Kant's Defense of Common Moral Experience A Phenomenological Account Modern European Philosophy Series

In this book, Jeanine Grenberg argues that everything important about Kant's moral philosophy emerges from careful reflection upon the common human moral experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. Through careful readings of both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, Grenberg shows that Kant, typically thought to be an overly technical moral philosopher, in fact is a vigorous defender of the common person's first-personal encounter with moral demands. Grenberg uncovers a notion of phenomenological experience in Kant's account of the Fact of Reason, develops a new a reading of the Fact, and grants a moral epistemic role for feeling in grounding Kant's a priori morality. The book thus challenges readings which attribute only a motivational role to feeling; and Fichtean readings which violate Kant's commitments to the limits of reason. This study will be valuable to students and scholars engaged in Kant studies.

Introduction: getting Kant's joke: a phenomenological defense of common moral experience; Part I. The Interpretive Framework: 1. Kant's common, phenomenological grounding of morality; 2. Response to immediate objections: experience; 3. Response to immediate objections: feeling; Part II. The Groundwork: 4. Kant's Groundwork rejection of the possibility of a reliable experience of categorical obligation; 5. The phenomenological failure of Groundwork III; Part III. The Critique of Practical Reason: 6. Recent interpretations of the Fact of Reason; 7. The gallows man: the new face of attentiveness; 8. The Fact of Reason is a forced, phenomenological fact; 9. The gallows man's fact is the Fact of Reason; 10. Thoughts on the deduction of freedom; 11. Objective, synthetic, a priori, practical cognitions; Conclusion.

Jeanine Grenberg is Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. She is the author of Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue (Cambridge, 2005).