Susan Meld Shell Libros

Autonomy for Kant is not just a synonym for the capacity to choose, whether simple or deliberative. It is what the word literally the imposition of a law on one’s own authority and out of one’s own rational resources. In Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, Shell explores the limits of Kantian autonomy―both the force of its claims and the complications to which they give rise. Through a careful examination of major and minor works, Shell argues for the importance of attending to the difficulty inherent in autonomy and to the related resistance that in Kant’s view autonomy necessarily provokes in us. Such attention yields new access to Kant’s famous, and famously puzzling, Groundlaying of the Metaphysics of Morals . It also provides for a richer and more unified account of Kant’s later political and moral works; and it highlights the pertinence of some significant but neglected early writings, including the recently published Lectures on Anthropology.Kant and the Limits of Autonomy is both a rigorous, philosophically and historically informed study of Kantian autonomy and an extended meditation on the foundation and limits of modern liberalism.

This Element examines the entirety of Kant's Critique of Taste (in Part One of the Critique of Judgment) with particular emphasis on its political and moral aims.

This book presents the first full translation of the correspondence of Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger, showing for each the development of key and influential ideas, along with seven interpretative essays by leading Strauss scholars. During the early to mid-1930’s, Leo Strauss carried on an intense, and sometimes deeply personal, correspondence with one of the leading intellectual lights among Heidegger’s circle of recent students and younger associates. A fellow traveler in the effort to “return to Plato” and reject neo-Kantian conventions of the day, Krüger was also a serious student of Rudolf Bultmann and the neo-orthodox movement in which Strauss also took an early interest. During the most intense years of their correspondence, each underwent significant intellectual development: in Krüger’s case, through a penetrating series of studies of Kant and Descartes, respectively, ultimately leading to Krüger’s conversion to Catholicism; and, in Strauss’s case, through the complex stagesof what he subsequently called his “reorientation,” involving what he for the first time calls “political philosophy.” Readers interested in tracing the development of Strauss’s thoughts regarding a theological alternative that he found helpfully challenging—if not ultimately compelling—will find this correspondence to be an accessible point of entry.