Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both be socially and politically successful in the industrial nations of Western Europe, and that it would develop an entirely new way of human social life that would retain and even enhance the productive benefits of capitalism while overcoming the inhumanity and exploitation of capitalist social relations. Marx himself had no solutions to these problems. His object of study was capitalism itself.

Hegel's theory of recognition is basically derived from Fichte, who is its real author.

Kant's system of duties constitutes a Doctrine of Virtue because the duties also indicate what kinds of attitudes, dispositions and feelings are morally virtuous or vicious.

In any matter of moral importance, our first task, before we plunge ahead and decide what to do, is to figure out what we ought to do.

Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific methodology.

The relation of the law to the self is only a helpful way of thinking about the law, that helps us better understand its validity for us.

Capitalism has proven to be a far more terrible system than Marx could ever bring himself to imagine. Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims.