The Inescapability of What? Kant’s New Take on Constitutivism

Stefano Bacin (Università degli Studi di Milano)

The Digital Kant-Centre NRW is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Stefano Bacin (Università degli Studi di Milano) with the following topic: The Inescapability of What? Kant’s New Take on Constitutivism.

The lecture will take place online (via Webex) on Wednesday, 26 March 2025, from 18:00 – 19:30 CET. The lecture will be held in English.

Please see below for the Webex-link and an abstract of the lecture. 

The talk is part of the lecture series Digital Kant-Lectures, organized by Digital Kant-Centre NRW, which takes place on the last Wednesday of each month via Webex. For the program of the series, please see here.

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Webex-Link: 

https://uni-siegen.webex.com/uni-siegen/j.php?MTID=m41000e99082f65f93449c5acd39abaf2

Abstract: 

It is disputed whether Kant’s approach to moral philosophy and metanormative theory in general can be characterised as a form of constitutivism. To shed light on the issue, I contrast Kant’s view on the foundations of morality with other eighteenth-century views that can be construed as early variants of constitutivism, that is, Reid’s and Butler’s. Drawing on the contrast with those accounts, I shall suggest that Kant’s view is not to be interpreted in terms of Agency Constitutivism nor as Reason Constitutivism, but can nevertheless be properly understood as a version of constitutivism. His strategy revolves around a different Inescapability argument, which grounds on the practice of moral judgment.