from Part III - Human Feeling and Ethical Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2025
At least since Pauline Kleingeld’s defining work, scholars recognize that Kant’s aims in his philosophy of history are practical as well as theoretical: not just to describe history, but also to provide a view of it that supports moral action. Often scholars understand this support to be similar to that provided by the postulates of practical reason: the progressive view of history Kant articulates is taken to be a belief necessarily presupposed in moral agency, supporting the more general belief that the agent’s moral ends are realizable. Prompted by Kant’s description of his view as “consoling,” this chapter considers whether his view in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim may instead be interpreted as a form of Stoic consolation on the model of Seneca’s consolatory writings, with a different practical import: to relieve the moral agent from grief concerning large-scale historical events, thereby freeing her to act effectively within her own sphere.
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