I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do, and independent of any procedures we might use in making such decisions.

It is a cause of shame to any member of the human race to be a member of the same species some of whose members could vote for any candidate for president that has been offered by the Republican party. Such people seem to be motivated only by short-sighted greed, ignorance, fear and hatred.

Kant's treatments of rational theology and metaphysics were aimed primarily at theoretical questions. His attitude toward the pseudo-sciences of "special metaphysics" in Wolff and Baumgarten was always double-edged. He did see them as pseudo-sciences but also valued their doctrinal value and especially their regulative value for the empirical sciences. Like his views about religion, I don't think any of this is any longer viable in its original form.

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.

Kant has been famous for his rejection of eudaimonism, but I think Kantian ethics has a great deal in common with Aristotle, and some things in common with Stoicism as well. The traditions tend, I believe, to talk past each other when it comes to happiness or eudaimonia.

Until I was a junior in high school, I was a "boy scientist" type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

We totally misunderstand both his aims and his contribution if we try to read into Marx some anticipation of either the modest successes or the disastrous failures of those who later thought they were acting in his name.