Immanuel Kant

Nietzsche repeatedly claims that Kant’s supreme moral principle, the categorical imperative, is expressive of a kind of slave morality. Paul Guyer, however, argues that a proper understanding of Kant’s conception of free agency within the boundaries of the categorical imperative reveals that Nietzsche’s criticism of slavishness misses its mark. According to Guyer, Kant, just as much as Nietzsche, rejects slavish conceptions of morality insofar as they undermine the value of self-legislation in determining ends. This paper contends that Nietzsche may in (...) fact have a subtler conception of the categorical imperative’s slavishness in terms of the (un)realisability of our ends, which could allow his criticisms to land, and that Kantians will be responsive to. (shrink)

This paper undertakes a comparative ethical analysis of Immanuel Kant’s concept of moral autonomy and Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of human dignity. Kant grounds autonomy in the rational capacity of the will to legislate universal moral law, establishing dignity as intrinsic and unconditional. Tagore, by contrast, articulates an ethical humanism rooted in spiritual freedom, creative self-realization, and relational harmony. By placing these perspectives in dialogue, the study highlights convergences and divergences concerning autonomy, moral motivation, and the nature of ethical life, proposing (...) a richer framework for contemporary intercultural ethics. (shrink)

This essay will explore historical and conceptual analogies between emergent theories of space in the Early Modern and contemporary periods, where an emergent space (spacetime) theory regards space as an emergent property or effect of a non-spatial (non-spatiotemporal) substance or substances. While emergent spacetime hypotheses are the dominate methodology in contemporary quantum gravity research, it will be demonstrated that the basic metaphysical presuppositions underlying Kant’s precritical monadology are roughly analogous to those assumed in various modern conceptions. In addition to demonstrating (...) that contemporary emergent space ontologies are not a unique development, since there are Early Modern historical precedents, the main goal of the essay will be to reveal the lessons that both camps can draw from each other on possible lines of development, especially as regards the “spatial presence” problem, i.e., whether non-spatial elements illegitimately presuppose spatial concepts. Whereas the spatial presence problem presented a major obstacle to Kant’s monadology, the evolution of contemporary physics provides resources that have the potential to resolve that issue. (shrink)

Este trabajo explora, en primer lugar, la recepción heideggeriana de la filosofía de Kant, con especial atención a su concepción de la subjetividad y la función trascendental del tiempo, para posteriormente cuestionar la legitimidad de sus críticas mediante una interpretación alternativa de los textos que son el foco de su diatriba. Al reconstruir esta recepción, ponemos de relieve una ambigüedad: Kant es valorado como precursor del proyecto heideggeriano, pero se le reprocha una falta de radicalismo relativo a la cuestión del (...) tiempo que resulta, en última instancia, en una insuficiente superación del planteamiento ontológico cartesiano. A partir de lecturas recientes que sostienen que la subjetividad kantiana guarda un papel trascendental implícito para la espacialidad del sujeto, proponemos una reinterpretación unitaria de la paradoja de las contrapartes incongruentes, la “Refutación del idealismo” y la “Deducción trascendental de las categorías” de la edición B. Acudiremos, asimismo, a varias Reflexionen, entre las cuales destacaremos la llamada “Reflexión de Leningrado” descubierta en 1986. Sostenemos, contra Heidegger, que la redacción de la KrV de 1787 no pretende suprimir la primacía trascendental del tiempo frente al espacio, sino presentar una concepción de la relación entre ambos en la que el espacio desempeña una función constitutiva en la apertura a la experiencia. Por último, defenderemos que en el curso de Heidegger de 1935-1936 sobre la KrV se produce un giro respecto a la lectura de la década anterior compatible con la interpretación aquí propuesta. (shrink)

For Kant, “thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (KrV, A51/B75). This formula was directed against the conception of concepts held by authors such as Wolff and Baumgarten, who regarded as empty only those concepts whose content is contradictory. According to these thinkers, concepts whose content is possible are not empty, since their content consists in the sum of the determinations that define that content as such. For Kant, by contrast, even concepts of possible contents are empty, (...) since, taken as such, they do not yield knowledge of an actually existing object; for this, an empirical intuition grounded in perception is required. Hegel, for his part, disputes the claim that the content of empirical intuitions contains anything more than its own determinate content. But if both the content of concepts and that of empirical intuitions are merely possible, when and how does the mind come into contact with the real world? For the explanatory model proposed by Hegel, this apparent problem rests on a fallacious line of argument, namely, that if both concepts and empirical intuitions are empty, then the totality formed by the two cannot itself be anything but empty. On the contrary, for Hegel the reference of contents to the real world results from the coherent system that mediates all determinate contents among themselves; the way in which concepts and empirical intuitions acquire their reference to the world is precisely through this totality insofar as it singularizes itself within itself as a concrete, particular object. (shrink)

