Before the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Immanuel Kant interrupted his writing for ten years, with only a few exceptions. He then wrote the book in about four to five months, gleichsam im Fluge, as if in flight. It appeared in 1781. Two years later, Moses Mendelssohn wrote to Kant and called the book a Nervensaft verzehrendes Werk, a work that consumes the reader’s nervous energy.
philosophy
An Animal That May Promise
Nietzsche opens the second essay of Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) with a question: Ein Thier heranzüchten, das versprechen darf – ist das nicht gerade jene paradoxe Aufgabe selbst … (To breed an animal that is permitted to promise, is that not the paradoxical task itself?) He calls the ability to keep a promise ein eigentliches Gedächtniss des Willens, a true memory of the will.
Answering for the Consequences
On 28 January 1919, Max Weber gave a lecture in a Munich bookshop called Politik als Beruf, politics as a vocation. An expanded text was published in July 1919. In it he names the Verantwortungsethik, the ethic of responsibility. Under this ethic, daß man für die (voraussehbaren) Folgen seines Handelns aufzukommen hat: a person must answer for the foreseeable consequences of what he does.
Four Kinds of Guilt
In Die Schuldfrage, The Question of Guilt, published in 1946, the philosopher Karl Jaspers separated four kinds of guilt: criminal, political, moral and metaphysical. He rejected the idea of a collective guilt of the German people. Verbrecher ist immer nur der einzelne. Only the individual is ever a criminal.
The end does not sanctify the means
The end does not sanctify the means.
The original proverb runs the other way, and most languages cite it as a cynical observation about how the world works. German most often cites it negated, as a rule.
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s project in 1781 was not to reach conclusions about the world. It was to examine the instrument first — to establish what reason can and cannot validly do, before using it.
Critique, in his title, does not mean criticism. It means examining the apparatus.
The most influential work in German philosophy is an inspection of the method, carried out before the work begins.
Pragmatism as a national philosophy
Peirce, James and Dewey between them built the only philosophical school America originated, and its founding move was to test ideas by their consequences rather than their coherence. It shaped Progressive-era reform, the New Deal, and American legal thinking. The country’s one native philosophy is a philosophy of what works.
Cash value
America produced one original school of philosophy, and it is named after practical consequence. In Pragmatism (1907) William James asked of any belief: what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?
He described the pragmatic method as looking away from first things, principles, categories and supposed necessities, and toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
And he put the conclusion as bluntly as it can be put: truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
Proportionality
A constitutional principle in German law with a defined three-part test: suitability, necessity, and appropriateness in the narrow sense. Judgment is required, and the structure within which it must be exercised is itself specified.
The reasonable person
American negligence law measures conduct against what a reasonable person would have done in the circumstances. The standard is deliberately not a rule. It is a judgment, made afterwards, by a jury, about what judgment should have been made at the time.