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Final Exam Study Questions
Two of the following questions will be on your final exam. (1) Explain Kant's Copernican revolution in metaphysics as it unfolds in the CPR. Be sure to discuss both the faculties of intuition and understanding. Be sure to explain how Kant's perceived revolution leads to his understanding of synthetic a priori judgments. Explain what Kant thinks we can know, and what we cannot know. Can we know the transcendental ideas? How is it that we can discuss them? Do you think pursuing Kant's approach to metaphysics will allow us to make progress in metaphysics? Be sure to explain what Kant means by metaphysics. Defend your position. (2) According to what Kant says in the CPR, what is the main question of transcendental philosophy? What are the four questions it divides into? Consider this question: how are synthetic a priori judgments possible in moral philosophy? Would Kant consider that a fifth transcendental question? Why or why not? How are such judgments possible? According to Kant, what assumptions or postulates are needed to make sense of morality? Be sure to discuss section three of the FPMM and any relevant material from the CPR and the CPrR. Do you think we need any of those postulates? Defend your position. (3) In the FPMM, Kant starts by examining what he takes to be the common or popular understanding of morality, and he works towards a critique of pure practical reason. What does he take himself to have discovered about the nature of morality along the way? (Be sure to discuss duty, imperatives, and autonomy.) In the CPR, Kant tried to ground objectivity in the constitution of the subject; what is objective in the phenomena is grounded in the constraints imposed by the operations of intuition and understanding. In the FPMM, he is attempting to ground the objective form of morality in the rational subject and its rational community (the kingdom of ends). In sections one and two of the FPMM he says that he is assuming that morality is objective (an assumption he tries to support or at least motivate in section three of the FPMM and in the CPrR). Let us say that we make the assumption that morality is objective (to see where it goes). Do the first two sections of the FPMM provide a useful sketch of (or useful constraints on) what an objective morality would look like? Defend your position. (4) For Kant, aesthetic judgment "mediates" between theoretical and practical reasoning. Discuss Kant's views on beauty and the sublime, and explain the more general role they play in his philosophy. Consider Kant's Copernican revolution. Is it a unifying theme in his philosophy (theoretical, practical, and aesthetic), or does it play a more limited role? Defend your position.
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