Word: kant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," he quoted Kant, and added that the fact that the world is comprehensible "is a miracle." He also understood his responsibility for the weapons he helped create. "We scientists," he wrote, "whose tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used...
Last week, I spent an evening chewing on one of these practical present-day applications with a friend enrolled in the course. What did Kant think about racial profiling, we wondered aimlessly, until it occurred to us that he didn't--there were and are, thank God, more important things to worry about. Things more fitting for a great philosopher's philosophy, more fitting even for a Harvard student's studies...
...forcing great thinkers into modern political debates with Procrustean zeal, Justice makes mere politics of political philosophy. Kant should be an end in himself. One should not, and does not, have to locate his thinking on our political spectrum to make him interesting. But students in Justice are required to pluck Kant from the clouds, fumble with him in their untutored hands and mold him to a present-day problem--like smashing a butterfly between one's fingers in order to admire its wings. Such familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a false and dangerous sense of intimacy...
Worst of all, when exposed only to simplified and modernized tidbits of philosophy, students can begin to take philosophy itself for granted. If one can easily approach and understand Kant and Aristotle, and one need only look to them to inform contemporary disputes, they become decidedly less lovely. And if one doesn't love Kant and Aristotle, can one really find solace in Marx or Foucault...
...course, youth itself does not prevent students from taking ideas seriously. On one hand, there are the seniors reclining in Sanders' balcony, pondering Kant's thoughts on a free market for women's eggs, and then there is the 20 year-old Friedrich Schelling writing to Hegel. "We must take philosophy further! Kant has destroyed everything; but how is everyone to notice? You would have to crush it to bits before their eyes to make it tangible to them!" Or the 19 year-old Marx who, upon reading Hegel, wrote to his father, "There are moments in one's life...