This chapter examines Immanuel Kant’s racial theory and its enduring impact on liberal political philosophy, arguing that Kant’s racism is not a peripheral contradiction but central to understanding his system’s continued relevance. Through an intersectional and critical analysis, the author explores how Kant’s mature political philosophy, particularly in The Doctrine of Right, embeds racial hierarchies within frameworks of formal equality and rightful dependency. By tracing Kant’s silence on race and strategic location of slavery “elsewhere,” the chapter uncovers how colonial and (...) racial subordination are rendered invisible within liberal meritocracies. It then presents Kant as a pioneer of colourblind, meritocratic strategies that continue to justify systemic inequality. Rather than dismissing Kant, the author argues for engaging critically with his legacy to expose the racialized architecture of liberalism and to better understand how modern notions of justice obscure, rather than eliminate, enduring patterns of racial domination. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper argues that the bottom-up methodological paradigm—the attempt to reconstruct reality from determinate, bounded elements—is structurally doomed to fail due to the General Zero Principle (GZP), which states that all determination requires an indeterminate ground.1 Using case studies from mathematics (Gödel), philosophy of mind (the hard problem), mod- ern cosmology (the crisis of origins), particle physics (the crisis of substance), logic (Aris- totelian non-contradiction), and Kantian epistemology, I demonstrate that each domain en- counters a limit-gap that is not (...) an anomaly but the return of the constitutive outside. These gaps—from the Singularity to the Noumenon—are unified as manifestations of Parmenides’ wall: the impossibility of containing the condition of determination within what is determined. I propose that the Neo-Pre-Platonic Naturalist (NPN) meta-structure offers a coherent way forward by formally acknowledging the outside (Apeiron) (FP5) and reorienting epistemology as top-down navigation rather than bottom-up construction. -/- DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18234685 -/- Keywords: General Zero Principle, GZP, Parmenides’ wall, infinite regress, Gödel, hard problem of consciousness, cosmology, particle physics, string theory land- scape, Kant, NPN, Apeiron, navigation. (shrink)

We argue that scholars involved in debates on Kant’s writings on race and racism are deeply entangled with a tacit methodological debate about the use of a ‘priority principle’. We identify three variants of the priority principle in Kant scholarship. To illustrate, we focus on interpretations of Kant’s Physical Geography. The methodological approaches we analyse offer three opposite and mutually exclusive interpretative recommendations. We articulate a taxonomy of methods commonly employed and suggest that focusing on individual texts reveals value-laden methodological (...) assumptions guiding the debate. To address substantive issues surrounding Kant’s raciology, we suggest commentators should carefully justify their methodological choices. (shrink)

Three claims have dominated contemporary epistemology for the better part of a century: -/- 1. Knowledge is justified true belief; 2. Treating knowledge as justified true belief has been standard in epistemology since Plato; 3. This ancient standard was torpedoed by Gettier’s (1963) paper, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” -/- Taken together, 1–3 form the background of the JTB theory of knowledge (henceforth JTB). According to JTB, a subject S knows a proposition p just in case (i) p is true; (...) (ii) S believes p; and (iii) S’s belief is justified. But in 1963, Edmund Gettier dealt what is generally regarded to be a devastating blow to (iii), and therefore to JTB on the whole. So then, the thinking goes, some new version of JTB must be found, usually by modifying (iii), the J condition. Many many studies have been written on this, with mixed results. But what if the whole JTB enterprise is frustrated precisely because it was wrong-headed from the get-go? (shrink)

We must proceed with both epistemic humility—the recognition that we don’t know everything, and in fact know very little—and flagrant optimism about the positive surprises that await us. This paper develops a philosophical framework for thinking about artificial intelligence, large language models, and the prospect of artificial general intelligence under conditions of radical uncertainty. Drawing on Kant’s critical philosophy, Leibniz’s monadology, and contemporary cosmology, I argue that our situation with respect to intelligence mirrors our situation with respect to the physical (...) universe: approximately 95% of what matters remains unknown. Just as dark matter and dark energy constitute the overwhelming majority of the cosmos while remaining deeply mysterious, so too do the “dark variables” of cognition, consciousness, and intelligence constitute vast lacunae in our understanding. -/- This epistemic situation demands humility about confident predictions, whether optimistic or pessimistic, regarding AI capabilities, timelines, and risks. Yet it equally demands openness to radical positive surprises. A systematic analysis of “attained fantasies”—dreams once dismissed as impossible that subsequently became reality—reveals a consistent pattern: from Lucian of Samosata’s lunar voyage (150 CE →1969 CE) to Turing’s thinking machines (1950 → 2015), human imagination has repeatedly underestimated what the universe permits. The paper connects this analysis to my 1995 prediction of digital resurrection technology, which anticipated by three decades the emergence of AI systems capable of simulating deceased individuals. The conclusion is not skepticism but calibrated wonder: we are at the beginning of understanding intelligence, not the end, and the space of positive possibilities vastly exceeds our current imagination. (shrink)

What does it mean to do wrong for its own sake, and is this even possible? I call this the puzzle of malice, and in this paper I review a historical dialectic that plays out between Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on how to address it. By reviewing each author’s account of malice, and their criticism of their respective predecessor, I reach several surprising findings: First, that Nietzsche has a positive account of malice (albeit one on which it isn’t always a (...) vice); second, that recent attempts to defend Schopenhauer’s account of malice fail; third, that Nietzsche’s account bears more resemblance to Kant’s than to Schopenhauer’s; and fourth that Nietzsche’s broad account of malice sheds light on moral phenomena left out of more conventional approaches (e.g. willful defiance of the sacred). (shrink)

This article discusses Kant's distinction between right and ethics as developed in his Metaphysics of Morals, 6:218-221 and 6:390. According to Kant, ethical as well as juridical laws are laws of freedom. I will argue that although both types of laws have unconditional binding force, law and ethics differ in how obligations can be claimed within their respective spheres of legislation. While a subject can be externally coerced to act according to juridical laws, ethical laws require that the agent performs (...) his duty from a moral disposition. (shrink)

This chapter articulates and defends a republican interpretation of corrective justice theory. This view takes “independence” as the constitutive aim of a legal system but understands independence in a substantive and not merely formal way. Developing Kant’s conception of substantive independence as an ideal of equal citizens working together, this chapter argues that corrective justice requires accounting for the role that private legal entitlements play in causing and upholding forms of subordinating dependence that arise from our interdependent participation in a (...) productive economy around work, housing, education, and public accommodation. It outlines an approach to defining the scope of private entitlements and a doctrine of exploitation consistent with corrective justice. Independence points to a non-distributive approach to justice that retains the core ideas of relationality and correlativity at the heart of private law. This alternative approach incorporates many of the considerations associated with public law and distributive justice while remaining within a corrective justice framework. (shrink)

Is the death penalty definitively a question of the past? Although over 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, around 55 states still retain and, in some cases, actively use it. This book offers a rigorous introduction in three parts: first, a systematic examination of the two major penal philosophies (retributivism and utilitarianism) and their relation to capital punishment; second, a broad contextualization of contemporary debates, especially in the Anglo-American world; and third, a critical reflection on (...) the compatibility of the death penalty with the principles of a democratic rule-of-law state. The inquiry culminates in two philosophical commentaries on Beccaria and Kant, foundational figures whose opposition still shapes the contours of this debate. While the author does not conceal an abolitionist commitment, he engages seriously with opposing arguments in order to shed philosophical light on a major issue of contemporary justice. -/- . (shrink)

Here I sketch and suggest a reading of Kant's main argument in the Second Analogy—call it the “nomologically determined object” view—that avoids shortcomings both of the "looseness of fit" view and Friedman's Newtonian view while extracting a conception of particular empirical laws of nature untouched by the famous non sequitur objection. Causality is a necessary principle of nature as such and particular empirical laws of nature are necessary for one and the same reason: “changing in such and such manner” is (...) the form of the only possible mark by means of which we individuate any possible object of cognition and hence discover further determinations that constitute (the state of) any possible object that changes in such and such manner. In short: objects necessarily obey particular causal laws because a distinctive manner of changing determines what states of what sensible objects change in that distinctive way—in other words, empirical causal laws and their objects are coindividuated. As I show in closing, such laws need not be deterministic, and the non sequitur objection, recast in light of this result, further helps identify how Kant mistakenly though understandably thought that they must be. (shrink)

In this paper, we revisit Kant’s conception of political freedom and draw a connection to the concept of freedom presented in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals—a practical concept of freedom that is immediately grounded in the transcendental concept of freedom. Also, we defend the traditional viewpoint on the relationship between Kant’s theory of morals and the theory of Right, which is equivalent to the claim that political freedom is based on the definition of freedom in the Groundwork.

