On Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Draft

Immanuel Kant

May 2024 · Minerva Heritage Press

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About this ebook

A new translation of Kant's 1795 On Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Draft into modern American English with the original German manuscript in the back for reference.

This is Volume XI in the Complete Works of Immanuel Kant published by LP.

Kants 1795 On Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Draft is one of his most well-known works written in his old age. Here Kant directly applies his Teleological Moral Philosophy he established across his life directly to the field of politics and International Relations. Due to the broken and inherited evil nature of man, peace is not natural and must be built through adherence to rational maxims at the individual, national and international levels. These binding international maxims have built the foundation of anti-Machiavellian Liberal Internationalism of today. On Perpetual Peace is one of the foundational philosophic works underlying the international world order and the charter of the United Nations. The League of Nations ( a phrase coined by Kant) was founded by Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of Kantian philosophy, and explicitly used Kant's terminology "league of nations". This work was designed to be a template for future agreements between states, hence the reason it is written like a legal contract.

About the author

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher whose work in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics shaped the course of Western philosophy. In his landmark work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposed "transcendental idealism," asserting that human knowledge is limited by the mind's structures, which mediate our understanding of reality. This "Copernican revolution" in philosophy argued that we can only know phenomena (appearances) and not noumena (things-in-themselves). In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant introduced the "categorical imperative," a foundational principle in ethics that calls for actions to be universally applicable. Kant's focus on autonomy, moral duty, and rationality laid the groundwork for modern ethical and political thought, and his ideas continue to influence fields such as philosophy, law, and cognitive science, positioning him as a central figure in the Enlightenment.

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