Among the most surprising claims in The Methods of Ethics is Sidgwick’s assertion that his key ethical axioms are corroborated by Kant. This article analyses Sidgwick’s claim that his axioms of justice and benevolence closely correspond to particular features in Kant. I shall argue that his claim of agreement with Kant was a serious overstatement. In particular, the restrictions which Sidgwick places

Kraus’s book is a rich and systematic examination of Kant’s account of the different dimensions of the metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology of the ‘self’ that pertains to human subjectivity. Here I explore some of the different meanings that Kraus associates with the term ‘self’ on Kant’s behalf, asking for further clarification as to her interpretation of the terms ‘subject’ (‘the I’), ‘soul’

Kraus’s book is both deep and wide-ranging. My comments focus on her account of Kant on self-awareness – both a priori and empirical apperception. Basic to her account is what she calls the hylomorphism of mental faculties in Kant. Kraus distinguishes her ‘reflexive’ account of apperception from both ‘logical’ and ‘psychological’ accounts. An inevitable question is: Does Kant think we have an empirical

I raise three related objections to aspects of Katharina Kraus’s interpretation in Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation. First, I reject her claim that representations count as merely subjectively valid for Kant if they represent objects from the contingent perspective of a particular subject. I argue that Kant in fact describes consciousness of subjectively valid representations as consciousness

These remarks focus on Kraus’s claim that for Kant the category of substance cannot apply to the soul but that instead we can and should apply a merely regulative idea of the soul. While granting Kraus’s contention that we require an idea of the soul in order to investigate inner experience, I argue that the category of substance nonetheless applies to the soul, but that the notion of the soul as entirely

Kant’s theory of citizenship replaces the French revolutionary triptych of liberty, equality and fraternity with freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit) and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). The interpretative question is what the third attribute adds to the first two: what does self-sufficiency add to free consent by juridical equals? This article argues that Selbständigkeit adds the idea

Individualist normative theories appear inadequate for the complex moral challenges of climate change. In climate ethics, this is especially notable with the relative marginalization of Kant. I argue that Kant’s philosophy, understood through its historical and cosmopolitan dimensions, has untapped potential for the climate crisis. First, I situate Kant in climate ethics and evaluate his marginalization

While Kant’s account of humankind’s rational progress has been widely discussed, his speculative views about the way in which this progress might have begun and the circumstances surrounding this beginning have been largely neglected. Implicit in such an omission is the assumption that Kant does not say much about the very beginning of human history or that whatever he says is of little philosophical

Kant’s account of the pain of remorse involves a hybrid justification based on self-retribution, but constrained by forward-looking principles which say we must channel remorse into improvement and moderate its pain to avoid damaging our rational agency. Kant’s corpus also offers material for a revisionist but textually grounded alternative account based on wrongdoers’ sympathy for the pain they cause

This article considers an apparent Achilles heel for Kant’s transcendental idealism, concerning his account of how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. The problem is that while Kant’s distinctive attempt to explain synthetic a priori knowledge lies at the heart of his transcendental idealism, this explanation appears to face a dilemma: either the explanation generates a problematic regress, or

This article examines an appendix to the Doctrine of Virtue which has received little attention. I argue that this passage suggests that Kant makes it a duty, internal to his system of duties, to ‘join the graces with virtue’ and so to ‘make virtue widely loved’ (MM, 6: 473). The duty to make virtue widely loved obligates us to bring the standards of respectability, and so the social graces, into a

Kant’s notion of common sense (Gemeinsinn) is crucial not only for his account of judgements of beauty, but also for the link he draws between the necessary conditions of such judgements and cognition in general. Contrary to existing interpretations which connect common sense to pleasure, I argue that it should be understood as the capacity to sense the harmony of the cognitive faculties through a

This article aims to justify the positive role in the empirical investigation of nature that Kant attributes to the idea of God in the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, I propose to read the Transcendental Ideal section and the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic together to see whether they can reciprocally illuminate each other. I argue that it is only by looking at the transcendental

Liberal democracy has been experiencing a crisis of representation over the last decade, as a disconnect has emerged from some of the foundational principles of liberalism such as personal freedom and equality. In this article, I argue that in the third part of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason we can find resources to better understand and counteract this crisis of liberal democracy

In this article I discuss the moral-coherence reading of Kant’s moral argument offered by Allen Wood in his recent book Kant and Religion, display some of the challenges that it faces and suggest that a moral-psychological formulation is preferable.

