Kantian Subjects Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity

In this volume, Karl Ameriks explores 'Kantian subjects' in three senses. In Part I, he first clarifies the most distinctive features-such as freedom and autonomy-of Kant's notion of what it is for us to be a subject. Other chapters then consider related 'subjects' that are basic topics in other parts of Kant's philosophy, such as his notions of necessity and history. Part II examines the ways in which many of us, as 'late modern,' have been highly influenced by Kant's philosophy and its indirect effect on our self-conception through successive generations of post-Kantians, such as Hegel and Schelling, and early Romantic writers such as Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis, thus making us 'Kantian subjects' in a new historical sense. By defending the fundamentals of Kant's ethics in reaction to some of the latest scholarship in the opening chapters, Ameriks offers an extensive argument that Hölderlin expresses a valuable philosophical position that is much closer to Kant than has generally been recognized. He also argues that it was necessary for Kant's position to be supplemented by the new conception, introduced by the post-Kantians, of philosophy as fundamentally historical, and that this conception has had a growing influence on the most interesting strands of Anglophone as well as Continental philosophy.

1 - Introduction to an Extended Era
2 - On the Many Senses of 'Self-Determination'
3 - From A to B: On 'Critique and Morals'
4 - Revisiting Freedom as Autonomy
5 - Once Again: The End of All Things
6 - Vindicating Autonomy: Kant, Sartre, and O'Neill
7 - On Universality, Necessity, and Law in General in Kant
8 - Prauss and Kant's Three Unities: Subject, Object, and Subject and Object Together
9 - Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism
10 - History, Idealism, and Schelling
11 - History, Succession, and German Romanticism
12 - Hölderlin's Kantian Path
13 - On Some Reactions to 'Kant's Tragic Problem'
14 - The Historical Turn and Late Modernity
15 - Beyond the Living and the Dead: On Post-Kantian Philosophy as Historical Appropriation

Karl Ameriks is the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in the history of modern philosophy, continental philosophy, and modern German philosophy. Much of his research is dedicated to the study of Immanuel Kant about whom he has published multiple books, including Kant's Elliptical Path (Oxford 2012) and Kant's Moral and Legal Philosophy (Cambridge 2009). He has served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Journal of the History of Philosophy and on the editorial boards of Critical Horizons, Kant Yearbook, Oxford Philosophical Concepts, and Philosophisches Jahrbuch.