Kant Trouble - Obscurities of the Enlightened (Paperback)

Offers a reading of some of the lesser known and less lucid aspects of Kantian thought. Diane Morgan focuses her investigation on a reappraisal of Kant's writings on architecture, monarchy and faith in progress. Throughout her study Morgan challenges the widely held view of Kant as the exponent of concrete and rigid rationality and argues that his airtight "architectonic" mode of reasoning, which Kant identified in "The Critique of Pure Reason", overlooks certain topics which destabilize it. Themes such as temporary forms of architecture, like landscape gardening; examples which undermine the autonomy of the Kantian subject, for example freemasonry; and the concept of radical evil suggest that Kant's thought was capable of accommodating troubling and subversive themes. Morgan's discussion arrives at a perspective on Kant whereby he is no longer to be regarded as a concrete rationalist but as a daring thinker, not afraid to entertain ideas highly threatening to his own system and to the humanistic legacy of the Enlightenment.