First-Degree Würde: A Means to What End?! An Examination of Human Dignity and Moral Status in Kantian Ethics and Utilitarianism! ! Kantian Ethics! ! In Chapter 10 of his famous book Leviathan, philosopher Thomas Hobbes writes on the topic of the worth of a person. He writes, “The ‘value,’ or ‘worth,’ of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for t...

We describe a database for number fields that has been integrated into the algebraic number theory system Kant. The database gives efficient access to the tables of number fields that have been computed during the last years and is easily extended. A set of functions that are specific for a number field database has been integrated into the user interface Kash of Kant. The user has thus the pos...

Since 1976 Hilary Putnam has drawn parallels between his ‘internal’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘natural’ or ‘common-sense’ realism and Kant’s transcendental idealism. Putnam reads Kant as rejecting the then current metaphysical picture with its in-built assumptions of a unique, mind-independent world, and truth understood as correspondence between the mind and that ready-made world. Putnam reads Kant as ove...

for kant, it is impossible for theoretical reason to prove human autonomy and freedom. he, therefore, tries to prove it as an axiom by practical reason or ethics. kant believes freedom as the quality of human will. he has known free will to be the same as autonomous will; that is, human will would be considered free in such a case that it causes some effects while being itself not caused by the...

In his teleological antinomy in the Dialectic of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment, Kant presents two competing views of the explanatory power of causal mechanism for a science of origins. Kant expresses both the positive (thesis) view and the negative (antithesis) view in the guise of merely “regulative principles for the reflecting power of judgment”. The regulativity of thes...

Kant is well known for his restrictive conception of proper science. In the present paper I will try to explain why Kant adopted this conception. I will identify three core conditions which Kant thinks a proper science must satisfy: systematicity, objective grounding, and apodictic certainty. These conditions conform to conditions codified in the Classical Model of Science. Kant’s infamous clai...

Kant famously claims that autonomy is the ground of dignity. If he is correct about the grounding relationship, then doubts about our autonomy entail doubts about our dignity. Here, I attempt to show that Kant is sensitive to this problem, and invokes the ‘fact of reason’ (Faktum der Vernunft) as the key piece of evidence for our autonomy, and therefore our dignity. But as is well known, Kant’s...

In this paper, we describe the design and deployment of KANT Controlled English (KCE) for knowledge-based machine translation in the KANT system. KCE combines three kinds of constraints: constraints on the lexicon; constraints on the complexity of sentences; and the use of generalized markup language. We describe how each of these types of language control are utilized in the implementation of ...