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The picture of Kant as the 'theological Robespierre' or the world-crusher was first suggested by someone with whom Kant stood in a relation of philosophical disagreement but also great mutual respect: namely, Moses Mendelssohn.
Allen W. Wood
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Allen W. Wood
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: January 1
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Seattle
Washington
Allen William Wood
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Kant
More quotes by 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
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
Karl Marx left it to others to find the way beyond capitalism to a higher form of society. He saw his role as giving them as accurate a theory as he could of how capitalism works, which would also show them the reasons why it needs to be abolished and replaced by a freer and more human form of society.
Allen W. Wood
I don't think Kant's theory looks bad to people except insofar as they have misunderstood it (for instance, as heartless and ironheaded, or as committed to an absurd metaphysical conception of freedom that violates Kant's own philosophy).
Allen W. Wood
Freedom is an unprovable but unavoidable presupposition, not an article of faith.
Allen W. Wood
Freedom is a permanent problem for us, both unavoidable and insoluble.
Allen W. Wood
People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.
Allen W. Wood
We can't coherently deny, or even decline to affirm, that we are free.
Allen W. Wood
That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.
Allen W. Wood
Fichte is concerned with freedom as non-domination.
Allen W. Wood
Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.
Allen W. Wood
We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.
Allen W. Wood
Empiricist philosophy always tends to be anti-philosophy (and is often proud of it).
Allen W. Wood
Adam Smith was aware of the way that economic interests could have a distorting and destructive effect both on the market and on politics.
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
Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.
Allen W. Wood
If being iron headed is to be lacking such feelings, then Kant's position is that an ironheaded person could not be a moral agent because such a person would not be rational.
Allen W. Wood
Teaching and writing about philosophy is about the only thing I've ever been really good at.
Allen W. Wood
Kant takes a free will to be a being or substance with the power to cause a state of the world (or a whole series of such states) spontaneously or from itself.
Allen W. Wood
Capitalism now seems more likely a swamp, a bog, a quicksand in which humanity is presently flailing about, unable to extricate itself, perhaps doomed to perish within a few generations from the long term effects of the technology which seemed to Marx its greatest gift to humanity.
Allen W. Wood