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Question:Is "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone" the same as "Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason" both by Kant?
When I search for help online, the second comes up, but I don't know if its the same as the text I'm reading...
Also, if you have any good summary websites, those are helpful too!


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Is "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone" the same as "Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason" both by Kant?
When I search for help online, the second comes up, but I don't know if its the same as the text I'm reading...
Also, if you have any good summary websites, those are helpful too!

Wikipedia!!!
And of course these texts are the same. These titles are both translated from:
Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blo?en Vernunft (more loosely translated: the religion inside/within the limits/borders/boundaries of the naked/pure reason).
This text is terribly outdated btw. It's a shame people make you read that text. Kant is one of the greatest philosophers of all times, but his religious views are really poor compared to his epistemological ideas. His main accomplishment is just that he took God out of the equation. He made science autonomous that way. Not the least thing a philosopher can do!

i'm pretty sure it's one and the same, just translated differently b/c they mean the same.

Kant's expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation* and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic baseā€”and what it had to be saved from was reason. "For the New Intellectual," For the New Intellectual, 30. *["Self-abnegation" is the altruism of Compte, who sought to wipe out the ego. Self-abnegation is the denial of reason as the means of knowing the world. http://www.ditext.com/runes/a.html ]

One of Kant's major goals was to save religion (including the essence of religious morality) from the onslaughts of science. His system represents a massive effort to raise the principles of Platonism, in a somewhat altered form, once again to a position of commanding authority over Western culture. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 31

...although he believed that the dutiful man would be rewarded with happiness after death (and that this is proper), Kant holds that the man who is motivated by such a consideration is nonmoral (since he is still acting from inclination, albeit a supernaturally oriented one). Nor will Kant permit the dutiful man to be motivated even by the desire to feel a sense of moral self-approval. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 78

Yes, the titles are just slightly different translations of the original German. The first is the more common.

Summaries? Don't know of any. But I hope the answer above helps

(And leave Peikoff and Rand alone, their reading of Kant is seriously off-base.).