In the 1770s’ lectures on ethics, Kant distinguishes between two principles of obligation: the principle of adjudication and the principle of execution. The former is the normative standard of moral evaluation, while the latter denotes the incentive for performing an obligatory action. This distinction is significant in that it anticipates Kant’s mature position of combining these two principles, i.e. the moral law later becomes the supreme principle of moral judgment and (via respect) is itself the incentive to moral action. I (...) explicate Kant’s distinction in view of the moral thought of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Christian Wolff. I challenge the dominant views which interpret Kant’s distinction in connection with Hutcheson and Smith, and argue that it is best understood in relation to Wolff’s conception of obligation. While Hutcheson’s distinction between exciting and justifying reasons is broadly similar to Kant’s distinction, Hutcheson’s account does not center on the concept of obligation. Furthermore, I argue that Smith’s distinction between the character of virtue and the faculty of the mind by which it is recommended to us does not concern the normative and motivational moments of moral agency, but rather the meta-ethical question of the nature of virtue and the faculty that conditions its appraisal. Finally, I show that Wolff’s conception of obligation involves normative and motivational aspects conceptually similar to Kant’s distinction between the two principles of obligation. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant denies K. L. Reinhold’s definition of free will as the capacity to choose for or against the moral law. Kant notoriously calls the possibility of deviating from the moral law an incapacity, leading commentators to attribute to Kant the view that immoral action is not free. I argue that this claim instead pertains to the proper definition of free will. This reading elucidates the connection between Kant’s commitment to free immoral action and his restriction (...) of the concept of free will to pure reason’s ability to be practical independently of sensible necessitation. (shrink)

Kant ist immer wieder der Vorwurf gemacht worden, den seine kritische Philosophie fundierenden Stämmedualismus von Sinnlichkeit und Verstand nicht begründet, sondern bloß vorausgesetzt zu haben. Träfe der Vorwurf zu, stünde die gesamte Kantische Philosophie auf tönernen Füßen. Denn nicht nur die transzendentale Theorie der Erkenntnis und die Kritik der Metaphysik, auch die praktische Philosophie, Ästhetik und Teleologie hängen letztlich vom Dualismus der Erkenntnisstämme ab. Der Vorwurf ist nicht gerechtfertigt. Das Buch zeigt, dass Kant eine klare Vorstellung von der Begründung der (...) Unterscheidung zwischen den Vermögen der Sinnlichkeit und des Verstandes als den einzigen Quellen menschlicher Erkenntnis hat. Diese Begründung wird rekonstruiert anhand der Detailanalyse der Theorie der Vorstellungsarten: Anschauung und Begriff, die Kant seit der Raumschrift von 1768 entwickelt und in seiner kritischen Philosophie vor allem in Auseinandersetzung mit der Leibniz-Wolffschen Theorie der Repräsentation entfaltet. Den Kern der Argumentation bildet die von Kant eingeführte neue Konzeption des Einzelnen und des Allgemeinen, der zufolge die Anschauung als einzelne Vorstellung und der Begriff als allgemeine Vorstellung irreduzible Vorstellungsarten sind. Die im erkennenden Subjekt verankerte Dualität der Einzelheit der Anschauung und der Allgemeinheit des Begriffs erweist sich so als die unhintergehbare Fundamentalunterscheidung der kritischen Philosophie, die bis heute für jede Kant-Kritik eine Herausforderung darstellt. (shrink)

Although Kant’s view of the rational subject has been enormously influential, less attention has been paid to his account of what occurs when a subject fails to reflect on her reasons and falls under the influence of what he calls prejudice. My first goal in this paper is to explain Kant’s definition of prejudice by drawing on related discussions scattered across his published texts, notes and lectures. Next, I discuss his prescriptions for how prejudice can be identified and overcome. Although (...) he is often portrayed as requiring subjects to internally monitor their beliefs and intentions, I show that he in fact takes individual reflection to be a limited tool. Rather, he argues that communication with other subjects can be indispensable in fully overcoming prejudice. Finally, I argue that Kant’s account successfully avoids either over- or under- intellectualizing prejudice. In allowing that subjective causes like a subject’s associations and inclinations can lead her to judge and act in prejudiced ways, I suggest that he anticipates contemporary discussions of implicit bias. At the same time, however, he continues to maintain that a subject is rationally accountable for her prejudices, since, on his view, she can always refrain from unreflectively endorsing her associations and inclinations. (shrink)

In his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant argues that divine assistance, or grace, may help a person transform his or her moral character. I argue that the possibility of divine assistance is compatible with Kant’s view that moral reform must be accomplished through a person’s own free activity. I argue, moreover, that Kant appeals to different concepts of grace in the Religion, which broadly correspond to the Protestant taxonomy of prevenient, sanctifying, and justifying grace. Examining the various (...) arguments for these types of grace will reveal that grace has practical significance, for Kant. It will therefore yield a richer understanding about the nature and possibility of moral transformation in Kant’s Religion. (shrink)

