This First Friday Lecture examined why Kant’s ethics can feel narrow and restrictive to readers who encounter it without knowing the philosophical groundwork he laid in the Critique of Pure Reason. The lecture traced what Kant argues in that first critique: that the world we experience is not reality as it actually is, but a world of appearances that our minds actively structure through concepts like space, time, and cause and effect. Because this phenomenal world is governed entirely by causal necessity, there appears to be no room for human freedom or moral choice. The lecture then showed how Kant’s ethics emerges directly from this problem. The one thing we can know exists outside the phenomenal world is that we are conscious, rational beings, and it is this rational self, acting freely according to universal laws of reason, that makes morality possible at all. It concluded by pushing back on the common reading of Kant as constrictive and narrow, arguing that his moral philosophy is actually deeply personal, asking each of us to choose to do what reason tells us is right, even when the outcome is uncertain.
Historians Made Elsewhere Than at Rome: Polybius and Josephus on the Roman Empire
This lecture examines how historians from conquered societies wrote about the Roman Empire.
