Kant: Social, Political, and Religious Thought

Kant’s views on human history have been widely studied, but commentators have rarely discussed his speculative account of humanity’s origins, assuming that it does not neatly fit into his critical philosophy. This paper challenges this assumption by defending two claims. First, Kant’s major essay on this topic, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” is a key component of his teleological understanding of human history and should be incorporated into the study of his critical philosophy. Second, the story of humanity’s origins informs (...) Kant’s prescriptions for our moral education by better explaining individual development and providing guidelines for it. (shrink)

This article examines Kant’s theory of property through a comparative analysis of Gottfried Achenwall’s justification of ownership rights. I argue that at the core of Achenwall’s and Kant’s understanding of ownership rights lies the idea that rights are to be acquired through a juridical act [factum iuridicum, rechtlichen Act] of the will. However, while Achenwall thinks of this act as emerging from a private will, Kant holds that rights and obligations can only be brought about by an act of the (...) general will. By contrasting these two views, I aim to illuminate one of the main features of Kant’s theory of property, namely that ownership rights are only possible in a rightfully constituted state. I conclude with a suggestion regarding Kant’s view of the notion of ‘provisional’ possession in the state of nature. (shrink)

This is a foreword to the special issue of Kantian Review (27.4) entitled Radicalizing Kant?, co-edited by Corey W. Dyck and Charles W. Mills.

With An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784) and What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786), Kant presents the concept of public use of reason and defines its requirements, scope, and function. In outline, the public use of reason consists in sharing one’s thoughts with “the entire public of the world of readers” (8:37). As for its requirements, to the extent that someone communicates in their own person, i.e. not in the exercise of their function (...) as a public official, and bases their reasoning on universalizable grounds, their use of reason qualifies as public and shall be free from state censorship. Therefore, Kant’s concept of public use reason aims to establish a public debate that is free and includes in its scope, both as subjects and recipients, potentially all adult men. The ultimate function of the public use of reason is to foster moral progress and, with it, the reform of the political community according to the republican ideal. However, it is commonly held that Kant, with his 1798 essay The Conflict of the Faculties, deprives his notion of public use of reason of its progressive core and adjusts it to the absolutist conception of speech and civil service. Characterizations of state officials as “not free to make public use of their learning” (7:18) and “bound to uphold whatever […] the crown sanctions for them to expound publicly” (7:8), as well as the depiction of laypeople as “incompetent” (7:18) and “resigned to understanding nothing about [the sciences]” (7:34), have led influential interpreters to read Kant as redefining his notion of public use of reason by restricting its subjects to university professors and its recipients to government members (e.g. John Christian Laursen 1986, rpt. 1992 and 1996; Kevin Davis 1992; Steven Lestition 1993; Jay Franzel 2013). On my reading, with The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant does indeed redefine the concept of public use of reason making concessions to the absolutist notion of speech and civil service. However, a close reading of the text reveals that the public use of reason ends up being reaffirmed in its progressive core and extended in its scope. To substantiate my interpretation, I will systematically analyse and classify each of the 68 occurrences of the adjective ‘public’ in The Conflict of the Faculties and show how Kant employs the absolutist vocabulary to convey the progressive project of his previous writings. Accordingly, I argue that Kant holds on to the free public use of reason as a means to reform politics according to the republican ideal and that the employment of the absolutist vocabulary is motivated by a pragmatic attitude and a provocative stance. (shrink)

This paper develops a new kind of approach to conspiracy theories – a procedural approach. This approach promises to establish that belief in conspiracy theories is rationally criticisable in general. Unlike most philosophical approaches, a procedural approach does not purport to condemn conspiracy theorists directly on the basis of features of their theories. Instead, it focuses on the patterns of thought involved in forming and sustaining belief in such theories. Yet, unlike psychological approaches, a procedural approach provides a rational critique (...) of conspiracist thought patterns. In particular, it criticises these thought patterns for failing to conform to procedures prescribed by reason. The specific procedural approach that I develop takes its cue from the Kantian notion that reason must be used self-critically. I tentatively suggest that conspiracy theorists fail to engage in the relevant sort of self-critique in at least three ways: they do not critically examine their own motivations, they avoid looking at matters from the point of view of others, and they fail to reflect on the limits of human knowledge. (shrink)