This paper argues that a central thread uniting much of 20th-century French philosophy is a reconfiguration of Kant’s transcendental dialectic as a response to the dominance of Hegel’s thought. After setting out Hegel and Kant’s accounts of dialectic, the paper explores how Merleau-Ponty uses Kant’s concept of antinomy and Derrida uses the concept of a transcendental ideal to develop a non-Hegelian account of thought. In contrast to Hegel’s sublation of contradiction into conceptual unity, these thinkers highlight how Kant’s transcendental dialectic (...) reveals the limits of conceptual thought and how, once resituated as operating between conceptual and non-conceptual aspects of the phenomenal world, it opens the way towards an understanding of pre-conceptual structures such as perception and différance. (shrink)

Die Werke Kants oder Hegels sind geistige Denkmaler: Sie gehören zur Nationalliteratur, und die Verfasser von Editionen und Kommentaren zu diesen Werken betreiben insofern eine Art Denkmalpflege. In der Geschichte Englands oder in der des englischen Sprachraumes hat kein philosophisches Werk einen auch nur annähernd ähnlichen Status. Texte als solche ("klassische Texte" oder "Meisterwerke") spielen dementsprechend in der deutschen Philosophie eine viel wichtigere Rolle als bei den Angelsachsen, und etwas ähnliches gilt auch für das Kommentieren: Zu englischsprachigen philosophischen Werken gibt (...) es nämlich keine Kommentarliteratur. (shrink)

A prominent post-Kantian critique of Kant contends that Kant’s Critical philosophy is defensible only if his account of mental activity is grounded in life, subsequently denying that Kant grounds mental activities in life. I call this critique the inorganicism challenge. In what follows, I show that this challenge is neither extraneous nor vague, but must be taken seriously. I also show that Kant has the resources to rebut this challenge. In the first section, I contextualize the inorganicism challenge by demonstrating (...) that it stems from a long line of (what I call) anti-realist readings of Kant’s doctrine of purposiveness. In the second section, I illustrate how anti-realist views have animated inorganicist challengers. In the third section, I explain that Kant actually does reserve a deep role for life in his theory of mind. (shrink)

Nick Land infamously recasts Immanuel Kant as a philosopher of cybernetics-as-control, arguing that the Kantian transcendental subject imposes rigid a priori forms that domesticate all alterity -- much as capitalist exchange imposes commensuration on difference. In this polemic, I contest Land’s reading and propose that Kant, far from inaugurating a closed regime of control, opens the door to a metadisciplinary, porous cybernetics of the transcendental. By revisiting Kant’s critical philosophy through contemporary category theory and sheaf theory, I argue that the (...) transcendental is not a static apparatus of domination but an evolving, self-correcting system of constraints and feedbacks. This transcendental cybernetics synthesizes diversity into provisional unities without totalizing them, thereby offering a recursive, non-totalizing approach to the subject–object relation. -/- To support this view, I draw on my trilogy of works---Prolegomenon to a Treatise (2022), Critique of Transcendental Structure: Toward a Synthetic Unity of Aesthetics and Collective Intelligence (2025), and Dub Langlands: Art Theory Texts on Cybernetics (2025)---which reframe Kantian critique via category-theoretic structures. My Critique of Transcendental Structure}, my magnum opus, demonstrates how a “transversal” or “synthetic” reason armed with sheaf theory can achieve unity-in-diversity without enforcing uniformity. I further incorporate Noah Chrein’s recent distinction between two approaches to "categorical cybernetics''---(1) modeling systems by categories vs. (2) modeling systems in arbitrary formalisms with a categorical metatheory---to clarify how the latter approach fosters an open-ended, reflexive framework. The result is a vision of critique as an open system of knowledge: one that continually revises its own conditions (akin to Fichte’s self-positing I and Novalis’s transdisciplinary "Romantic Encyclopædia'') rather than a final legislator of truth. This approach stands in contrast to both Hegelian absolute closure and speculative realism’s flat ontologies, preserving a space for novelty ("voids'' of indeterminacy) as the very medium through which rational progress occurs. (shrink)

This chapter first outlines key interpretive traditions—libertarian, legal positivism, participatory democratic—in the existing scholarship on Kant’s theory of political obligations and discusses how women and minority scholars in the field have transformed it through their analyses of situations confronting people whose lives are characterized by serious and systemic oppression. It then proposes that these discussions give us reason to rethink the assumption in much philosophical theory—namely, that the question of whether or not political obligations exist in a particular society can (...) be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” Indeed, giving up this assumption when we analyze the choices facing oppressed people is likely a first step in making political theories more suited to the moral complexities of our actual, historical societies. (shrink)

Kant has been interpreted as claiming that persons possess unconditional and incomparable value. If this claim, which I call the “absolute value claim,” entails that persons are valuable in all circumstances and cannot be valued vis-à-vis each other, then its philosophical validity may be disputed. I point to passages in which Kant can be understood as saying that persons, as opposed to non-persons, can be thought to have absolute value, but persons performing immoral actions can be denied value. I argue (...) that if we accept these propositions, then, at least from the Kantian standpoint, some well-known cases which seem to problematize the absolute value claim—a soldier sacrifices himself in battle to save four of his comrades; a person kills another person in order to save his own life; should a scarce life-saving drug be given to a young or an old person?—need not be seen prima facie to undermine the philosophical viability of this claim. (shrink)

This paper examines and critiques Immanuel Kant’s strong opposition to espionage and related “infernal arts” as expressed in Towards Perpetual Peace and the Metaphysics of Morals. While Kant condemns espionage as a dishonorable stratagem that undermines the trust essential for lasting peace, this stance has received limited scholarly attention. The paper argues that Kant’s rejection of espionage is more nuanced than a mere objection to dishonesty; rather, it is rooted in his political and legal philosophy, particularly his views on just (...) war theory and the need for nations to establish a “rightful condition.” The analysis contrasts Kant’s views with those of Grotius and Hobbes. Critically, the paper challenges Kant’s position, suggesting that it aligns only with a narrow conception of espionage and overlooks its potential to foster international trust. By reassessing Kant’s arguments, the paper highlights their relevance to contemporary debates on the ethical dimensions of espionage and warfare. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relationship between language and thought in Kant and contemporary philosophy. It argues that Kant, despite his substantive contributions to the philosophy of language, would not have followed the linguistic turn in philosophy. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, the sharp distinction between words and concepts, as well as between ‘nominal’ and ‘real’ concepts; secondly, the view that philosophical inquiries are genuinely directed at ‘concepts of things’ rather than at ‘concepts of words.’ The first section analyses (...) the word-concept distinction in Kant. The following section examines the conflation of words and concepts in both everyday and professional philosophical language, as well as Kant’s possible response. The next part is dedicated to the problem of conceptual and topical discontinuity as well as the distinction between words, concepts, and conceptions from both contemporary and Kantian points of view. Finally, the concluding section offers an alternative perspective on the significance of words and continuity in philosophy. (shrink)

This paper is a critical analysis of transcendental naïve realism (TRN), a metatheory of perception proposed by Allen, and inspired by the works of Merleau-Ponty and P.F. Strawson. TRN postulates granting naïve realism a special status amongst philosophical theories of perception on the basis of a transcendental argument that purports to render naïve realism unfalsifiable. Perhaps this conception manages to identify a so far unacknowledged reason why some philosophers regard naïve realism as the best theory of perception. But if TRN (...) is supposed to support naïve realism in the debate with competing theories of perception, it is a counterproductive enterprise. For it creates an impression that the belief in naïve realism has its source in wishful thinking. That impression is mistaken, as Allen’s transcendental argument is neither the only nor the best account of naïve realism’s motivations. (shrink)

This article engages closely with David Owen’s ‘Autonomy, Self-Respect, and Self-Love: Nietzsche on Ethical Agency.’ Owen argues that Kant tried, but ultimately failed, to resolve the tension between law and love that is characteristic of European modern philosophy. This is because Kant takes a ‘highly critical stance to self-love throughout his moral philosophy’ since he conflates self-love with psychological egoism and sees it as ‘opposed to morality as a threat, a challenge, a danger…’ Owen articulates Nietzsche’s main objections to the (...) Kantian opposition between self-love and the moral law and argues that Nietzsche has a rather greater claim than Kant to have resolved this tension. In this article, I explore whether some of the arguments developed in Owen’s text represent serious challenges to Kant’s position and develop a reading of Kant’s ethics which can answer most of the challenges. First, I argue that Kant is committed to a version of the ‘agency free will’ model. I show that, on the Kantian model, one constitutes oneself as self by becoming what one is through reflecting about one’s ability to live up to what one considers one’s fundamental commitments. Second, I argue that on this model, there is no universal list of maxims or commitments that can be fully specified in advance for all agents in all times. Each person’s project of moral transformation is personal and ultimately shaped by features of their own psychology and personal history as well as features of their social circumstances. Third, I argue that the Kantian project of moral transformation, which involves repenting immoral maxims, can also be understood as a form of flourishing and self-affirmation, which includes the pursuit of happiness as one of its components. On this reading, far from endorsing an ‘ascetic ideal’ of the moral agent, Kant embraces an ideal of the human life in which there is significant space, and even a duty, to pursue pleasurable endeavours. However, although morality and happiness are not intrinsically incompatible, they are likely to conflict under unstable and unjust external conditions. Thus, the extent to which we can live a completely morally good life is not independent of social and political conditions. Ultimately, in the Kantian picture, the task of moral self-improvement also has a social dimension: we must avoid being complicit with the injustices of our time and instead work towards overturning them. It is in fair (or at least fairer) social and political conditions that we can pursue both moral and personal ends and flourish. (shrink)

