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.

Peirce’s concept of science entails that normative judgment in science, about which types of theory or explanation or evidence, etc., are good, must depend on the evidence provided by the experience of inquiring (Chapter 2), a thesis supported by the history of science (Chapter 3). This implies a method, at once empirical and normative, which Peirce’s late sketch of a trio of ’normative sciences’ (aesthetics, ethics, logic) generalizes and rationalizes. Its generalization is supported by Peirce’s expansion of empiricism (Chapter 7), and its rationalization depends on the rediscovery of final causation (Chapter 6). Although sketchy, Peirce’s idea of normative sciences is important; for its plausibility undermines that most pernicious of dichotomies, of fact and value. This chapter explicates Peirce’s idea of normative science, traces its method from Schiller’s aesthetics through Kant’s ethics, and suggests that the rediscovery of final causation corrects what is most problematic in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, viz., its anti-naturalism.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.