A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library should be useful for students interested in philosophy, literature, Germany, intellectual history, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and related subjects.
Kant and Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy. Contexts, Influences and Controversies is edited by Andree Hahmann and Stefan Klingner.
Associate Professor Andree Hahmann teaches philosophy at Tsinghua University, Beijing, the People’s Republic of China.
Dr. Stefan Klingner teaches philosophy at Georg August University Göttingen, Germany.
The TU Library collection also includes several other books by and about Immanuel Kant.
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher of the 1700s.
His work in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy.
He believed that the nature of things as they are in themselves cannot be known to humans.
Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment.
Kant’s religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory.
He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosopher P. F. Strawson.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are political and moral philosophers whose work is influenced by Kant’s moral philosophy.
The Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan was inspired by study of Kant to develop a personal philosophy known as New Confucianism.
Kant has also influenced the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky.
Here are some thoughts by Kant from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:
The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective… Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed… The body is a temple.
- A lecture at Königsberg (1775)
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
- Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784)
Doing good is a duty. Whoever often practices this, and sees the beneficent purpose succeed, comes at last really to love the people who have been benefited. When, therefore, it is said [in the Bible], “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” this does not mean, “First love, and by loving, afterwards do good”; but rather, “Do good to a neighbor, and this beneficence will produce in a love of humanity as a settled habit of tending to want to do good to others.
- Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1780)
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another…Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment…
It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.
Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!…
A public can only arrive at enlightenment slowly. Through revolution, the abandonment of personal despotism may be engendered and the end of profit-seeking and domineering oppression may occur, but never a true reform of the state of mind. Instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones, will serve as the guiding reins of the great, unthinking mass.
All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom; and particularly the least harmful of all that may be called freedom, namely, the freedom for people to make public use of his reason in all matters.
- What is Enlightenment? (1784)
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind… Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself… All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience… It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err — not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all… I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
- Critique of Pure Reason (1787)
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me… I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds… Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
- Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
It is absurd … to hope that maybe another Newton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass.
- Critique of Judgment (1790)
However, he who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards that he gets stepped on… Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
- Metaphysics of Morals (1797)
(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)