In this article, I critically examine the religious argument for the existence of God, which Palmquist formulated from Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. After showing the structure of the argument, I point the problematic point of the argument and focus on the concept of Gesinnung. The privateness of Gesinnung is problematized in the analysis of it, and I briefly suggest that an alternative account of the Gesinnung is possible. Yet I emphasize the advantage that this argument has (...) compared to other competing arguments. (shrink)

My dissertation examines Kant’s and Rawls’s theories of the moral development of individuals within structured political communities. I reconstruct Kant’s under-studied account of the emergence of reason by looking at his remarks on the transition our species underwent from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings. I show how his account of the emergence of reason fits with his broader view of humankind’s rational progress and the moral development of an individual. Next, I argue that Kant’s anthropological and pedagogical writings (...) influenced Rawls’s early views on moral development in A Theory of Justice. In contrast to other commentators who have located Kant’s influence on Rawls in his emphasis on the free and equal nature of human beings, my dissertation shows that Kant’s anthropological theory of moral development is also at the core of Rawls’s Kantian project. I also argue that the moral-psychological account Rawls develops in Part III of Theory sheds light on crucial aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, notably on his emphasis on the need for one generation to provide the moral education of subsequent generations in order to achieve political stability. Dissertation Committee: Allen Wood (co-chair), Leif Wenar (co-chair), Juliana Bidadanure, David Hills, David Estlund (external, Brown). (shrink)

In this paper I propose an interpretation of Kant’s notion of the highest good which bears political, ethical, and religious layers simultaneously. I argue that a proper analysis of what Kant allows us to hope for necessarily involves what we should hope for as moral agents. I argue that Kant’s conception of the highest good plays a crucial role in his moral theory as it designates the ideal “context” of moral experience which can be described as “a moral world”. Each (...) of these three layers or aspects of the moral world (i.e., political, ethical, and religious) as the interrelated contexts in and through which we realize our moral agency is inextricably linked with the highest good. Without any dichotomy between secular or religious conceptualization of the highest good, in the political and in certain aspects of the ethical contexts we should adopt certain hopes as an implicit aspect of being virtuous, whereas from a religious perspective we are able to, and we may legitimately adopt hope and faith about the cosmic/ teleological context of our moral experience. (shrink)

While Kant’s account of humankind’s rational progress has been widely discussed, his 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 value. This paper challenges these assumptions. I reconstruct Kant’s account of the emergence of reason by looking at (...) his various conjectural and more literal remarks about our species’ transition from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings possessing a rudimentary form of rationality. Next, I show how this account fits with Kant’s broader view of humankind’s rational progress and its subsequent stages. By doing so, I elucidate Kant’s guidelines for achieving this progress in the future by unifying them with his regulative view of reason’s past. (shrink)

Sowohl Friedrich Schlegel als auch Joseph Görres reagieren mit ihren Einlassungen auf die Idee des "Ewigen Friedens", wie sie vor allem durch Kant vorgetragen und um 1800 durch eine Vielzahl von Autoren im Angesicht einer stürmischen und kriegerischen Zeitenwende diskutiert wurden -/- With their statements, both Friedrich Schlegel and Joseph Görres react to the idea of "eternal peace", as it was primarily put forward by Kant and discussed by a large number of authors around 1800 in the face of a (...) stormy and warlike turning point in time -/- Своими высказываниями и Фридрих Шлегель, и Йозеф Гёррес реагируют на идею «вечного мира», как она была в первую очередь выдвинута Кантом и обсуждалась большим числом авторов около 1800 года перед лицом бурного и воинственного перелома во время -/- Con sus declaraciones, tanto Friedrich Schlegel como Joseph Görres reaccionan a la idea de “paz eterna”, tal y como fue planteada principalmente por Kant y discutida por un gran número de autores hacia 1800 ante un tormentoso y bélico punto de inflexión. a tiempo. (shrink)

