Thursday, September 17, 2009

Kant

So I'm sitting in my Introduction to Ethical Theory course (I told you I'd be blagging everywhere).
Anyway, today we're talking about Immanuel Kant (German philosopher 1724-1804) and his moral philosophy.
Now, Kant had to write three complete works to fully describe his moral philosophy. It is manifested in five separate formulations, two of which deal with complex ideas such as God and the nature of autonomy and freedom. I've talked to Munz about Kant several times, and he told me it's a widely accepted professorial rule that if you're going to teach Kant, to dedicate the bulk of, if not your entire semester on him, because it is extremely difficult to cover all of Kant's ethical theories in a standard college semester.
So imagine my surprise when I saw on the syllabus that we were spending but a single class on it. And we're not learning from reading Kant, but Barbara MacKinnon's short summary of his theory.
I've done a significant amount of reading on Kant, so I came into this class with some background knowledge that the majority of people had not. I can't imagine how mind-boggling some of this stuff must be to people who are taking this class as a simple elective.
I don't know. Maybe I'm over-analyzing, but I'm pretty sure Munz is right on this one.

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