In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant defines the relation of harmony between the faculties as constituted by the freedom of the imagination and the lawfulness of the understanding. The freedom of the imagination, however, has been broadly understood as directed towards the cognitive needs of the understanding. I propose a novel interpretation, based on Kant’s statements in the General Remark: freedom should be understood as signifying an activity emanating from imagination’s own spontaneity, directed towards the satisfaction of imagination’s own needs, and is revealed through a distinctive phenomenology in the apprehension of the beautiful forms of nature.

This paper investigates the development of Kant’s concept of ‘heart’ (Herz). Though it has been largely overlooked, ‘heart’ is an important term for Kant, referring to the power of the faculty of desire to produce desires based on feelings. In his anthropology lectures, the heart belongs entirely to an agent’s Sinnesart (‘way of sensing’). In Religion, Kant reintroduces it to connect the Sinnesart and the intelligible Denkungsart (‘way of thinking’). Whether we freely choose a good or evil heart partly determines how our feelings cause desires, letting Kant say what his mature theory of freedom requires: that we are responsible for our own motivations.

This paper analyses a dispute that flared up in the 1790s about whether Kant’s moral theory leaves room for the possibility of imputable wrongdoing. Contra Paul Guyer’s reading, I argue this was not merely a matter of mutual misunderstanding but reflected its participants’ varying perceptions of an arguably genuine dilemma for Kantian ethics: that what he needs to say to explain how imputable action contrary to duty is possible within his framework is prima facie incompatible with what he needs to say to establish that the moral law is categorically binding. In addition to presenting my interpretation of the controversy, I offer a suggestion as to how Kant might be able to escape the dilemma and further suggest we have good reason to think that Kant himself was both aware of the danger and endorsed the proffered solution.

Although not explicitly a socialist, in his political philosophy Kant provides arguments that can be deployed by socialists to argue for radically different forms of social and economic organisation. In this article I contrast Karl Marx’s criticism of capitalist property relations with the general theory of property which Kant outlines in his Doctrine of Right. I demonstrate that Kant’s concept of property provides a sounder ethical basis for the regulating and reform of capitalist economic organisations than Marx’s historical materialist view of economic and social development. Kant’s theory of property relations may fall short of Marx’s in terms of the sociological and historical insights it affords but Kant’s theory more than makes up for this is with its greater moral and political astuteness.

In this paper, I attempt to interpret Kant’s early reported thesis that the historical practice of senicide (i.e., killing the elderly) among certain Inuit communities constituted a ‘loving service’ and was ‘to some degree justified’ insofar as it was carried out to prevent one’s parents from facing a ‘more ignominious death’. On my interpretation, Kant’s verdict on Inuit senicide sheds new light on a core idea within his mature ethics – that persons are obligated to preserve themselves for as long as they remain a subject of duty. As I argue, Kant’s verdict implies that those subject to senicide were no longer bound by the duty of self-preservation insofar as they were no longer able to live as persons with inviolable moral dignity. If my argument holds, this invites further exploration of the relationship between Kant’s notion of dignity and the duty of self-preservation in the broader context of end-of-life decision-making.

Although we value Guyer’s particular reading of British Idealist works, we nonetheless consider that his largely textualist-focused approach narrows both the scope and ultimate comprehension of Idealist ethics, particularly in relation to Kant. We consider that Guyer’s analysis misses the depth of their moral understanding. Such Idealist argumentation embodies a rich blending of historical, sociological, political, and evolutionary theory, which was employed consistently in their ethical reflections. To miss this contextual point can make many of their writings almost unintelligible. Thus, we consider it of central importance to understand British Idealist moral philosophy within this much broader philosophical frame.

Those who have engaged with the moral and political thought of Richard Price have often commented on the striking similarities with Kant. Price, as much a polymath as he was a philosopher, was nevertheless a very different intellectual figure, widely admired at the time in Europe and America as a radical, but sporadic rather than systematic in his writing. This paper will consider his thinking holistically, in particular drawing on recent research on his economic commentaries and work on insurance. This expositional work around Price’s nascent political economy lays the basis for defending his positioning as a proto-socialist thinker – whose commitments also fit with the key tenets of 18th-century Left-Kantianism. It is argued that these claims, and his extant anti-capitalist thought, make Price an important and intriguing foil against which to consider Kant’s own leftist credentials, and for expanding the debate around the latter’s political economy and Left-Kantianism more generally.

Paul Guyer has shown us how misguided some early criticisms of Kant were, as well as how influential Kant’s views have been on contemporary moral philosophy. Here, I focus on Guyer’s summary judgements of what is of enduring value in Kantian moral philosophy. At issue are the claims that Kantian morality is affirmative of, rather than restrictive on human energy; that the conjunction of universal happiness and universal virtue, the summum bonum, was an important goal for Kant, able to guide individual and collective action; and that the enhancement of freedom, as Kant conceived it, is related to the forms of liberation that characterize contemporary conceptions of social justice and social progress. Such interpretations appear to take Kant in directions he would not himself have wanted to go.

The commentators have focused on my interpretations of responses to Kant’s moral philosophy by K. L. Reinhold, Friedrich Nietzsche, and several of the British Idealists, including R. G. Collingwood and John Rawls. I argue that, contrary to Reinhold, Kant’s conception of freedom does include the source of moral normativity in its distinction between Wille and Willkühr; that, in contrast to Nietzsche’s ‘exceptionalist perfectionism’, Kant’s insistence upon the equal right to freedom of all remains a defensible ideal; that Collingwood underestimated the subtlety of Kant’s moral philosophy on a number of crucial issues and, in particular, failed to recognise the importance of Kant’s version of the traditional distinction between perfect and imperfect duties; and that in her critique of both Kant and Rawls, Catherine Wilson demands from their political philosophy what, on their accounts, should be expected only from the other half of moral philosophy, namely ethics – again, primarily the domain of imperfect duty.