Kroner’s Interpretation of Kant’s Weltanschauung

Subject Areas : Philosophy

Received: 2013-08-11 Accepted : 2014-01-28 Published : 2014-02-20

Keywords: Ethics, Epistemology, the Thing-in-itself, the Supersensible, Dualism, Subjectivism, Voluntarism,

Abstract :

Abstract The discussion about the primacy of either ethics or epistemology and their relation in Kant’s philosophy has a long history. Any argument in this regard, rests inevitably its foundations upon one of these fields and interprets the other one on the basis of those foundations. Richard Kroner, like other neo-Kantian commentators of the Heidelberg school, understands the Kantian philosophy as a whole which is more a weltanschauung, rather than a closed system like the Hegel’s, in which ethics is prior to epistemology and the practical is superior to the theoretical. According to Kroner’s interpretation, epistemology itself is ethical in essence, and the activity of the reason is a moral action as well. In his interpretation, however, neither ethics nor epistemology fades in favor the other one. According to him, Kant’s Weltanschauung is based on the constant tension between two poles none of which will fade away into the other one. Their contrast is in fact the engine of the struggle of the moral will. Epistemology and ethics are faced with each other on the basis of this very Kantian dialectic. In the present article, I am going to analyze Kroner’s interpretation of Kant’s Weltanschauung and his main theses in his Kant’s Weltanschauung. I will show the status of morality in the Kantian System and explain the relation between epistemology and ethics in this system on the basis of the preliminaries provided by Kroner.

References:

منابع

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