We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves—or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.
Over a large range of cases, environmental problems arise from our entirely reasonable habit of taking the benefits of our activities, while passing on the costs. The environment is degraded because w...
Music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
Kant’s position is extremely subtle – so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008.
It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists
I think we can all see the force of the idea that there are certain things that cannot be done to human beings – certain basic goods, including life itself, that cannot be taken away from them unless...
He describes a particular faculty, reason, in its illegitimate employment; he also demolishes all the claims to knowledge that this faculty tempts us to make.
Habits of secrecy, made necessary by the actual relations between states, violate the ‘transcendental formula of public right’, which is that an action is wrong if it is not compatible with being made...
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
The power of jealousy is one of the most important facts to be taken account of in the derivation of sexual morality. In a world where sexual prohibitions are of diminishing force, we should not be su...
The growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people...
Society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To
Law of nature that our scientific thinking tends toward the truth, our morality toward the good, and maybe (though he doesn’t go this far) our tastes toward the beautiful.
In a thousand ways people combine not just in circles of friendship but in formal associations, willingly adopting and submitting to rules and procedures that regiment their conduct and make them acco...
Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold f...
We can envisage society as founded in a contract only if we see its members as capable of the free and responsible choice that a contract requires. But only in certain circumstances will human beings...
Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Josef Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of no...
The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'p...
The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.