Although no direct claim for the autonomy of spheres was advanced in the scholastic speculations discussed in Chapter 5, such notions would be put forward in the circles where humanism and the artistic renewal pursued in contact with it emerged in Renaissance Italy. A powerful example was Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that what caused art and architecture to decline from its ancient heights was the substitution of religious values for aesthetic ones by Christianity as it became established under the Roman Empire. This defense of aesthetic autonomy would become more general and explicit as the expansion of the audience for painting and sculpture and the display of art objects in locations specifically dedicated to them – museums and galleries instead of churches or princely and noble residences – confronted viewers with “art as such,” and it would be theorized in Kant’s aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, which removed both religious and social value from judgments about art. But this development was singularly European. No similar move toward attributing autonomy to the aesthetic sphere would take place in India, China, or Muslim territories, despite the many beautiful objects produced in all of them and the exalted position attributed to artists in some.

This chapter argues that Vico’s philosophy, Kant’s transcendentalism, and Victor Cousin’s eclecticism, were merged together by legal thinkers in Naples in 1830s and 1840s to forge a philosophical foundation for law based on universal principles and derived from the study of society. The adoption of Hegel in Naples transformed Vico’s philosophy of history into the dialectical unfolding of an absolute rationality identified with the idea of freedom. According to Neapolitan thinkers, Hegel’s philosophy of history became the realization of a universal reason that was acknowledged as the idea of freedom. Building on Vico, Hegel’s philosophy of history disclosed to Neapolitan legal thinkers the universal law that guided the progress of all nations. By drawing on Hegel and Vico the Neapolitan Hegelians were endeavouring to establish the principle of nationality as the expression of both inner liberty and the political liberty that unfolds within historical institutions.

Yoon Sun Lee discusses how Enlightenment understandings of race shaped ideas about inheritance, such that property ownership came to be understood in racialized terms and race came to be understood in economic terms. Burke’s and Kant’s writings about heritability thus shed light on the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby, as Lee puts it, “enslaved women of African descent bore children who counted not as population that could inherit things but as property that could be inherited by others, on the basis of a color that had to be ascribed or assumed as the material sign of a legal condition.”

The introduction introduces the concept of imagination used in the book, explains the relation of art and of faith to this concept, and discusses the approach and method of the book, highlighting its understanding of theology and theology’s relationship to phenomenology and to other disciplines. The introduction concludes with an overview of the plan of the book.

Some of the criticism that followed the publication of The Origin of Species was generated by theological prejudice. Few experts in the field would deny or doubt that. However, Darwin and his followers lumped these critics together with other detractors whose objections were first and foremost of a scientific kind, collectively painting them with the tar brush of creationism. A case in point is the enduring misrepresentation – from Darwin till Dawkins – of Owen and several of his allies. Yet Owen had been an adherent of evolution well before his critique of Darwin’s 1859 book. He himself was severely censured by creationists when he put forward his famous vertebrate archetype as palpable evidence for the evolutionary origins of backboned animals. His approach to origins was in fact more comprehensive than the Darwinian one. It had been developed previously, from the year 1755 on, when Kant published his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. Kant’s unified theory of evolution had many and eminent followers, not least Humboldt with his first two volumes of Kosmos. Denigrating Owen’s critique as theologically prejudiced and without a sound scientific basis is a Darwin myth.

To illuminate the notion of ‘totality’ in Wagner’s conception of the ‘total art work’ or Gesamtkunstwerk, this chapter invokes Schopenhauer’s claim that ordinary life is like a phantasmagoria or dream – a claim that epitomises his interpretation of Kant’s theory of knowledge. The chapter associates the notion of a phantasmagoria with that of a dream, and the latter with the nineteenth-century conception of the unconscious, in particular as presented in Freud’s characterisation of dreams as multidimensional semantic expressions. Wagner’s operas are accordingly considered to be phantasmagorias in this dream-associated sense. Wagner is often appreciated as a forefather of modernism, but by recognising the phantasmagoric, semantically-multidimensional quality of his operas he can be seen further as a forefather of postmodernism.