This paper provides an entrance into central discussions regarding Kant’s account of property. The first section shows how Kant engages and transforms important, related proposals from Hobbes and Locke as well as how the ‘libertarian’ and ‘liberal republican’ interpretive traditions differ in their readings on these points. Since Kantian theories for a long time didn’t focus on Kant’s Doctrine of Right but instead followed Rawls’s lead by developing Kantian theories grounded on Kant’s (meta-) ethical writings, the second section focuses on (...) property discussions found in the Rawlsian tradition. The final section shows how important contemporary work in the Kantian tradition goes beyond Rawlsian, libertarian, and liberal republican concerns of distributive justice among free and equal citizens, to include questions central to, for example, the philosophy of care, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of sex and love, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

The main purpose of these introductory remarks is to give the reader a sense of Philip Rossi’s philosophical project and its importance. I will then advance an interpretation of what motivates Kant’s commitment to community, and, on its basis, object to Rossi’s views on radical evil –a point which affects how one should conceive the moral vocation of humanity and the role that politics and religion play within it. My reconstruction concludes with a sketch of how the five contributions to (...) this Symposium fit together and deepen our understanding of Rossi’s overall project. (shrink)

hese are replies to my critics at at Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (SGIR) Author-Meets-Critics session, Pacific APA 2021. -/- Published version of the full symposium is available on SGIR Review's homepage.

Hatfield, Joseph M. 2017. “Immanual Kant: from Universal Rationality to Perpetual Peace,” book chapter in Philosophers and War, edited by Timothy Demy, Eric Patterson, and Jeffrey Shaw. Middletown, RI: Stone Tower Press.

Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy has enjoyed renewed attention as an egalitarian alternative to contemporary inequality since it seems to uncompromisingly reassert the primacy of the state over the economy, enabling it to defend the modern welfare state against encroaching neoliberal markets. However, I argue that, when understood as a free-standing approach to politics, Kant’s doctrine of right shares essential features with the prevailing theories that legitimate really existing economic inequality. Like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Kant understands the state’s function (...) as essentially coercive and, in justifying state coercion, he adopts a narrow conception of political freedom that formally preserves the right to choose while denying that the range of choices one actually has can be a matter of justice. As a result, Kant cannot identify various forms of social pressure as potential injustices even as he recognizes their power to create and sustain troubling inequalities. For both Kant and the neoliberals, the result is that economic relations almost never count as unjust forms of coercion, no matter how unequal they are. Views that identify coercion as the trigger for duties of justice are thus particularly ill-suited to orient us to contemporary inequality. (shrink)

In times of a prevailing sense of crisis and disorder in modern politics, there is a growing sentiment that anger, despair or resignation are more appropriate attitudes to navigate the world than hope. Political philosophers have long shared this suspicion and shied away from theorising hope more systematically. The aim of this article is to resist this tendency by showing that hope constitutes an integral part of democratic politics in particular. In making this argument I draw on Kant’s conceptualisation of (...) hope as a psychological condition on action under circumstances where the chances of making a difference are dim. Given that the Kantian agent avoids the threat of despair in the pursuit of political goals by placing trust in her fellow citizens, hope has the potential to positively transform democratic practices. (shrink)

Review of: Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform, by PapishLaura. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 257.

Non-state peoples cannot be subjects of Kant’s international law, which accordingly affords them no protection against external interference. They might also lack the dynamic of private law at the basis of the duty of state entrance. Prima facie, this compels Kant to allow that their lands be appropriated and that they be forced out of the state of nature. But this conclusion is at odds with his cosmopolitanism, particularly its anti-imperialistic commitments: non-state peoples are protected against annexation, under Kant’s cosmopolitan (...) law. The paper makes three contributions to the debate on this tension. Firstly, it disambiguates scope, ground, and relata of the duty to exit the state of nature. Secondly, it argues that non-state peoples have an inter-group duty to exit the state of nature; and that this holds for a non-state people regardless of whether it also has an intra-group duty of state entrance, which remains unenforceable by outside parties. Finally, it offers a construal of the former duty as a cosmopolitan duty to interact peacefully even in the absence of a shared culture. (shrink)

Which role can physical proximity play in our thinking about the foundations of political community in a world where, due to political, economic and technological developments, we seem to live side by side with virtually everyone globally? This article interrogates this question in conversation with Kant’s political thought, where proximity makes a prominent appearance both as a foundation of statehood and of cosmopolitan community. I argue that, as a scalar criterion, the idea of proximity cannot serve as a particularisation principle (...) that guides us in carving up the world into peoples or territories. However, as a regulative principle it provides an appealing normative criterion for the internal constitution of existing states. While this is predicated on accepting Kantian conservatism about boundaries, the proximity-based state is structured in a way that deflates the normative significance of the very distinction between insider and outsider. (shrink)

