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One rational standard of action is how well it promotes the end it seeks. Another standard is whether it aims at ends which are good. Both of these, but especially the former, depend on judgments of fact.

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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Good
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More quotes by Allen W. Wood

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Kant considers belief in God and immortality to be items of faith because he relates faith to the pursuit of ends - in this case, the highest good.
Allen W. Wood
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I could identify for virtually every important figure in the history of modern continental philosophy an idea (or more than one) absolutely central to that philosopher's thought, whose original author was Fichte.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience and practice.
Allen W. Wood
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Those who employ their modest talents as best they can do make a contribution to a better human future.
Allen W. Wood
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Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history.
Allen W. Wood
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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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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
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In general, those who defend capitalism are basically out of touch with reality.
Allen W. Wood
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Not only our moral life, but even our use of theoretical reason - on which we rely in rationally inquiring into nature - presupposes that we are free.
Allen W. Wood
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Not only in order to act morally, but even to formulate theoretical questions, devise experiments, choose which ones to perform and what conclusions to draw from then - we must presuppose that we are free. That's the sense in which it is true that for Kant we must assume we are free.
Allen W. Wood
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What Smith and Marx have in common is that they were both philosophers of great vision and perceptiveness, deep humanity, and a sense of social reality that has been lost in the abstractly formalistic economic theories that have dominated the field since the last third of the nineteenth century.
Allen W. Wood
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We are generally forced to choose one way or the other of distancing ourselves from Kant. I suppose I tend to choose the irreligious way. But I regret that Kant's path has not been followed.
Allen W. Wood
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I don't think Kant's approach to religion is any longer viable in its original form. But that does not mean it is simply wrong or that we cannot learn from it.
Allen W. Wood
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As long as the Republican party exists in its present form, our nation cannot endure as a free society. Still worse, under their policies the human race is being rapidly propelled toward its extinction.
Allen W. Wood
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Freedom is a permanent problem for us, both unavoidable and insoluble.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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When Marx, in the Theses on Feuerbach, says that only idealism up to now has understood the active side of material Praxis, what he says is more true of Fichte than of any other philosopher in the classical German tradition.
Allen W. Wood
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For the utilitarian, there is a fact of the matter about the good (the general happiness, or whatever conception of the good the utilitarian adopts) and about which actions or moral rules would contribute to maximizing the good. For the rational intuitionist, there are truths about which actions should be done and not done.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant does not regard freedom as an item of faith because it is too basic to our agency to be related to any end.
Allen W. Wood