Mapping the Republic of Letters

Description This website provides interactive, visual tools that depict the vast networks of people and information during the Enlightenment. Using archived letters, travel logs, and other resources, it depicts visually the routes traveled by letters, […]

Critique of the Faculty of Judgment [Urteilskraft]

Description Received most often as Kant’s aesthetic treatise, but also understood as his mature political treatise (cf., Hannah Arendt’s “ectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy). Unlike most aesthetic treatises before and since, this one privileges natural […]

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Description Deserves as much credit as any source for bringing the political implications of Kant’s Critique of Judgment into contemporary discourse. Despondent over the perceived failure of the French Revolution, Schiller asks, “Why are we […]

Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy

Description Argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgment represents his mature political philosophy. Judgment is important for Arendt as the faculty which mediates between particularity and universality, thereby providing the conditions for a uniquely human interpolation […]

“Art and Democracy”

Description Interprets an “increasingly visible weariness and distrust towards democracy” and proposes the construction of contemporary “Academies of Art” to aid in the education of “mature” citizens. Lachenmann interpolates his remarks into two discourses. First, […]

Emile, or on Education

Description Outlines a program for educating children according to the precepts of Nature. Heavily influenced by Locke’s philosophy of human understanding, this 1762 treatise argues that parents should pursue a “negative education”: avoid formal schooling […]