Events

A Critique of Pure Practical Reason

Wednesday 10 March
16:00 until 18:00
Bramber House Room 232
Speaker: Sam Reznek
Part of the series: SUPSOC Seminars

Kant’s moral philosophy is centered on two main ideas. These are freedom and reason. Morality, for Kant, is the free construction of pure practical reason. In the first part of my paper, I explain how this idea fits into Kant’s overall system and how the system fits into history. In the second part, I launch a critique of pure practical reason—a critique Kant himself thought unnecessary. I argue that when we strip Kant’s system down to its bare essentials and cast out its dogmatic assumptions, it leaves us in a moral vacuum. Completely ungrounded we are struck with vertigo. The enlightenment that pure reason affords merely illuminates the nothingness this vacuum. Sartre’s existentialism is the attempt to live with this predicament. I argue that we need not go so far. The predicament is an historical artifact and can be discarded once we uncover an appropriate sense of impure reason. I argue we can and that this impure reason illuminates the plurality of goods open to free agents rather than vertigo inspiring nothingness.

Sam Reznek is an associate tutor at the University of Sussex who is currently working towards a Dphil on morality.

More information at www.supsoc.org