afro-American Studies Department where I was happily running a doctoral program in that field.  So I wrote up what I had found and put it away in my file drawer of unpublished essays.  Some while later, I was invited to contribute an original essay to a volume to be called Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Social Philosophy, edited by Jane Keller and Sidney Axinn.  The volume was published by the State University of New York Press in 1998 and, so far as I know, was read by virtually no one.

Which is, in a way, unfortunate, because I think my essay was a really significant contribution to the scholarship on Kant's moral philosophy.

So I am going to post it here on my blog.  Who knows?  Maybe someone will finally read it.

No comments: