The Making of Modern Ukraine cover image

16: Colonization, Extermination, Ethnic Cleansing

The Making of Modern Ukraine

CHAPTER

How to Create a Rule in Prussian History

This moment in Prussian history is also, if I can just make a brief connection to the history of philosophy. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued among many other interesting things that when you act, you should act as though you were making a rule. So, for example, if you're watching this class not live but on video, and there are 3 million views of this class, and every single person who watches it sends me an email and expects me to respond, the rule that you were creating is that Timothy Snyder should be spent 60 years responding to your emails. That's an example of Kantian reasoning.

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