Kant's Elliptical Path explores the main stages and key concepts in the development of Kant's Critical philosophy, from the early 1760s to the 1790s. Karl Ameriks devotes essays to each of the three Critiques, and explores post-Kantian developments in German Romanticism, accounts of tragedy up through Nietzsche, and contemporary philosophy.

• Acknowledgements


• Note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations


• Introduction: Our Elliptical Path


• Part I. Before the Critiques: Kant's Self-Recovery


• 1: Kant, Human Nature, and History after Rousseau


• 2: Reason, Reality, and Religion in the Early Development of Kant's Ethics


• Part II. Kant's Critiques


• First Section. The First Critique (1781, 1787) and Reality


• 3: Kant's Idealism on a Moderate Interpretation


• 4: On Reconciling the Transcendental Turn and Kant's Idealism


• 5: Idealism and Kantian Persons: Spinoza, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher


• Second Section. The Second Critique (1788) and Morality


• 6: Kant's Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism


• 7: Is Practical Justification in Kant Ultimately Dogmatic?


• 8: Ambiguities in the Will: Kant and Reinhold, Briefe 2


• Third Section. The Third Critique (1790) and Purpose


• 9: The Purposive Development of Human Capacities


• 10: Kant's Fateful Reviews of Herder's Ideas


• 11: The End of the Critiques: Kant's Moral "Creationism"


• 12: Kant and the End of Theodicy


• Part III. After the Critiques


• 13: On the Extension of Kant's Elliptical Path in Hölderlin and Novalis


• 14: Kant, Nietzsche, and the Tragic Turn in Late Modern Philosophy


• 15: Interpretation After Kant


• Bibliography


• Index

Karl Ameriks completed his PhD in Philosophy at Yale University. He has held positions in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame since 1973, and is now McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy. He has acted as President of the North American Kant Society, and President of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division. Ameriks is the co-editor of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, and author of Kant's Theory of Mind (Clarendon, 2000), Interpreting Kant's Critiques (Clarendon, 2003), and Kant and the Historical Turn (Clarendon, 2006).