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Calendar

PHIL 409, Kant and the twentieth century, Fall 2026

9/18

I’m really happy with where we ended up Thursday. But there is a lot on the docket for this coming week.

Note the selections from the readings; no, I’m not expecting you to read 200 pages or whatever, haha.

And, if we were to get caught up with our original calendar, we would also cover:

Which is unlikely.

Notes will be up later this weekend.

9/11

I’m not optimistic about getting caught up. I’m very sad about it, too! Anyway, our goals for next week:

  • From “§2 The solution” in the Dialectic to the end on Tuesday
  • A brief discussion of teleological judgment on Tuesday; the text is here; no notes yet (need to figure out how to keep it B.R.I.E.F.)
  • A discussion of Heidegger and Nietzsche on Thursday

That would leave us still exactly one class behind, but looking ahead the terrain is a sublime nightmare of material. So, if we get through everything we need to get through on Tuesday, I’ll tack a discussion of Gadamer on at the end.

Your first commentary is due a week from today. ABTAK: Always Be Thinking About Kant.

9/4

Our plan for the coming week:

  1. On Tuesday:
    1. Begin discussion of the Deduction
    2. Complete the remainder of our discussion of the sublime
  2. On Thursday, complete our discussion of the Deduction; perhaps get into the Dialectic. I’ll get notes up for all this soon, and will update via Discord.

Now, I have the idea that we will leave the discussion of teleological judgment for our later discussion of Jonas etc. Is that a bad idea? I wouldn’t mind if a few of you weighed in on your feelings. I will say that reading it now may be the responsible thing to do, judging this against the grain of one common way of receiving the third Critique as “some thoughts Kant had on art and biology.” So maybe I talk myself out of this idea. Anyway, it’s something I’m mulling over. Let me know if you have thoughts.

8/28

Here’s a basic plan for next week:

  1. Read the Analytic of the Beautiful, with or without my notes. I suggest you focus on, in case you don’t recall:
    1. the second moment (that the beautiful is universal), because it is, let’s say, characteristic of Kant’s views, and
    2. the third moment, because it is the most difficult of the four moments to make sense of (and also, let’s say, the most systematically important, that is, inasmuch as it helps us make sense of the whole of the third Critique).
  2. Read the Analytic of the Sublime, with or without my notes. You’ll see I’ve made a pretty tight selection of sections to read and discuss (§§23, 25–27, 29), so I wouldn’t necessarily direct you any more specifically than that.
  3. Read the first chunk of the Deduction, for which I haven’t yet posted notes; they will be up soon. There’s no way we discuss this before Thursday though. If it gets out that I cover the beautiful and the sublime in a single session, someone’s going to come for my teaching license. (Just kidding, I don’t have one.)

Have fun with it! Keep your eyes open for the weird stuff.

8/24

Welcome to the fall semester! Here are some things you might do and/or take note of before class tomorrow:

  • All texts are going to be made available electronically, but if you prefer hard texts, the one I might recommend is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner Pluhar (ISBN: 9780872200258). This is a class (mostly) on this text, so it might not be a bad idea, especially, again, if you prefer hard texts. But, like I said, everything will be made available electronically.
  • If you’re here, you found the second-best week-to-week resource for keeping up to date (the best resource is coming to class). Other related resources:
    • The course outline gives a schedule of readings. Keep in mind that I try only to be about a week or two ahead of wherever we are in class, and this is significant because you might see hundreds of pages ‘assigned’ for a given week, but that is only because I haven’t yet prepped the material (pruned and written up notes).
    • See contact info for ways of reaching me and connecting to the course Discord. I will probably write up a once-weekly summary of what’s going on here, and then give more regular updates via Discord. You’ll also be able to reach me there a lot of time during the work week.
  • Read through the syllabus. I’ll hit the major things tomorrow in class, but we are going to hit the ground running, so it’s not something we’re going to spend a ton of time on.
  • We’re going to try to blow through the third Critique fairly quickly, and partly that means getting right into it tomorrow. We’re going to discuss (I hope) some background to the third Critique and its two introductions. See the outline or go directly to the notes/readings pages (I’ll talk about how to navigate these tomorrow) here: