Defending Kant after Darwin: a Reassessment of Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Abstract

The paper argues that Kant’s teleology in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose can be salvaged only if the mechanism of social unsociability, considered as the true center of the essay, is a) detached from the ? by contemporary standards ? hardly defensible notion of ‘natural dispositions’ and b) understood in conjunction with general premises that Kant does not make explicit, but rather takes as self-evidently true. In this perspective, Kant’s teleology is reduced to the affirmation
that, given certain constant features of human beings (mainly, limited benevolence and ability to see their best interest through experience) as well as relatively constant objective circumstances of the world we live in (mainly, availability of finite yet sufficient resources and sustainable growth in a competitive yet peaceful system), an approximation of human affairs towards the ‘cosmopolitan constitution’ is the most likely outcome. The paper moves the first steps towards a defense of this thesis by reformulating Kant’s argument in a way to make it compatible with contemporary science.