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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

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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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Basic
Regard
Freedom
Faith
Kant
Ends
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Items
Agency

More quotes by 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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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
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Surely the world will be a better place, at least marginally, if people have a better understanding of Kant and Hegel, if Marx's thought its studied and appreciated, if people gain a better understanding of Fichte, whose philosophy is far more important than people realize.
Allen W. Wood
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What is central to morality is rational self-constraint (acting from duty), in cease where there is no other incentive to do your duty except that the moral law commands it.
Allen W. Wood
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I do not know how much my own work has achieved, and I must not pretend it has done more than it has.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.
Allen W. Wood
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If the problem of free will is to see how freedom fits into the order of nature, then Kant's basic view about the free will problem is that it is insoluble.
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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There is a tradition of modernist theology arising out of post-Kantian thought - Fichte was the real father of it, but Schleiermacher and others also developed it - which might have more promise if it had greater influence on popular religion.
Allen W. Wood
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That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.
Allen W. Wood
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We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.
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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Kant is not saying - about freedom or any other subject - anything of the form: Not-p but we must assume that p. That's close to self-contradictory, like Moore's paradox: p, but I don't believe that p.
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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Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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The Russian revolution did not occur until a generation after Marx's death. He was not involved with it, or with what came after it. His works do not describe post-capitalist society, and a fortiori they do not recommend any part of what the Soviet Union did.
Allen W. Wood
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I wish that our culture could retain the symbolism and emotional power of traditional religion while combining it with reason and science and using the combination to enhance our humanity rather than impoverishing it by choosing the one side or the other.
Allen W. Wood
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We totally misunderstand both his aims and his contribution if we try to read into Marx some anticipation of either the modest successes or the disastrous failures of those who later thought they were acting in his name.
Allen W. Wood