Kant and His Legacy (PHIL*3100)
Code and section: PHIL*3100*01
Term: Winter 2019
Instructor: Robert Minatel
Details
This course will study selected readings from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Through these studies we will work to understand the significance of Kant’s philosophical project in the context of the history of philosophy, as well as to appreciate how Kant’s thinking is taken up and developed in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. The main theme of the course will revolve around Kant’s question, “what are the formal conditions under which an experience of objects is possible?” The first half of the course will approach this question by studying Kant’s conception of the faculties of sensibility and understanding. We will also consider Kant's conception of the imagination as that which organizes the sensible and cognitive dimensions of experience. Throughout this study we will appreciate some of Kant’s most provocative and revolutionary theses regarding the character of space, time, causality, and freedom. In the second half of the course, we turn to study Heidegger’s phenomenology of human reality in division one of Being and Time, to see that there is an important sense in which Heidegger’s thinking is still grappling with Kant’s question pertaining to the conditions of our experience of objectivity. Through our reading of Heidegger’s phenomenology, we will consider the thesis that our experience of objects is grounded in and realized through practical, emotional, and inter-subjective forms of comportment.