DPTCW, #2

Immanuel Kant, born 22nd April 1724 in Königsberg, Prussia; died 12th February 1804 in Königsberg, Prussia.

Born to a Pietist family, Kant never physically left the region of his birth, but why bother if one can deduce the nature of the solar system from rationalist premises?

It was around the time the University of Königsberg appointed him Chair of Logic and Metaphysics (at the age of 46) that reading Hume famously awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” and provoked his elaboration over the course of the 1780s of his (“Copernican”) revolutionary system of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.

Cameo #2 joins our cannon for his appearance in Bernard Williams’ “Human Rights and Relativism”, where his quest for a “pure moral philosophy” which “does not borrow in the slightest from acquaintance with [man] (in anthropology), but gives him laws a priori as a rational being” (Groundwork, Preface) earns him hypothetical transportation to Camelot in the place of Twain’s Yankee. Williams flings this incongruity in the face of the idea that “moral judgement must take everyone everywhere as equally its object”:

“Of course, one can imagine oneself as Kant at the court of King Arthur, disapproving of its injustices, but exactly what grip does this get on one’s ethical or political thought?” (In the Beginning was the Deed, p. 66)

 

DPTCW, #1

A little late, but here’s Ferdinand again (died 23rd January 1516), and appropriately enough, he’s appropriating America from a very airy apartment with a flick of the wrist. 

 

Dead Political Theory Cameo Watch, #1

Ferdinand II “the Catholic” of Aragon, born 10th March 1452 in Sos, Aragon; died 23rd January 1516 in Madrigalejo, Spain.

Our first Dead Political Theory Cameo unified most of Spain. In 1479, he inherited the kingdom of Aragon from his father, and acquired the kingdom of Castille as a result of his marriage to Isabella of Castille (and a bit of fighting with the Portuguese). Granada followed in 1492, just in time to see Columbus unhindered passage to the New World. Following some particularly zealous Inquisiting, Jew expulsion, and intervention in Italy, Ferdinand assumed the Papally-awarded sobriquet “the Catholic” in 1496, going on to invade Navarre in support of Rome in 1512.

Machiavelli has his own admiring take on the reign of “the foremost king in Christendom”, but it is Rousseau in the Social Contract (I, 9) who playfully toyed with the possibilities.

In September 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa had stood on the sea-shore of the Gulf of San Miguel and taken “possession of the South Seas and the whole of South America in the name of the crown of Castille.” A century and a half later, Rousseau interrogated the event with dripping cynicism: “was that enough to dispossess all their actual inhabitants, and to shut out from them all the princes of the world?” Clearly not, and out of history he summoned in aid a hypothesised Ferdinand: “On such a showing, these ceremonies are idly multiplied, and the Catholic King need only take possession all at once, from his apartment, of the whole universe, merely making a subsequent reservation about what was already in the possession of other princes.”

So maybe the unification of Spain wasn’t so impressive after all.

 

Dead Political Theory Cameo Watch

Continuing our adaptation from the Virtual Stoa’s venerable Dead Socialist Watch, the Code of Nature brings you the Dead Political Theory Cameo Watch, dedicated to honouring all those unsuspecting souls co-opted into the political theory canon through no act of their own, but as part of some political theorist’s though-experiment.

To qualify,

1) They must have existed

2) They must have not performed certain actions

3) The actions they have not performed must be presented as hypothetically performed by them, and used as an example in a work of political theory

Glad we’ve established that…