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Ius naturae, translated as Natural Law. Kant described Achenwall as a “respectable” man who was “cautious, precise and modest” (TP 8: 301), and his own legal and political theory is in many ways indebted to Achenwall. But Kant was highly critical of the most fundamental tenets of Achenwall’s account, including his account of obligation, his philosophical foundation of natural law, and his theory of the state – to (...) mention just a few. In the only known transcript of his course, known as the Feyerabend lectures (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s theory but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from these lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, we must compare the transcript to the textbook. Thus, one must have Achenwall on one’s desk when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures on natural law. Our aim in this essay is to introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we start with some background information about Achenwall and his work (Section 2). We then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right (Section 3), and his theory of property and the state (Section 4). We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures (Section 5). (shrink)

As part of the Rex Reviews Series, Kant’s first and greatest critique is on the table, where some of his philosophy is elucidated, his themes, project, and the limits of such a project are briefly outlined, and finally, why such a book had a lasting impact on me personally. From his opaqueness to the merits and path-finding direction of his philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason rightfully is a masterpiece of philosophy, errors notwithstanding.

Are gender and sexuality genetically determined, or do we construct and perform them? For too long, debates about gender and sexuality have swung between the idea that our identities are biologically fixed and the claim that they’re freely chosen or socially constructed. Philosopher of gender and sexuality Helga Varden offers a striking alternative. Drawing on Kant’s theory of human nature, she argues that gender and sexuality aren’t chosen or hardwired – they emerge from the inner texture of our conscious, embodied (...) experience of the world. (shrink)

The study investigates the epistemological premises of the so-called "anthropological turn" of the eighteenth century within the German-speaking territories. Contrary to the dominant scholarly narrative of the past two decades, this shift is shaped less by the empirical sciences than by semiotics and exercises of the self, which find expression in the newly re-evaluated rhetorical tradition of the eighteenth century. As a discipline attuned to both semiotics and exercises, rhetoric offers a framework for reconfiguring human formation within the bourgeois Enlightenment. (...) On this basis, three key concepts organize Enlightenment anthropology in its effort to form the human being as a "good" human being: character, 'Bildung' (cultivation or formation), and 'Bestimmung' (vocation or destiny). -/- Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, drawing on Aristotle and Leibniz, argues in his "Ethica philosophica" (1740) for a perfection of the human being conceived as a dynamic process. This process, he claims, is dependent upon regimes of signs and exercises of the self. Given that these are primarily operative on the level of sensibility, Baumgarten subsequently sees the necessity to develop a science of sensate cognition—an endeavor he undertakes with his "Aesthetica" (1750/58). Through the artistic figure of the 'felix aestheticus', he outlines a set of exercises that serve the formation of the "good" human being. -/- Johann Georg Sulzer adopts this model of the human being as a subject in formation in his "Versuch von der Erziehung und Unterweisung der Kinder" (1745), thereby introducing the concept of 'Bildung' into Enlightenment pedagogy and establishing it as a central concept of the period. As he argues, the optimal formation of the human being into a "good" individual is achieved through poetry. This insight motivates Sulzer to implement such poetic pedagogy in practice with his "Unterredungen über die Schönheit der Natur" (1750), through which he seeks to cultivate the human being as he imagines it. -/- This dynamic model of human formation is further reflected in Immanuel Kant's concept of the 'Bestimmung des Menschen' (vocation or destiny of the human being), which becomes a central trope of German Enlightenment discourse. Since this vocation cannot be promoted through transcendental philosophy alone, Kant, in the methodological sections of his Critiques, shifts toward ethical askesis. From this point forward, it is through exercises that the human being is shaped and brought toward the ideal Kant envisions. In his pedagogical treatise "Über Pädagogik" (1803), Kant elaborates these formative exercises. Yet because the pragmatic formation of the human being never fully attains the ideal, Kant ultimately locates the telos of this formation in a social context—die Tischgesellschaft (the table society)—in his "Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht" (1798). (shrink)

Book review in English of: Eckart Förster, "Grenzen der Erkenntnis? Untersuchungen zu Kant und dem Deutschen Idealismus." Herausgegeben von Johannes Haag und Bodo Beyer. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2022, 490 pp. ISBN 978-3-7728-2932-1. -/- Review published in: Studia philosophica 83 (2024): 178-181. (Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Philosophie: Basel / Berlin, Schwabe Verlag).

