POLITICS 305 MODERN POLITICAL THEORY [ 1 ] IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) and COSMOPOLITANISM

Sammy Basu Dept of Politics Willamette University

Cosmopolitanism

Synonyms

Democratic globalization, multiculturalism, internationalism, world citizen, global village

History of Cosmopolitanism:

Greek and Roman Cosmopolitanism

Socrates

Diogenes

Chrysippus

Cicero

St. Augustine

Dante

Early Modern and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism

Erasmus

Montaigne

Grotius

Voltaire

Christoph Martin Wieland

Anarcharsis Cloots

Kant

Adam Smith

Cosmopolitanism in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Distinguish

Empirical cosmopolitanism: interdependence

Moral cosmopolitanism:

- economic, globalization

- cultural

- moral

- political

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/

IMMANUEL KANT

Kant’s works

(1755) General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens

(1781) Critique of Pure Reason – most famous original work

at age 60 he turns to politics:

(1783) Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic which shall lay Claim to being a Science

(1784) What is Enlightenment

(1784) Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

(1790) Critique of Judgement – epistemology

(1792) Theory and Practice

(1793) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone - got him in trouble with the King

(1795) Perpetual Peace

(1797) The Metaphysical Elements of Right

(1798) The Context of the Faculties

- There is no comprehensive treatment of politics offered, rather a series of texts in which principles are advanced and refined, in accordance with his underlying epistemological and metaphysical views

Kant’s epistemological method

- after reading one particular philosopher, David Hume,

- developed esp in his book, The Critique of Pure Reason,

followed by two further Critiques of practical reason, and judgement

Kant took on respectively metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics with the concern of establishing what and how we know what we claim to know

- he turns aside from other available sources of knowledge

- rationalism - world is not a rational order

- empiricism - sensory proofs are uncertain

- irrationalism or romanticism - unreasonable and subjective

Instead

- he argues that the real physical or noumenal world is unknowable

- everything that we know we know through our senses, which means that what we know is the world of appearances, or the phenomenal world.

- his solution is to turn to mental notions which we know to be necessary, universal, noncontradictory and logically independent of sense experience.

- use a priori concepts or categories of understanding

- K's critical method seeks to establish a system of synthetic a priori principles for the purpose of understanding the external world.

- there are logical categories in our mind through which we organize our perception of the world

Having addressed epistemology he then applies this way of thinking to ethics and politics.

more images

http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/Kant_gallery.html

bio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant

http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/kant.htm

more info

http://naks.ucsd.edu/

misc

http://queenellen.com/wetkant/kant01.htm

Readings

LP Pojman. 2005. “Kant's Perpetual Peace and Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of Social Philosophy, 36, 1, 62-71.
Argues that Kant should have gone farther, namely endorse a republican form of world government.
v.
David Parker. 2003. “Diaspora, Dissidence And The Dangers Of Cosmopolitanism.” Asian Studies Review, 27, 2, 155-179.
Discusses the genealogy of the cosmopolitanism in transnationalism and diaspora. Overview of contemporary cross-culturalism; Criticisms against the rights associated with cosmopolitanism; Translocational identities of diasporic communities.

Sept 23 F
Beck, Ulrich, 2004. “Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction between Cosmopolitanism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks, 4, 2, 131-156.
Distinguishes a ‘normative’ or ‘philosophical’ cosmopolitanism on the one hand from an analytical-empirical social science cosmopolitanism, and defends the latter.
v.
David Harvey, 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture, 12, 2, 529-564.
Suspicious of the actual content of the actual geographical and anthropological knowledges collected in the name of cosmopolitanism.