Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group Talk (Pauline Kleingeld, Groningen)

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is delighted to welcome as a speaker Pauline Kleingeld, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Her academic interests lie in Kant and Kantian philosophy, as well as in ethics and political philosophy. She is the author of Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Königshausen und Neumann, 1995). She has also edited three volumes with translations of texts by Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Achenwall and in 2020 received the Spinoza Prize.

Talk Title

The Argument of Kant’s Groundwork

Talk Abstract

The structure of Kant’s overall argument in the Groundwork leaves many readers puzzled, and the book’s third section is seen as downright obscure. There is even deep disagreement as to which metaethical position he is defending in the book. In this paper I argue that one crucial resource for understanding the Groundwork has thus far been overlooked: Kant’s Prolegomena. I propose a new account of the Groundwork’s overall argument by drawing on Kant’s discussion of method and highlighting the striking similarities between the argument structure of the Groundwork and the Prolegomena. I show that Kant develops a three-step argument that is helpfully understood as a form of reverse engineering of common morality.

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is a a subgroup of the History of Philosophy Research Group, which focuses on European philosophy in Kant and post-Kantian traditions.