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Kant says that we may regard ourselves as legislator of the moral law, and consider ourselves as its author, but not that we are legislators or authors of the law.
Allen W. Wood
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Allen W. Wood
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: January 1
Academic
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Seattle
Washington
Allen William Wood
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Kant
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More quotes by Allen W. Wood
No theory about our bodies as mere objects of observation and calculation (as distinct from partners in communicative interaction, assumed to be free) can comprehend human nature.
Allen W. Wood
It is a culturally interesting (but also deeply depressing) fact that many religious claims seem to retain their emotional power for believers only if taken in ways that are intellectually unsupportable and even morally contemptible.
Allen W. Wood
Kant's system of duties constitutes a Doctrine of Virtue because the duties also indicate what kinds of attitudes, dispositions and feelings are morally virtuous or vicious.
Allen W. Wood
Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized.
Allen W. Wood
Kant does not think that the silly commandment universalize your maxims is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances.
Allen W. Wood
We can establish empirical criteria for free actions, and investigate human actions on the presupposition we are free.
Allen W. Wood
We can't coherently deny, or even decline to affirm, that we are free.
Allen W. Wood
What are we to think of the shortsightedness of the great mass of people who are content to do nothing about it, and even worse, the greed or venality of the rich and powerful who deliberately bar the way to human survival?
Allen W. Wood
Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter than the former.
Allen W. Wood
Capitalism has proven to be a far more terrible system than Marx could ever bring himself to imagine. Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims.
Allen W. Wood
Kant did think he had a moral route back to rational faith in God, for those who need it, and he thought that at some level, we all do need something like it.
Allen W. Wood
Those who employ their modest talents as best they can do make a contribution to a better human future.
Allen W. Wood
We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.
Allen W. Wood
Being aware of truths about what is good or right or about what we ought to do is not the same as deciding what to do. Nor can the former truths be derived from decisions about what to do, or about procedures for making such decisions, unless these procedures themselves rest in some way on the apprehension of truths about what we ought to do.
Allen W. Wood
Marx's writings still have something to teach us about capitalism. They have little or nothing to teach us about any alternatives to it. Anyone who had read them knows that.
Allen W. Wood
I think Fichte did take it further than Kant by arguing that we can regard the moral law as objectively valid only by seeing it as addressed to us by another being, even though Fichte thought God could not literally be a person who could address us.
Allen W. Wood
It seems to me self-evident that it is worthwhile to understand the best thoughts of the past, to appropriate them, to criticize them.
Allen W. Wood
Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx.
Allen W. Wood
Until I was a junior in high school, I was a boy scientist type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Allen W. Wood
Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.
Allen W. Wood
