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Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Tuesday, November 1, 2016

PENULTIMATUM

Good news for all you Kant lovers!  The eighth [and penultimate] Kant lecture is now available on YouTube here.  I strongly recommend it as an escape from the election, which is now a mere seven days away.  I had the very great pleasure of voting this noon.  I can report that if the United States were Chapel Hill writ large, Clinton would win in an historic landslide [except that if the United States were Chapel Hill writ large, it would be Bernie Sanders who would be about to win in a landslide.]

I suppose that I am a sentimentalist, but it gave me great pleasure to vote.  For one brief moment, I was actually doing something, and not just complaining about the world.

The final lecture will be next Monday, the day before election day, which is of course madness.  How on earth am I going to keep busy now that I am about done with the Kant lectures?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

For the amount of information you've acquired over your lifetime, 9 hours of lectures does not do it justice. Why don't you continue the series in your own time and elaborate on topics you deem necessary to be concise? You mentioned how difficult it was to cram all of the information from Lecture 8 into an hour, what's stopping you from video taping an 8.5 lecture to expand on what you briefly summarized? Or rather, title videos based on the topics you're covering instead of a series of numbers. All of the videos that you upload to YouTube become timeless and will be watched for decades to come. It would be an absolute shame if you were to conclude your video series indefinitely after a mere 9-10 hours.

Danny said...

hmm..Prof. Wolff, you begin the lecture by dismissing a 'lousy argument' regarding our own perfection! --something that is found amid Kant's division of duties. I think you mean this:

“The capacity to set oneself an end – any end whatsoever – is what characterizes humanity (as distinguished from animality). Hence there is also bound up with the end of humanity in our own person the rational will, and so the duty, to make ourselves worthy of humanity by culture in general, by procuring or promoting the capacity to realize all sorts of possible ends”.

This rests our duty to make our own perfection into an end firmly on the formula of humanity as end in itself. And you dismiss it. I guess I don't want a heavy attitude that this canonical and Kant's ethics is one of the paradigms of contemporary ethics..but then again, it is though, right?