In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom located the central problem of universities [and as an extension the whole of American society] to be a essential contradiction of Enlightenment thought. He thought that either things will become clear or the whole of the social studies departments and humanities departments of university structure will disintegrate. I have thought because of that, it is necessary to come to some sort of resolution IN PHILOSOPHY. I thought Kant provided the best possible approach, but outside of philosophy departments, he is ignored. He is not as flashy as DEI, Marxism, existentialism, The One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization. And to some degree you can see that part of the fault is in Kant himself--in the B Deduction which there has never been the slightest agreement about what Kant says there. And my favorite version of Kant with the approach of Leonard Nelson is universally ignored.
For some reason Allan Bloom did not refer to Kant as a possible solution. But he did suggest that people learn the Republic of a Plato, and that in itself suggest the Kant-Friesian School of thought because the major thesis of Fries is that there is a deep source of knowledge that begins before knowledge based on the outside world or knowledge based on pure reason i.e., non intuitive immediate knowledge. This correlates with Plato who held knowledge is from what we remember from what we knew before we were born.
The Rambam might be considered a proto Friesian in that he does not think moral principles are derivable from Reason. They had to have been given by GOD at Sinai, but without that, they would not be known at all.
Sunwall writes :"First of all with regard to the primal status of monotheism, Maimonides has ruled out the most powerful argument that could have been made in its favor, that of an innate moral or metaphysical faculty in the human mind. This was a characteristic notion of his own, predominantly Islamic, cultural epoch. This sort of rationalistic anthropology motivated works such as lbn Tufayl's The Life of Hayy, in which the inhabitant of a desert island arrives independently at rational, moral, and monotheistic conclusions. However, Maimonides debars himself from saying "all human beings are natural monotheists" in the same sense that many of his contemporaries would have asserted that "all human beings are natural Muslims" (i.e. when they are born and until they may happen to be perverted by the cultures of non-Muslim societies). Rather in the Guide and elsewhere in his ethical writings, Mairnonides goes to great pains to deny that human beings have any innate metaphysical, and especially, moral intuitions. For Maimonides, although there are moral and metaphysical absolutes, these have been discovered, revealed, or forgotten, within the context of human history as a whole and then transmitted, correctly or otherwise, by tradition. This places the burden of justifying the primal nature of monotheism entirely on historiography."
