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Habitual Desire: On Kant’s Concept of Inclination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2016

Eric Entrican Wilson
Eric Entrican Wilson*
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Tamar Schapiro has offered an important new ‘Kantian’ account of inclination and motivation, one that expands and refines Christine Korsgaard’s view. In this article I argue that Kant’s own view differs significantly from Schapiro’s. Above all, Kant thinks of inclinations as dispositions, not occurrent desires; and he does not believe that they stem directly from a non-rational source, as she argues. Schapiro’s ‘Kantian’ view rests on a much sharper distinction between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul. In the process of explaining these (and other) differences, I argue that Kant’s own view is in some respects philosophically superior to Schapiro’s.

Keywords

inclinationdesirepassionmoral psychology
Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , July 2016 , pp. 211 - 235
Copyright
© Kantian Review 2016 

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