Kant: Moral und Religion

Morals and religion - two facets of human culture which are not aliens to each other. For the most part religions have their rules of desirable conduct, standards of right acting towards human beings and god. In many cases, morals are founded on religious convictions or metaphysical assumptions. Regarding the special position of Kant, facts are apparently quite different: he defends the autonomy of morals and criticizes the traditional metaphysics. Doing so, he seems to argue for a clear separation between religion (with its theonomous morals) and metaphysics on the one side, and the autonomous morals of human reason on the other side. But this impression would be wrong. Kant's concept of religion is nothing else but its material identification with morals; and a critical look at his ethics allows to discover their new metaphysical core. The essays, papers and lectures in this book try to show - in different ways and from different points of view - that Kant defends a dialectical relation between morals and religion.