Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I think the contribution people make is not proportionate to their fame or success. In fact, I think the relation is often… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant thinks we can show that there is no contradiction in supposing we are free. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I think the term "Kantian constructivism" as an oxymoron. Kant was a constructivist about mathematics, but not about ethics. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
The relation of the law to the self is only a helpful way of thinking about the law, that helps us better… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I don't think Kant's theory looks bad to people except insofar as they have misunderstood it (for instance, as heartless and ironheaded,… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I think Fichte did take it further than Kant by arguing that we can regard the moral law as objectively valid only… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant has been famous for his rejection of eudaimonism, but I think Kantian ethics has a great deal in common with Aristotle,… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant did think he had a moral route back to rational faith in God, for those who need it, and he thought… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones,… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
What are we to think of the shortsightedness of the great mass of people who are content to do nothing about it,… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions.… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
It is actually a nice question how far Descartes himself endorses the monological and metaphysically dualistic theory of mind associated with his… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
There is no author or legislator of the moral law. It is simply valid in itself in the nature or essence of… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant's treatments of rational theology and metaphysics were aimed primarily at theoretical questions. His attitude toward the pseudo-sciences of "special metaphysics" in… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
In fact, if you read what Kant has to say about feeling, desire and emotion, you see that he is not at… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
It is absurd for anyone to think that Soviet "Marxism" is a correct application of the thought of Karl Marx. No doubt… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant does not think there is anything wrong with being beneficent from sympathy. He thinks we have a duty to cultivate sympathetic… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant does not think that along with choice of an action we also choose in each case the motive from which we… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
The moral law is simply the way we think our own freedom as self-determination. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I don't think Kant's approach to religion is any longer viable in its original form. But that does not mean it is… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do,… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I think if there were to be a solution to the problem of free will, it would have to be a compatibilist… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant regards the universalizability test for maxims as focused on a very special sort of situation: one where the agent is tempted… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
When people think that moral problems can be solved by some simple strategy of calculation, that sets them up for ghastly overreaching.… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
In my view, there was a long period in which analytical philosophy had little to say about ethics. I think their intellectual… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Both Kant and Fichte thought of traditions of revealed religion as ways of symbolically (that is, with aesthetic emotional power) thinking about… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
I think that both Mill and Sidgwick are great and admirable philosophers, from whom we still have a lot to learn. I… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
As with many metaphysical and religious questions, Kant thinks they lie beyond our power to answer them. If you can't stand the… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
For the utilitarian, there is a fact of the matter about the good (the general happiness, or whatever conception of the good the utilitarian… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
No theory about our bodies as mere objects of observation and calculation (as distinct from partners in communicative interaction, assumed to be free) can… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kantian ethical theory distinguishes three levels: First, that of a fundamental principle (the categorical imperative, formulated in three main ways in Kant's Groundwork); second,… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Some empirical feelings, such as sympathy, are indispensable parts of certain moral virtues. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
We commit not only theoretical error but also moral wrong in objectifying ourselves or other rational beings, ignoring their capacities for free action and… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value. — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
It is sad to witness the persistence in our society of the racism and xenophobia that seems to be a permanent part of our… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
We can never prove that we are free or integrate our freedom in any way into our objective conception of the causal order of… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
Kant regards the universalizability test for maxims as focused on a very special sort of situation: one where the agent is tempted to make… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
My own view is that Kant's conception of the duality of the good (morality and happiness, the good of our person and the good… — Allen W. Wood Copy Share Image