A murder of an Afro-American detainee by a policeman at the end of May 2020 caused a public outrage in the United States, which led to a campaign against the monuments to historical figures whose reputation, according to the protesters, was marred by racism. Some German publicists, impressed by the campaign, initiated an analogous search for racists among the national thinkers and politicians of the past. Suddenly Kant emerged as a ‘scapegoat’. This statement is an attempt to assess such reactions (...) from the perspective of Russia’s experience. (shrink)

With this paper I intend to rehabilitate the status of orality as medium of the public use of reason in the normative Kantian sense. As a first step, I reconstruct the reasons why Kant rejects the spoken word and designates the written word as the sole medium of public reasoning. As a second step, I argue for the possibility of employing the spoken word as medium of public reasoning while remaining within the normative framework of Kant’s concept of the public (...) use of reason. (shrink)

「我可希望甚麼？」希望問題（question of hope /Hoffnungsfrage）於康德學統裡常為人忽略。學者多歸諸宗教哲學範疇，甚或僅視為一附帶、中介問題，以聯繫「我能知甚麼？」與「我應做甚麼？」的論域，遂至今仍未見完整、獨立的康德希望哲學或希望理 論面世。 雖然學人鮮以「希望」為研究重點，但並不代表希望概念於康德言無足輕重，反之，若以之為繩準閱讀其哲學，可看到有關希望問題 的思慮實貫穿了康德「批判」和「學說」時期。本文以「希望概念和問題」為圓心，梳理出康德哲學中一道從思考「最高善」發展到關注 「人類道德進步」的線索，圖以之開展閱讀康德哲學之新定向。 -/- The question of hope (Hoffnungsfrage) - “What may I hope?” – has been overlooked in the mainstream Kantian scholarship. It is generally categorized into the field of philosophy of religion, or even to be treated as an appendage or solely a mediating question to connect the discourses on “what can I know?” and “what ought I to do?”, whilst the marginalization of this question leads to indifference towards the related researches. Therefore a (...) complete and independent Kant’s theory or philosophy of hope is not yet to be seen. Albeit few scholars put high value on the concept of hope, it does not mean that the concept of hope to Kant is insignificant. If we set the concept of hope as the orientation point of reading Kant’s philosophy, we would see that the concept of hope and the related discussion appear frequently in his works, not only in the “critiques” but also in the “doctrines”. His apparently disparate views on the problem of hope in different periods of his work can actually be formulated to a theory of hope. In the paper, I tried to reveal the hidden philosophical agenda that runs through the entire development of Kant’s philosophy: from the reflection on the concept of highest good to the issues of the improvement of human morality in general. In conclusion, by reinterpreting Kant’s philosophy as a kind of philosophy of hope, we may gain a new orientation to understand his philosophy in addition to the epistemological and ethical approaches as favored in mainstream Kantian scholarship. (shrink)

