200 Years of Immanuel Kant: Terror, Peace, and Universalism

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Two hundred years after Immanuel Kant, in a world disenchanted with modernity, it is important to retrospect on the philosophy of the project of enlightenment and modernity. Terror, Peace, and Universalism explores Kant's universalisms in the context of a world where particularities and differences matter, a world looking for differences of histories rather than for a universal history. While Kant's rationalist universalism and cosmopolitanism has been celebrated as the spirit of modernity, it perhaps led to a centricism that saw differences as peripheral. At one level it was expressed in a new way of thinking about experience, at another level it led to universalist legalism, ideas of perpetual peace, universal history of mankind, and republicanism. With different discourses being employed against each other, the Kantian universalism of moral values and ideas of autonomy can seemingly be appropriated by the terrorist ideology. Section one traces this schizophrenia in Kantian universalist discourse as also Kant's ideas of world peace and republicanism. Section two studies the politics of centre and periphery in universal history. Section three examines the foundation of Kantian universalist discourse in his cognitive universalism. With contributions from scholars across disciplines and from all over the world, this elegantly written collection brings together diverse views about modernity and highlights the cosmopolitan nature of Kant's works. Like its companion volume Reason, Morality, and Beauty, this book will find a wide audience amongst scholars and students of Western philosophy, continental philosophy, epistemology, and the social sciences.