Attempts have been made to naturalize Kant’s account of the rational will and good willing by way of Freud’s account of the superego. This paper argues that such efforts ignore the infantile legacy of the superego, although its origin story is nonetheless congenial to Kant’s larger moral project. Some more speculative points of contact between Freud and Kant are then explored.

A Kantian reconstruction of racialized moral psychology can illuminate the late Charles Mills’s account of white complicity. Unfortunately, philosophers have comparatively less to say about the incentive structure of the oppressed to participate in the systems that oppress them. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, this article argues that the oppressed might participate in injustice out of a misguided sense of self-respect that rationalizes their disregard of the unmet claims of fellow oppressed people. Self-respect gone too far is, in effect, the normative basis of Du Bois’s critique of the black middle class’s failure to forge intragroup black political solidarity.

This essay investigates Kant’s various reasons for pessimism about happiness. I argue that some of Kant’s concerns about whether (or to what extent) happiness is possible for us are more pressing than others, and some can be more easily mitigated. Moreover, although he tends to emphasize the difficulties in securing personal happiness, Kant’s texts offer several helpful strategies for ways of acting and living that can help us avoid some key sources of discontent, thereby increasing our chances for being happy in life.

This article examines a tension between María Lugones’ critique of the universality of gender, and her view of the role of categorial thought in resisting what she calls the coloniality of gender. I argue that Lugones seeks alternatives to oppressive gender arrangements, advocating for a world where multiplicity replaces fragmentation and sexual differences exist without categories. However, the text challenges the necessity of abandoning categorial thinking altogether for transformative resistance, emphasizing instead the importance of solidarity, coalition-building, and alliances among people with diverse cosmologies in struggle against colonial and structural oppression.

This article reconsiders Kant’s theory of citizenship in the light of various Enlightenment debates on the duties and rights of women. First, the paper analyzes Kant’s view of women as passive citizens, confined to reproductive labour and domestic subordination, and highlights the class bias in his account. Second, it examines Theodor von Hippel’s defence of the intellectual and civic contributions of women, situating his proposals for legal and social reform in the wake of the influence of Kant’s practical philosophy. Third, it explores Amalia Holst’s attempt to reconcile the gendered duties of women with their access to higher education.

Colonial slavery supercharged Europe’s prosperity in the eighteenth century. It was legally sanctioned, supported by state powers, and largely condoned by the public. Against this backdrop, Kant observed that “Negro slaves” functioned as money in trade, their number measured a nation’s wealth, and the slavery business was therefore intertwined with a competitive intra-European politics. Meanwhile, he racialized the “Negro” as uniquely suited for slave labor, indirectly benefited from such labor, refrained from calling colonial slavery an unjust institution, and occasionally signaled anti-abolitionist sympathies. Given these facts, what is the prospect of a deracialized, radical Kantian liberalism?

Immanuel Kant’s account of justice is no enemy of potent political activism. Claims that seem to condemn any but the most bloodless and measured protest are better read as cautions against actions that forsake justice for violence, fraud, or whim, that spurn rather than elevate moral assessment and critique, that undermine public trust in the rule of law, and that advance individual lust for power or personal gain at the expense of justice. Most fundamentally, Kantian political activism is committed to vigorous social and political justice reforms respectful of the civic agency of persons and duly sensitive to worldly conditions.

In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant introduces the Formula of Universal Law by saying that it is the one and only categorical imperative. Nevertheless, he proceeds to add a series of other formulas. Their wording differs significantly, and the relations among them are far from clear. In this article, I argue that Kant’s technical-philosophical conception of analogy provides the key to understanding the relations among the formulas. I propose solutions to most—if not all—difficulties commonly diagnosed in the literature, in large part by drawing on Kant’s distinctive republican political theory.

Anti-intellectualism is both epistemic (against products of the intellect) and social (against an elite). One can find in Kant’s discussion of the displeasure in judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment an account of anti-intellectualism that captures both of these aspects of anti-intellectualism. For Kant, the remedy for anti-intellectualism, which, I argue, he considers to be constituted by the inability of the productive imagination to come up with forms of possible intuition, is engagement with aesthetic ideas.