Como começamos a refletir e deliberar sobre nossa conduta moral, colocando-nos no lugar dos outros? Mais especificamente, de que forma gerimos, de maneira arbitrária, nossa conduta a partir de uma perspectiva que prioriza o bem de todos os seres humanos de forma universal? Com o objetivo de responder essa questão, parto da hipótese de que o conceito de razão prática, frequentemente tratado como 'vontade' na Fundamentação da Metafísica dos Costumes de Kant, pode esclarecer o desenvolvimento de nossa capacidade de refletir (...) e gerir autonomamente nossas ações sob uma ótica que coloca todos os indivíduos em condições de igualdade, isto é, sob uma perspectiva universalista. Para atingir esse objetivo, minha investigação se desdobra nas seguintes etapas: (i) analiso o conceito de vontade a partir dos conceitos de dever e de razão prática; (ii) analiso o conceito de autonomia a partir dos conceitos de liberdade e de lei moral; e (iii) sintetizo as duas análises precedentes e abordo com mais detalhes o conceito de Imperativo Categórico no sentido de buscar responder como o conceito de vontade pode nos ajudar a compreender o processo pelo qual passamos a direcionar nossa conduta a partir de uma perspectiva universalista. Concluo que, embora a reflexão autônoma seja o caminho para a liberdade e para uma conduta moral universal, ela ainda pode — e deve — ser socialmente cultivada. (shrink)

Kant, na Crítica da razão pura, propõe, inspirado pelo sucesso da física e da matemática, uma transformação da metafísica em ciência. Observando o fracasso da metafísica tradicional, que tentava adaptar o conhecimento à natureza dos objetos, Kant sugere uma inversão metodológica: os objetos devem se ajustar ao conhecimento, de maneira semelhante à revolução copernicana, que trocou a Terra pelo Sol como centro do universo. Kant defende que a forma como intuímos e conceituamos o mundo molda os objetosconhecidos e, apesar de (...) não podermos conhecer além da experiência, podemos pensá-lo sistematicamente mediante a razão pura. Nesse cenário, o objetivo deste artigo é esclarecer o significado da revolução copernicana na epistemologia e na metafísica kantianas, com uma análise focada no parágrafo 11 do prefácio da segunda edição da obra. Com este trabalho, espero poder contribuir para a compreensão introdutória desse problema que é um clássico na filosofia, sobretudo no contexto da graduação. (shrink)

Comentario de un texto de Kant: Fundamentación para una metafísica de las costumbres (Cap. I, [<Ak. IV, 402> [ A 17 ]).

In a well-known essay, Thomas Pogge argues that Kant’s political philosophy is not comprehensive in Rawls’ sense, since it is independent of his moral philosophy. However, Pogge understands Kant’s comprehensive liberalism as the view that his moral philosophy entails his political philosophy. I question whether this is the best way to understand comprehensive liberalism, in Kant or in general. I argue that Kant’s comprehensive moral philosophy is not an independent argument for the moral truth of liberal ideals, but a liberal (...) way of justifying an independent commitment to politically liberal values, given that we all have values that are not political. (shrink)

In the Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics, Robert Clewis characterises Kant’s early views of aesthetic normativity in terms of a synthesis of a rationalist appeal to laws of sensibility and an empiricist appeal to rules of taste that are arrived at through consensus about great works of art. On the consensus approach, sharing the experience of beauty with others is itself a source of pleasure and normativity. For Clewis, the mature Kant no longer ties aesthetic normativity to sociality, but instead grounds (...) it in the a priori principle of judgement. In these comments, I challenge Clewis’ narrative about Kant’s development and argue that the mature Kant continues to connect aesthetic normativity to the sociality of taste. (shrink)

In this article, we will argue that the interpretation that Kant was a racist is not based on the main arguments of Kant’s race theory nor on normative discrimination. Furthermore, this interpretation usually relies upon a literal reading of Kant’s notorious statements, which may not always be suitable. To support these arguments, we will lay out Kant’s theory of race in the first chapter, emphasizing the goals and intentions he explicitly stated, and conclude that the central arguments of his theory (...) are non-discriminatory and non-racist. In the second part of the paper, we will present a non-racist reading of some of Kant’s most frequently cited statements. While we do not dispute that Kant’s comments about certain races sound extremely discriminatory, we will argue that we should consider the historical and philosophical context, philological analysis, and arguments surrounding the statement in question when interpreting Kant’s words. Our goal is not to prove conclusively that Kant was not a racist, but to demonstrate that it is possible to interpret Kant’s thoughts on race in a non-racist key, consistent with his normative theories. (shrink)