Kant on Reflection and Virtue

There can be no doubt that Kant thought we should be reflective: we ought to care to make up our own minds about how things are and what is worth doing. Philosophical objections to the Kantian reflective ideal have centred on concerns about the excessive control that the reflective person is supposed to exert over their own mental life, and Kantians who feel the force of these objections have recently drawn attention to Kant's conception of moral virtue as it is developed in his later work, chiefly the Metaphysics of Morals. Melissa Merritt's book is a distinctive contribution to this recent turn to virtue in Kant scholarship. Merritt argues that we need a clearer, and textually more comprehensive, account of what reflection is, in order not only to understand Kant's account of virtue, but also to appreciate how it effectively rebuts long-standing objections to the Kantian reflective ideal.

List of tables; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations and conventions for citing Kant's works; Introduction: rethinking the Kantian reflective ideal; Part I. Reflection: 1. Kant on the requirement to reflect; 2. Healthy human understanding; 3. Attention, perception, experience; Part II. Virtue: 4. Conceptions of reason and epistemic normativity; 5. Cognitive and moral virtue; 6. Virtue as a skill; 7. The cognitive basis of moral virtue; References; Index.

Melissa Merritt is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She has published widely on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy in journals including Philosophical Quarterly, European Journal of Philosophy, Southern Journal of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Kantian Review.