This article provides a summary and some replies to points offered in the Kantian Review Roundtable discussion of my recent book Kant and Religion. The main themes are as follows: Kant’s project in the Religion; religious thinking as symbolic; the rational interpretation of revelation and of religious symbols; Kant’s moral argument for religious faith; the ‘psychological’-moral argument; Kant’s thesis

In her new book, Karin de Boer attempts to read Kant’s first Critique as a reform of a Wolffian project. My contribution contains several comments and questions that aim to further develop this stimulating approach to Kant. They concern (1) the affinities and disagreements between Kant and Wolff, regarding metaphysics, epistemology and method; (2) the place of Wolff’s students (in particular Mendelssohn)

I raise three questions relevant to De Boer’s overall project in Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics. The first is whether Kant’s 1799 open letter to Fichte supports or threatens her contention that Kant had an abiding interest in developing a reformed metaphysics from 1781 onwards. The second is whether De Boer’s conception of the pure intellect and its place in Kant’s projected system of metaphysics captures

Karin de Boer has given the best account so far of the reform of Wolffian metaphysics that Kant promised. But does such a reform cohere with the revolutionary goal that Kant also affirmed? Standpoint is singled out as the central meta-concept of Kant’s revolutionary goal, and it is argued that, in the second and third critiques, Kant himself developed his revolutionary insight into the perspectival

In my comments on Karin de Boer’s Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics, I pose five questions. First, I ask how the fundamental principle of practical philosophy that Kant identifies and claims is fundamentally different from Wolff’s is consistent with the claim that Kant is reforming Wolff’s metaphysics. Second, I ask whether De Boer thinks that Kant, as a reformer of Wolff, continues to accept the Principle

I am very grateful to Stefanie Buchenau, Eric Watkins, Brian Chance and Paul Franks for accepting the invitation to act as commentators during the launch of my Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason Reconsidered (De Boer 2020a), which took place on 29 October 2020 (online). I am also grateful for their praise of the book as well as for their willingness to share their thoughts and

Kant’s general mode of argument in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, especially his defence of human nature’s propensity to evil, is a matter of considerable controversy: while some interpret his argument as strictly a priori, others interpret it as anthropological. In dialogue with Allen Wood’s recent work, I defend my earlier claim that Religion employs a quasi-transcendental mode of argument

In this article I argue that the current readings of permissive law fall into hermeneutical difficulties and do not completely explain Kant’s complex use of the concept. I argue that the shortcomings of these interpretations can only be overcome by relating permissive law to practical teleology. That teleological thinking has a role in Kant’s moral thought by way of history is not new. Here, however

In this article I argue that Kant’s understanding of the universality of radical evil is best understood in the context of human sociality. Because we are inherently social beings, the nature of the human community we find ourselves in has a determinative influence on the sorts of persons we are, and the kinds of choices we can make. We always begin in evil. This does not vitiate responsibility, since

In this exciting book, Marco Sgarbi traces the importance of the local context of philosophical activities at Königsberg University in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in order to understand the emergence of Kant’s critical philosophy, and it turns out that this context in large part thrived on doctrines originating in Aristotle. Rather than focusing on Aristotle himself, as the title suggests

McKenna, Michael and Pereboom, Derk (2016) Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. McLear, Colin (2020) ‘On the Transcendental Freedom of the Intellect’. Ergo, 7(2), 35–104. https:// philarchive.org/archive/MCLOTTv1. —— (Forthcoming) ‘Kant on the Receptivity of Time’. In Colin Marshall and Colin McLear (eds), Kant’s Fundamental Assumptions. Oxford: Oxford

In this article, I challenge the semiological interpretation of Kant’s Religion, particularly as advanced in recent years by James DiCenso and Allen Wood. As I here argue, their interpretations are neither compatible with broader aspects of Kant’s positive philosophy of religion, nor with how Kant himself describes the project of the Religion. Kant wrote the Religion in order to explore the compatibility

In this paper, I discuss Kant’s concept-less schematism (KU, 5: 287) in the third Critique1 and make three claims: 1) concept-less schematism is entirely consistent with the schematism in the first Critique; 2) concept-less schematism is schematism with no empirical concept as an outcome; and 3) in accordance with 1) and 2), the imagination is free to synthesize the given manifold and leads to judgements

This paper calls into question the view typically attributed to Kant that aesthetic judgements are particularist, resisting all conceptual determination. Instead, it claims that Kant conceives of aesthetic judgements, particularly of art, as playing an important role in the revision of concepts: one sense in which aesthetic judgements, as Kant defines them, ‘find a universal’ for a given particular

