This book traces a complex of issues surrounding moral agency from Kant through Schelling to Kierkegaard.

Michelle Kosch's book traces a complex of issues surrounding moral agency - how is moral responsibility consistent with the possibility of theoretical explanation? is moral agency essentially rational agency? can autonomy be the foundation of ethics? - from Kant through Schelling to Kierkegaard. There are two complementary projects here. The first is to clarify the contours of German idealism as a philosophical movement by examining the motivations not only of its beginning, but also of its end. In tracing the motivations for the transition to mid-19th century post-idealism to Schelling's middle and late periods and, ultimately, back to a problem originally presented in Kant, it shows the causes of the demise of that movement to be the same as the causes of its rise. In the process it presents the most detailed discussion to date of the moral psychology and moral epistemology of Schelling's work after 1809. The second project - which is simply the first viewed from a different angle - is to trace the sources of Kierkegaard's theory of agency and his criticism of philosophical ethics to this same complex of issues in Kant and post-Kantian idealism. In the process, Kosch argues that Schelling's influence on Kierkegaard was greater than has been thought, and builds a new understanding of Kierkegaard's project in his pseudonymous works on the basis of this revised picture of their historical background. It is one that uncovers much of interest and relevance to contemporary debates.

In this study Professor Michalson attempts to clarify the complex tangle of issues connected with Kant's doctrines of radical evil and moral regeneration, and to set the problems resulting from these doctrines in an interpretive framework that tries to make sense of the instability of his overall position. In his late work Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), Kant charts out these doctrines in a manner that represents a fresh development in his own thinking on moral and relgious matters, apparently at variance with the mainstream Enlightenment outlook which Kant otherwise embodies. His position appears to amount to a retrieval of the supposedly outmoded Christian doctrine of original sin, and this ambivalence is seen to stem from his desire to do justice both to the Protestant Christian, and the Enlightenment rationalist, tradition, which weigh equally heavily upon him. In this study Professor Michalson attempts to clarify the complex tangle of issues connected with Kant's doctrines of radical evil and moral regeneration, and to set the problems resulting from these doctrines in an interpretive framework that tries to make sense of the instability of his overall position.

Christophe Bouton's Time and Freedom addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy's reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and (later), Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton's is the first major work of its kind since Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889), and Bouton's "mystery of the future," in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction.

In his late work Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Immanuel Kant struggles to answer a straightforward, yet surprisingly difficult, question: how is radical conversion—a complete reorientation of a person’s most deeply held values—possible? In this book, Ryan S. Kemp and Christopher Iacovetti examine how this question gets taken up by Kant’s philosophical heirs: Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Kierkegaard. More than simply developing a novel account of each thinker’s position, Kemp and Iacovetti trace how each philosopher formulates his theory in response to tensions in preceding views, culminating in Kierkegaard’s claim that radical conversion lies outside a person’s control. Kemp and Iacovetti close by examining some of the moral-psychological implications of Kierkegaard’s account, particularly the question of how someone might responsibly relate to values that have, by their own admission, been acquired in contingent and accidental fashion.

In Freedom and the End of Reason, Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant’s philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy’s larger history. He persuasively argues that the whole of Kantianism—not merely the Second Critique—focuses on a “critique of practical reason” and is a response to a problem that Kant saw as intrinsic to reason itself: the teleological problem of its goodness. Reconstructing the influence of Rousseau on Kant’s thought, Velkley demonstrates that the relationship between speculative philosophy and practical philosophy in Kant is far more intimate than generally has been perceived. By stressing a Rousseau-inspired notion of reason as a provider of practical ends, he is able to offer an unusually complete account of Kant’s idea of moral culture.