Instructor: Sean Capener

To hear the philosophers tell it, our contemporary moment is inescapably ‘post-Kantian.’ On the one hand, the story goes, the shadow of Kant’s influence looms so large that even those thinkers who repudiate his philosophy do so on the terrain it established. On the other hand, Kant’s shadow looms so large because his philosophy represents an intellectual revolution on a scale comparable to the idea that the Earth revolves around Sun rather than the reverse–a ‘Copernican revolution’ from which, we are told, there is no going back. In this course we will evaluate both Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and the narrative of inescapability that surrounds it, paying particular attention to questions of race, religion, property, and theodicy.