How do we care well for a human being: ourselves or another? Non-Kantian scholars rarely identify the philosophy of Kant as a particularly useful resource with which to understand the full complexity of human care. Kant’s philosophy is often taken to presuppose that a philosophical analysis of good human life needs to attend only to how autonomous, rational agents—sprung up like mushrooms out of nowhere, without a childhood, never sick, always independent—ought to act respectfully, and how they can be forced (...) to interact rightfully. Questions involving aspects of human life captured by what Eva Kittay aptly phrased “the fact of dependency” (1999) —such as our vulnerable, fragile, and embodied social natures, asymmetrical care relations, and deep systemic injustices—are therefore commonly thought to be beyond the grasp of Kant and of Kantian philosophy. Against this historically prominent understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy, below I engage and draw upon recent Kant scholarship which shows both the inadequacy of such rationalist readings and the fruitfulness of using Kant’s practical philosophy to enhance our understanding of human care relations. After situating my approach in the existing, relevant secondary literature on Kant’s human agent, I explore key features of Kant’s accounts of human nature and the highest good. I pay special attention to his proposal that our human nature comprises reflective and unreflective aspects and patterns that we (ought to) strive to develop, transform, and integrate in wise ways through our faculty of desire. In addition, I emphasize the dangers that our ineradicable propensity to do bad things (evil) poses for our projects of self- and other- care. I proceed by outlining how Kant’s account of moral (ethical and legal) responsibility for self and others is developed through his theories of freedom, that is, through his theory of virtue (virtuous internal freedom with its account of perfect and imperfect duties) and his theory of right (rightful external freedom with its account of innate, private, and public right). On the conception I am advancing, we are pretty messy, fragile, and vulnerable beings whose projects of caring are difficult, ongoing, and complex. On the one hand, we (should) strive to care for ourselves (by striving to manage and heal badly functioning parts and by developing, transforming, and integrating immature or distinct parts of ourselves into good wholes) and for others (assisting them in their projects of management and healing and of developing, transforming, and integrating themselves into good wholes) in ways that are both respectful and attentive to the particular people we are—people with lives of our own to live—and the kinds of relationships we share. On the other hand, we should, and can, be forced to interact rightfully, meaning interaction consistent with one another’s basic (innate, private, and public) rights and, hence, contribute to reform projects that improve our inherited, imperfect legal-political systems with regard to care relations. Bringing Kant’s philosophy into dialogue with care theorists, I conclude, advances the insights of both traditions by showing one way to arrive at a multifaceted, yet unified account of human care relations where our embodied, social as well as our rational natures are given due consideration. (shrink)

Na długo przed rewolucją francuską oraz jej pierworodną Deklaracją Praw Człowieka i Obywatela w europejskiej myśli politycznej członek państwa przedzierzgnięty został z poddanego w obywatela. Ta fundamentalna zmiana w definiowaniu stanowiska jednostki w państwie korespondowała z humanistycznym postrzeganiem rozumu ludzkiego nie tylko jako instrumentu poznawania świata, ale też narzędzia głębokiej refleksji i krytycznej oceny mechanizmów światem rządzących. Siła rozumu kojarzona była przez oświeceniowych filozofów z porządkiem naturalnym, który jawił się przeciwwagą dla społecznych i politycznych realiów absolutnego władztwa monarszego. W XVIII (...) w. we francuskiej i niemieckiej filozofii państwa nastąpił istotny postęp w zakresie kształtowania się idei obywatela pojmowanego w sensie zbliżonym do Arystotelesowskiej istoty państwowej (politikon zoon). Stało się tak jednak w dużej mierze dzięki XVII-wiecznym angielskim reformom wolnościowym. Racjonalistyczne i materialistyczne podwaliny oświeceniowego światopoglądu konstytuowała też, powstała na bazie krytyki pism Thomasa Hobbesa, myśl Johna Locke’a, stymulująca do urządzania życia społecznego zgodnie z zaleceniami umysłu i potrzeb ludzkich, a wbrew bezwzględnym prawom samowładztwa, w tym jego monopolu na rację, który dusił inicjatywę jednostki. (shrink)

Kant does not completely work out his philosophical conception of enlightenment. The definition of enlightenment that he offers in his well-known essay on the topic does not seem to completely match the definition that he puts forward later in his essay on the pantheism controversy and in the third Critique. It remains unclear how the two definitions relate to each other and whether and how they rest on the same principle. The lack of clarity in Kant’s conception of enlightenment is (...) left mostly unaddressed in the secondary literature on the topic. This paper suggests that Kant’s philosophical conception of enlightenment rests on the discipline of pure reason. The self-disciplinary principle of reason, which is laid out in the Doctrine of Method of the first Critique, underlies both of Kant’s definitions of enlightenment, although he himself does not clearly demonstrate how it does so. (shrink)

An influential interpretation of Kant’s Doctrine of Right suggests that the relationship between public right and freedom is constitutive rather than instrumental. The focus has been on domestic right and members’ relations to their own state. This has resulted in a statist bias which has not adequately dealt with the fact that Kant regards public right as a system composed of three levels – domestic, international and cosmopolitan right. This article suggests that the constitutive relationship is between all levels of (...) right, on the one hand, and ‘freedom in the external relation’ of all human beings, on the other hand. (shrink)