This chapter examines the view that state creation requires the existence of a normatively legitimate government. It begins by defining governmental legitimacy, arguing that it is best analysed in terms of the moral justifiability of individual acts of governance, whether viewed individually or in aggregate. Next, it considers what it means for institutions, social conventions, and legal principles to be legitimate before moving on to consider the negative argument that no theory of state creation that excludes a criterion of governmental legitimacy could ever be morally plausible. Having dismissed this objection as mistaken, the chapter then examines a range of legitimacy-based reconstructions, which draw respectively upon the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke. Each position is critiqued and dismissed as an implausible approach to the law of state creation.

What is Enlightenment? In a certain sense, The Magic Flute may be understood as a playing out of Immanuel Kant’s answer to that question: “Sapere aude! [dare to know] – Have the courage to use your own understanding” – a challenge that is at the core of Tamino’s perilous journey. But the idea of Enlightenment and the complexity of original thought encompassed under its banner demands of us that we examine the deeper questions that it asks: What view of Enlightenment is conveyed in Mozart’s music and Schikaneder’s libretto, and how does this view accord with those strains of thought and expression, of wit and sensibility, that we take to constitute the defining aura of the Enlightenment? The great arias of Tamino and Pamina, studied as embodiments of these qualities, are viewed against the master plots of the opera.

A decade before becoming famous for his prose narratives, W.G. Sebald worked on two film projects that remained unrealized in his lifetime and have not yet been extensively studied. These intended films were to focus on the lives of two philosophers, Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but Sebald only tangentially engages with their philosophical work. Instead, the film scripts consist of biographical sketches and, in the case of the Wittgenstein project, images. A closer look at these two projects reveals Sebald in a transitional phase in his development from academic to literary author. The works bear similarities to the style and themes for which he later became known: intertextuality, the pitfalls of human progress, and death. The Wittgenstein project also marks a starting point for Sebald’s interest in characters who bear a resemblance to the philosopher, which would persist throughout his literary career.

In this chapter Chris Meckstroth explains how Immanuel Kant responded to the urgent political question of the 1780s and 1790s, how to understand the collective agency of the people or nation, with a novel conception of history. Kant thought we must believe progress is possible if we are to sustain a commitment to acting justly. To this end he re-worked arguments of Leibniz and Pope, who had tried to show that we live in the best of all possible worlds, thereby absolving God of responsibility for evil and saving the coherence of moral duty from scepticism. Kant, however, did not pitch his argument to the religious conscience of individuals. He aimed at political rulers whose authority derived from representing the general will of an entire people. His political thought focussed on principles a ruler must respect to count as that sort of representative. To these his philosophy of history added a concern for improvement over time, which he made plausible by drawing on a mechanism of unsocial sociability familiar in authors such as Pope. The result was a new, secular theodicy of progress favouring peace and republican politics, and designed to contain conflict in an age of democratic reform.

Kant’s contribution to moral education is deep, wide, and operates at several levels, including moral theory, the theory of judgment (both theoretical and moral), ethics and politics, anthropology, and culture. Kant’s pedagogy runs through his “system,” including the three Critiques but also his articles and books detailing empirical concerns, such as, for example, his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The scholarship on Kant’s notion of education is equally broad and discusses each and all these themes. A taste of the range of scholarship is provided to the reader who is unfamiliar with the literature on Kant’s pedagogy and the role of it in his theoretical, moral, ethical-political, and cultural accounts. This will extend from a broad introduction of the scholarship to specific scholars and their respective accounts. Finally, five questions bearing on Kant’s account of education and its relationship to his other works and for present circumstances are drawn as indications for future scholarly directions.

According to a widespread narrative of early modern philosophy, the early modern period was characterised by the development of Descartes’, Spinoza’s, and Leibniz’s rationalism and Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s empiricism. The early modern period came to a close once Immanuel Kant, who was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, combined the insights of both movements in his new Critical philosophy and inaugurated the new eras of German idealism and late modern philosophy. Several scholars have criticised this narrative for overestimating the importance of epistemological issues for early modern philosophers, portraying Kant’s Critical philosophy as a superior alternative to empiricism and rationalism and forcing most early modern thinkers prior to Kant into the empiricist or rationalist camps. Kant’s three Critiques are the first published works that explicitly contrast the terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. This chapter sets out Kant’s contributions to the genesis of the historiographical narrative based on the dichotomy of empiricism/rationalism and argues that Kant is not directly responsible for the biases of that narrative. Kant did not regard the empiricism/rationalism distinction as purely epistemological, did not portray most of his early modern predecessors as empiricists or rationalists, and did not place himself over and above empiricism and rationalism.