2024 Theses Doctoral

Kant’s Pedagogy of Hope: A Reading of the ‘Doctrine of Method’ in the Critique of Practical Reason

Blazej, Adam

Why and, if so, how should educators cultivate hope in hopeless times? I defend a novel interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s theory of moral education - specifically, what I call his “pedagogy of hope,” a pedagogical method Kant prescribes to moral educators in the ‘Doctrine of Method’ of the Critique of Practical Reason for the purpose of cultivating virtuous character. According to Kant, moral educators should cultivate students’ hope for moral progress in order to sustain their moral motivation in the face of uncertainty, failures, and suffering.

Kant’s two-step pedagogical method amounts to an aesthetic education, in the sense that it mirrors his account of the relationship between feeling and judgment in experiences of the beautiful and the sublime. Drawing on that account, I describe how, for Kant, moral educators can cultivate hope by developing students’ judgment through deliberation of examples of moral conduct and of moral exemplars.