This chapter examines Kant's account of the nature of nonhuman and human animals in the "Critique of the Power of Judgement". It discusses how Kant thought that a complete account of the forms of explanation commit one to belief in God. It concludes, firstly, that Kant's account implies an unhealthy anthropocentrism and an Enlightenment prejudice in the form of the overestimation of reason, and secondly, that the Kantian model of God lacks one of the main characteristics of the Christian conception (...) of God: the universal divine love, a power that unifies and embraces all beings, including nonhuman and human animals and their orders. (shrink)

As is well known, § 6 of Kant’s Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right contains five paragraphs that do not belong there. The article shows that their correct location is at the end of § 16. This sheds some new light on Kant’s theory of property and its significance for Kant’s doctrine of cosmopolitan right.

The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the family resemblance between the two, and takes apart that family resemblance to (...) reveal differences. The ingredients of practice theory (historical inheritance, embodiment, cognitive limits, loose coupling between conscious thought and action) are in many cases also distinctive traits of conservative thought. But the similarity is deceptive. Practice theory and conservative thought constitute two distinct interpretations of practice, two disparate endeavours for connecting human science with political strategy, and two different formulas for opposing theory and practice. The present study will argue that this is primarily a political opposition for conservative thought, while it is a human-scientific opposition for practice theory. Conservative thought is initially political and then human-scientific; practice theory is initially human-scientific and then political. This article advocates for practice theory against conservative thought as differently amended versions of a politics that recognizes human finitude. (shrink)

The main thesis of this article is that Kant’s concept of law is a non-positivistic one, notwithstanding the fact that his legal philosophy includes very strong positivistic elements. My argument takes as its point of departure the distinction of three elements, around which the debate between positivism and non-positivism turns: first, authoritative issuance, second, social efficacy, and, third, moral correctness. All positivistic theories are confined to the first two elements. As soon as a necessary connection between these first two elements (...) and the third element, moral correctness, is established, the picture changes fundamentally. Positivism becomes non-positivism. There exist two kinds of connections between law and morality: classifying and qualifying connections. This distinction stems from different sorts of effects that moral defects give rise to. A classifying connection leads to the loss of legal validity, whereas a qualifying connection leads only to legal defectiveness. In Kant’s theory of law both connections are found. The qualifying connection is conspicuous throughout Kant’s theory of law, whereas the classifying connection, by contrast, is rare and well hidden. This will suffice to consider Kant as a representative of inclusive non-positivism. (shrink)

Although Kant’s final work in moral philosophy, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, currently attracts much scholarly attention, there is still a lot to explore. This article is an attempt to get to grips with a particular, often neglected passage of the Rechtslehre, namely §35. Here Kant defends the view that not only can a person’s good reputation can be tarnished after his death, but also that this constitutes a violation of this dead person’s property. Here I will not be able to (...) fully clarify what Kant means when he holds that persons can be harmed after their death, but I will put Kant’s view in a few perspectives. (shrink)

Kant deploys analogies from private law in describing relations between states. I explore the relation between these analogies and the broader Kantian idea of the distinctively public nature of a rightful condition, in order to explain why states, understood as public things, stand in horizontal, private legal relations without themselves being private. I use this analysis to explore the international law analogues of the three titles of private right, explaining how territory differs from property, treaty from contract and the specific (...) form of status relations between nations. I conclude with a brief discussion of the ongoing relevance of these horizontal relations. (shrink)

This article develops an account of the nature and limits of the state’s legislative authority that closely attends to the challenge of harmonizing Kant’s ethical and juridical theories. It clarifies some key Kantian concepts and terms, then explains the way in which the state’s three interlocking authorities – legislative, executive, and judicial – are metaphysically distinct and mutually dependent. It describes the emergence of the Kantian state and identifies the preconditions of its authority. Then it offers a metaphysical model of (...) the Kantian state and uses it to argue that the activity of juridical lawgiving is an act of the omnilateral will itself. Legislative authority is limited in the sense that it does not include the capacity to create juridical laws that are conceptually incompatible with the idea of universal external freedom. I argue that my proposed account of the legislative authority is wholly consistent with that authority’s exclusive lawgiving capacity and does not threaten the possibility of ‘distributive justice’ – the legal finality that is the sine qua non of a civil condition. (shrink)

