How Does Philosophy Begin? Kant on Common Reason
This paper reconstructs Kant’s account of how philosophy begins: how common or untrained reason becomes philosophical. It argues that, for Kant, philosophy emerges not from ignorance but from the moral and theoretical capacities already present in common reason. Ordinary reason is naturally moral and implicitly a transcendental idealist, and it needs philosophy to stabilize and ground the truths it already holds. Speculative philosophy begins in practical reason’s pursuit of positive wisdom: the search for unconditioned objects (a world, God and the soul), which guarantee the possibility of justice and moral meaning. Critical philosophy, in turn, begins when theoretical reason confronts its own failure to attain such unconditioned knowledge, yielding negative wisdom (awareness of the limits of theoretical reason) and thereby affirming the primacy of practical reason. Thus, philosophy begins through the dialectic between the moral need for the unconditioned and the recognition of theoretical reason’s necessary failure to grasp it.
Shterna Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard. She has taught in the Committee on Degrees of Social Studies at Harvard (2023-2024); and in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University (2022-2023). She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. She majored in philosophy at Barnard College, and also received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
She is currently working on a manuscript tentatively entitled The Idea of a Social System: Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Systemic Social Theory. It examines the emergence of the tendency to treat normative attributes (such as justice or oppression) as systemic rather than individual properties. More generally, her research focuses on the epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions of modern systemic social theory as developed by the German Idealists, and further elaborated and criticized by such later thinkers as Marx, Durkheim, Parsons, and Foucault. Trained in early modern political thought, she is interested in the deep historical sources of the present and the often unarticulated assumptions that underlie ordinary and philosophical social and political discourse. She is also interested in issues of social ontology, political metaphysics, historical causation, political epistemology, and the methodology of the social sciences.
The discussant for this workshop is Allen Wood, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor Emeritus.