Enleightenman and pratical reason

Abstract

This research will start do be developed at the Collège International de Philosophie with Prof. Dr. Diogo Sardinha. It has two aims. The first one is to show that the concept of public is a decisive factor for the critical project developed by Immanuel Kant in the early 1780s with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. The critique of metaphysics led to a conception of rationality that needs to justify and to legitimate publicly before itself. This idea of legitimacy has a clear political counterpart with regard to religion and the state as discourses that also need to be legitimated in the modern era. The question to be raised here is whether the development of Kant's critical project - considered as the opening of the practical realm of reason - led this idea of self-legitimation and self-justification as an important consideration to the elaboration of two fundamental concepts: the categorical imperative and the public use of reason. The second aim is to investigate the formulation of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals. Since this formulation can be considered as orienting the establishment of the practical realm of reason and in this sense have its own public (the Humanity), the question to be raised here is whether the moral foundation for political principles such as public use of reason, cosmopolitanism, republican constitution and the idea of a republic. (AU)