Comparing Kant and Sartre

By John Russon, Guelph

In my judgment this is a very good proposal, and the project is worth pursuing.

This volume intends to map out the relatively uncharted domain of the relationship between philosophies of Kant and Sartre. While Kant is widely recognized as the founding figure of the tradition of Continental philosophy to which Sartre himself belongs, more direct connections between the figures are not widely studied. This work promises to demonstrate a broadly grounded compatibility between the two thinkers, documenting important connections between their approaches to subjectivity, metaphysics, ethics, and more.

I think this is quite a worthwhile project, and will be of interest to scholars in Continental philosophy (primarily graduate students and faculty).

The sequence of proposed topics of study, as articulated through the abstracts, seems to me to be very well designed to draw important connections between these two thinkers both at a very fundamental, theoretical level, (addressing such topics as the transcendental unity of appreception/pre-reflective cogito, temporality and reflection), and at the level of their most developed reflections on the deepest existential and ethical issues of human life, (addressing such topics as bad faith, happiness and evil). I think the topics are appropriately fundamental and comprehensive.

I do not know many of the individual contributors (most of whom are centred in the UK), but the abstracts are very good, and attest to the high quality of the proposed contributions.

I also think this book is quite original and distinctive: I do not know of any other volume that covers this important ground.

I am quite confident that this will be an excellent volume and a worthwhile contribution to contemporary philosophical research.

Author's Response

I have two comments with regard to the review: one concerns the area of interest - the volume is not only designed to readers of Continental philosophy; all contributors write in an accessible style, which is common to both good analytic and continental philosophy, and some of them would define themselves as primarily analytic, although they may also write on the work of philosophers usually placed in the continental tradition. The second comment is about the aim of the volume - the volume aims to present some of the similarities between Kant and Sartre, but does this without neglecting their differences.