In legal orders around the world, commitments to democracy, liberalism and constitutionalism are increasingly eroding. Although political and constitutional theorists often lament this trend, they invariably adopt frameworks that are indifferent to these commitments. My aims in this article are both critical and constructive. As a critical matter, I will expose the indifference of the leading political and constitutional theories to the emergence, maintenance and refinement of liberal democratic constitutional orders. As a constructive matter, I will draw on Immanuel Kant’s (...) constitutional theory to explain why realizing such a form of governance is a public duty and why receding from it is a public wrong. (shrink)

This article explores the practical approach to global justice advocated by the cosmopolitan political theorists Pogge, Beitz and Buchanan. Using a comparative exposition it outlines their reliance on international law and on human rights law in particular. The essay explores the neo-Kantian influence on the practical approach and offers an original critique of this trend in contemporary international political theory.

This article explores the shift in Rawls’ just savings principle away from an initial iteration that was indifferent to previous generational savings, to one in which past historical savings are the cornerstone of the motivation to save for future generations. Attention is given to the practical application of the revised principle in the field of the environment. The revised principle is argued to be an improvement on the initial one, because previous generations have an existence and identity that is more (...) tangible than yet-to-be future ones. (shrink)

Kant's famous statement (from the first Critique) that he found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith acknowledges a religious or theological telos to the entire critical project. This article outlines a series of relations of 'knowledge' to 'faith' in the architectonic repetitions with variation that plays from the first Critique through the Religion. Various deployments of 'truth' at each stage presume a kind of 'faith' or trust all the way along. These deployments are shown (...) to follow a pattern which echoes that set out in Northrop Frye's understanding of literary modes descending from myth to romance to high and low mimetic and ending in the ironic. These modes describe realms of possibility and necessity, and their nesting in Frye's explication of literature is shown to be itself an echo of more formal theories of Tarski and Godel. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 110 Heft: 2 Seiten: 326-332.

This article provides a transcription and analysis of a newly located fragment of Kant’s autograph fair copy of his essay on Perpetual Peace. The 4-page manuscript is part of the John Wild Autograph Collection at Princeton University (USA) and constitutes the immediate sequel to a similar fragment preserved in the Staatsarchiv Hamburg and published in Kant-Studien 77 (1986). The Princeton fragment was not included in volume 23 of the Akademie-Ausgabe and was unavailable to recent editors; it presents a number of (...) textual variants and allows new insights into Kant’s writing process. (shrink)

In Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Kant claims that we may need to invoke divine aid in order to explain how a person can change from evil to good. Kant’s language is a bit curious; why does he not more clearly assert, either that we must posit divine grace, or that we may not? The explanation is this: if we affirm that God grants aid, then this could convince people to passively await it or to think, upon becoming (...) good, that they are part of a special elect. On the other hand, if we affirm that God does not help, then some may despair of ever becoming good while those who successfully change could become arrogant. Thus, Kant is noncommittal about grace because it allows the morally timorous to have hope that they can change, and the morally successful to avoid hubris. (shrink)

The terms “race” and “sex / gender” have a specific relation to the Age of Enlightenment. Both were relevant for the new discourses of anthropology or the ‘nature of men’. Both have ‘naturalistic’ and social aspects that intersect, as the double-termed idea of “sex / gender” shows explicitly. The idea of “race” is no less complex. Both terms were topics of theoretical anthropology, but were nevertheless charged with pragmatic implications which lead to naturalistic fallacies: the equation of physical features and (...) character traits or mental skills. Therefore, even today there is a complex intersection between both terms. Using this history of ideas first I will go back to a time before ‘races’ were invented and ‘gender’ became scientifically relevant. How did these categories of the other (from the European perspective) historically develop? What is or was their function? What kinds of (unconscious) intersections were there? I will then provide an overview of the use of the term “race” and its etymology. I will then reconstruct the development of the term “sex / gender”. Why, in which way, and by whom were they used? And how did the terms intersect from the beginning and thereby reinforce the confusion of ‘naturalistic’, scientific, social and other aspects (naturalistic fallacy)? I will focus on these questions. In so doing we can better understand the Enlightenment’s negative legacy and the sexisms and racisms of today. (shrink)