What I most fear now is that within a century or so there may not be any human future at all.

Smith could not be expected to have anticipated the horrors that were to come. But even in his own time, he was a defender of certain state actions that he thought necessary in order to safeguard the good effects of commercial society (Smith did not speak of 'capitalism' and was acquainted only with an early undeveloped form of it). Among these state actions the chief was general public education.

Marx's writings still have something to teach us about capitalism. They have little or nothing to teach us about any alternatives to it. Anyone who had read them knows that.

If we decide rightly what to do, or use a correct procedure for making such decisions, that has to be because the decisions or the procedure rest on good reasons, and these reasons consist in the apprehension of truths about what we ought to do. Because these truths must constitute reasons for our decisions, and because in the rational order, reasons must always precede the decisions based on them, the truth conditions of claims about what we ought to cannot be reduced to, or constructed out of, decisions about what to do, or procedures for making such decisions.

The picture of Kant as the 'theological Robespierre' or the "world-crusher" was first suggested by someone with whom Kant stood in a relation of philosophical disagreement but also great mutual respect: namely, Moses Mendelssohn.

Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts that reciprocally imply each other. Fichte thinks they are the same thought.

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