Teleology, culture and political progress in Kant

• Grant number: 07/01081-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2007
• End date: September 30, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Ribeiro Terra
• Grantee: Bruno Nadai
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

I intend to examine the relation between teleology, political progress and culture in Kant’s work along the decade of 1790. In §83 of Critie of Judgment Kant shows that is possible to judge man as the ultimate end in a teleolgical system of nature. Man can only be judged as such because he is the only being in nature that have the aptitude to choose unconditioned ends (moral ends) and, by this way, make hinself final end [Endzweck]. Culture, understood as the production of the aptitude of the rational beeing to chosse any ends, is what, preparing man to make hinself final end, allows to judge him as the ultimate end of nature. Kant sustains that culture has in the civil society the formal condition of its development, in such a way that without the progress of the institution of the civil society (what Kant understood as human history) there is no place to the production of the human aptitude to choose any ends. From the relation between ultimate end and final end, I intend to understand how Kant thinks the question of the possibility of the passage from culture, and political progress, to moral.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

NADAI, Bruno. Progress and morality in Kant\'s philosophy of history. 2011. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.