Revolution from Kant to Marx: A Defense of the Right to Rebellion // PHIL 332 Final Paper

The first iteration of this essay was a final paper for PHIL 332.

I officially published this paper in the Spring 2023 issue of The Garden of Ideas, UW's undergraduate philosophy journal, but I'm putting this reflection in three different quarters because the path to get there was rather complex. I first wrote a final essay comparing Kant and Marx's treatment of revolution for PHIL 332 (Modern Political Philosophy) with Dr. Mendoza. This was my first writing-based philosophy class (I had previously taken PHIL 120, or Intro to Logic), so I was nervous about how well I would do in the class, but to my relief my final essay was well-received by Dr. Mendoza (see above).

Because I received such positive feedback from Dr. Mendoza, I then submitted it to The Garden of Ideas. Unfortunately, my essay was rejected, but the editors suggested that I revise the essay to consider the importance of Hegel's work. In Spring 2023, I revised the essay (with an extremely tenuous understanding of Hegel mostly from secondary sources), and learned to my surprise that the essay was accepted for the spring issue of the journal!

For reasons still unknown to me, however, the staff that year never got around to publishing the Spring 2023 issue of The Garden of Ideas. When I joined the journal the next year, I took it upon myself (somewhat selfishly) to finally publish that issue. I finally had some free time in Winter 2024, after we had published the Autumn 2024 issue of the journal. At the same time, I was also taking PHIL 418 (Jewish Philosophy), in which we also happened to be reading Marx. For that reason, as I was reviewing my essay that quarter, it became clear to me that my relatively weak understanding of Marx and Hegel showed through in the essay, and I decided to take it upon myself to revise the essay once more before publishing. I removed the references to Hegel, and instead devoted the essay to a much deeper analysis of Kant and Marx's philosophy. The result was, in my view, a much stronger essay! I definitely got lucky with being able to retroactively revise this essay, and learned an important lesson to avoid taking shortcuts when writing about topics I was unfamiliar with.

You can read my published essay below!

4 - Andrew Shaw - GOI Spring 2023.pdf

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