This article is to be a bridge between Kant’s aesthetics and contemporary art – not by being a paper on Kant and contemporary art, but rather by being on Kant and contemporary philosophy of art. I claim that Kant’s views on the appreciation of art can accommodate contextualism as well as ethicism. I argue that not only does contextualism fit Kant’s views on the appreciation of art; in §§51–3 of the

This article contributes to understanding of Contemporary Art and of the temporality of contemporaneity, along with the philosophy of time more generally. I propose a diachronic contemporaneity over time gaps – elective contemporaneity – through examination of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, the Third Analogy and the concept of ‘following’ among artistic geniuses; diachronic recognition and disjunctive

This paper considers whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge of conceptual art. I begin by looking at two competing views of conceptual art by recent philosophers, before settling on an ‘inclusive’ view of the form: conceptual art includes both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ non-perceptual art (NPA). I then set out two kinds of conceptual complexity that I argue are implicated by all aesthetic judgements

Can Kant’s theory of fine art serve as a theory of modern art? It all depends on what ‘modern’ means. The word can mean current or contemporary, indexed to the time of use, and in that sense the answer is yes: Kant’s theory of genius implies that successful art is always to some extent novel, so there should always be something that counts as contemporary art on his theory. But ‘modern’ can also be

This article demonstrates the relevance of Kant to the interpretation of contemporary art. The defining properties of contemporary art are the impossibility of definition in material, formal or stylistic terms, and the central role that concepts play in the interpretation of a work. Danto and Osborne suggest how concepts might be applied but they do not develop their proposals. Kant’s theory of judgement

The term ‘miracle’ generally refers to events that are not explicable by natural causes alone. Kant’s notion of miracles is usually understood along these lines. However, Kant’s occupation with miracles should be understood in a practical context. Belief in miracles plays a constitutive role in Kant’s philosophy of religion concerning the need to strengthen the will both before and after departing

their formulations could invalidate the derivations of the later Books’, and in particular that of universal gravitation. Accordingly, eighteenth-century philosophers who formulated the laws of motion differently can be assumed to have different ‘fundamental concerns’ (pp. 92–3). But George E. Smith’s research on Newton’s thought reveals that Newton himself entertained different versions of at least

that appears in the internalist idiom’ (p. 245) is refuted by his own example. In addition, the externalist reading is also open to the charge that it renders space empirical, and thereby undermines the necessity of the axioms of geometry: ‘if all the properties of space are merely borrowed by experience from outer relations, then there would only be a comparative universality to be found in the axioms

Karin de Boer’s latest book is an ambitious work that is destined to provoke a lively debate within the Kantian community. The thesis underlying the book is simple, very clearly expressed and systematically developed throughout its eight chapters. As the title already hints, the author challenges ‘the assumption that the Critique of Pure Reason destroyed metaphysics’, as well as the idea that ‘it established

This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation)

Kant states in §76 of the third Critique that the divine intuitive intellect would not represent modal distinctions. Kohl (2015) and Stang (2016) claim that this statement entails that noumena lack modal properties, which, in turn, conflicts with Kant’s attribution of contingency to human noumenal wills. They both propose resolutions to this conflict based on conjectures regarding how God might non-modally

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing

Henry Allison’s interpretation of Kant’s First Analogy is among the most intriguing in the literature. Its virtues are considerable, but no previous discussion has done full justice to them. Nor has any previous discussion systematically explored the most important challenges to which it seems subject. This paper does both. Early sections provide a more thorough exegesis than is otherwise available

further questions. For example, if Kant’s and Fichte’s accounts of self-consciousness are indeed similar, then why does Schulting reject the latter in favour of the former and why does Fichte nonetheless choose to turn from Kant by calling selfconsciousness ‘intellectual intuition’, a kind of intuition that Kant claims humans cannot have? Answers to such questions are also relevant to the main claim

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant appears to make incompatible claims regarding the unitary natures of what he takes to be our a priori representations of space and time. I argue that these representations are unitary independently of all synthesis and explain how this avoids problems encountered by other positions regarding the Transcendental Deduction and its relation to the Transcendental Aesthetic

On my interpretation of Kant, feeling plays a central role in the mind: it has the distinct function of tracking and evaluating our activity in relation to ourselves and the world so as to orient us. In this article, I set out to defend this view against a number of objections raised by Melissa Merritt and Uri Eran. I conclude with some reflections on the fact that, despite being very different, Merritt

what first interrupted Kant’s dogmatic slumber presupposes that Kant considered it a keystone of metaphysics. In 1755 he made the attempt of proving a particular version of that principle valid for the cause of contingently existing things. In the early 1760s he rejected this view, and there is no evidence that his pre-Critical conception of metaphysics was essentially connected with and based upon