I offer an interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of cognitive spontaneity that explains how the understanding can function outside of the efficient-causal structure of nature, without being part of what McDowell calls ‘the domain of responsible freedom’. Contemporary literature is dominated by the ‘cognitive agency’ approach, which identifies cognitive spontaneity with a kind of freedom. Against this view, the ‘cognitive processing view’ banishes agential notions from its account but also reduces the understanding to mere mechanism. I argue that neither of these interpretations is obligatory, motivating a teleological but non-agential account that resists assimilation into either of the current approaches.

This paper aims to reconsider the relation between two opposed classes of interpretation of Kant’s idealism: (1) metaphysical two-aspect readings and (2) intentional object phenomenalist readings. Two major claims are advanced: first, I show that the difference between these views is far less drastic than many of their proponents (on both sides) make it seem; second, I argue that the phenomenalist option is nevertheless to be preferred because it gives the intuitively more natural description of Kant’s metaphysical picture of the mind-world relation. Both arguments are rooted in considerations about intentionality and conditions on successful intentional directedness.

Kant’s position in analytical jurisprudence has not been sufficiently explored. This paper aims to remedy this shortcoming. The main issue in this paper is to which extent Kant’s legal theory is an instance of natural law theory or legal positivism. Robert Alexy is one of the few philosophers who addressed this issue. Alexy believes that Kant defends a version of natural law theory that puts moral limits on legal validity. I show that Alexy’s interpretation is unsuccessful. I argue that Kant defends the positivist separability thesis that norms need not meet moral requirements to qualify as legal norms.

Kant’s description of the moral politician in ‘Perpetual Peace’ is the most detailed statement of his template for legislative reform. I argue that the moral politician responds to criticisms of Kant’s earlier ‘Theory and Practice’ essay by Friedrich Gentz and August Wilhelm Rehberg. Gentz and Rehberg objected to: Kant’s treatment of the relationship between theory and practice in politics, his conception of popular sovereignty, and his account of political transformation. By showing that Kant used the moral politician to rebut Gentz and Rehberg, I highlight an underappreciated dimension of ‘Perpetual Peace’ while situating Kant’s political stance in its historical context.

This paper explores the ‘puzzle of the nomads’ in the Metaphysics of Morals: the apparent tension between Kant’s argument about the duty to leave the state of nature and his insistence that European colonizers cannot permissibly force nomads to enter a civil union. Arguing that the puzzle is twofold, I suggest that the answer lies in the relationship between the state and territory in Kant’s work. After showing the shortcomings of an approach which suggests that nomadic peoples cannot enter the civil state without settling, I defend an alternative interpretation, which conceives the territoriality of the state as contingent.

Herder is often recognised as the intellectual originator of a tradition that stresses that language assimilation is a wrong. In what follows, I argue that that the way in which he has influenced that tradition is often misunderstood. Herder’s originality does not lie in his development of ‘linguistic constitutivism’ – the view that language plays a constitutive role in human cognition. Herder surely endorsed linguistic constitutivism, but so did earlier theorists, like Condillac, as well as French revolutionary theorists such as l’Abbé Grégoire. The original move that Herder made, I argue, is to add a normative, recognitionalist argument to the constitutive argument, and to intertwine the two. It is his constitutive recognitionalism that makes him the trailblazer of a new tradition.

The concept of equity is indispensable to Kantian morality. This claim is controversial given Kant’s labelling of equity as an unenforceable right and his reputed moral absolutism. A need for equity, however, can be elicited from within his writing. For Kant, human dignity constitutes the basis of duty. Conscience demands conformity with duty. Our duties to positively serve humanity are indeterminate. The need for equity arises, therefore, to guide conscientious deliberations in applying moral principles appropriately toward that end in particular situations. This is especially pronounced when one strives to support the dignity of others consistently with one’s own dignity.

According to the ‘rigorist’ interpretation, the imperfect duty of (e.g.) beneficence does not permit agents to fail to perform any beneficent act that is available to the agent in order to pursue some nonmoral interest, whereas on the latitudinal interpretation, agents are permitted to fail to do so. I defend the latitudinal interpretation by criticising recent defences of rigorism offered by Jens Timmermann and Pauline Kleingeld, arguing that they conflict with important features of Kant’s moral theory, and that the latitudinal interpretation better coheres with Kant’s overall view.

The foundation of the Kantian theory of right is the one innate right to freedom. Here, I offer a comprehensive philosophical comparison between Kantian rightful freedom and the conception of freedom as negative liberty or non-interference, a hugely influential view in terms of which Kantian rightful freedom is often understood. This fruitful comparison clarifies the fundamental differences between the two views, emphasizing the resources the Kantian approach offers for contributing to contemporary debates on freedom as a distinctive rights-based republican view. This Kantian perspective also offers a useful lens for critiquing negative-liberty-based views, revealing a dilemma they face.

Although scholars agree that Fichte’s earliest political writings are Kantian, they contain a theory of individual emancipation through a culture of perfection that is foreign to Kant’s Doctrine of Right. I argue that Fichte based his theory on Kant’s moral duty and therefore derived the conclusion that individual morality should be the constitution’s aim. As a result, principles of right are not limited to securing relations of external freedom among equals but concerned with creating a society of autonomous individuals. Reaching that end goes through emancipation both from the oppression of sensibility over rationality and from the false consciousness that upholds voluntary servitude to unjust regimes. As an alternative Kantian path, Fichte provides philosophical grounding for movements seeking political emancipation through cultural awakening.

In this article, I propose a Kantian framework for moral trust – trust in another person to only act with us in morally permissible ways. First, I derive an understanding of trustworthiness from Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. I argue that trustworthiness embodies a moral imperative, guiding us to act in ways that are reliable and recognizable as conducive to engaging in trusting relations. However, this alone is not enough, as it does not provide a means to assess whether someone is truly committed to the moral law and thus morally trustworthy. Therefore, in the second part, I explore a basis for assessing their moral conduct found in a local version of the Kingdom of Ends: given an ideal or archetype of a morally perfect interpersonal relationship, an archetype of the morally trustworthy agent allows us to comparatively assess the moral disposition of fellow agents.

This paper argues that, far from supporting, an oft-cited passage of the Phenomena and Noumena chapter (A247/B303) instead belies, Allison’s influential thesis that Kant’s transcendental idealism is not an ‘alternative ontology’ but a methodological or meta-epistemological ‘alternative to ontology’ that is devoid of specific metaphysical content. Following a programmatic sketch of Kant’s system of principles as a regional ontology of nature, it is argued that the precise wording and original punctuation of that passage suggest that the transcendentally realist ontologies of the past are to ‘give way’ to just such an immanent ontology of the world of outer experience.

Kant is invariably read by his followers as antipathetic to all forms of nationalism. Yet he was interested in differences of national character and used an organic metaphor to explain why states should not be broken up or annexed (unfortunately he never commented explicitly on the dismemberment of Poland by Prussia and its allies). He favoured a plural world in which national differences of language and religion prevented the emergence of despotic world government. So his acknowledgement of a limited obligation to provide refuge to vulnerable people should not be amplified into an acceptance of culturally disruptive mass migration.

This article addresses Kant’s account of domestic labour from the standpoint of social philosophy. First, I examine the case of the domestic household servant as a paradigm of the legal legitimation of social domination in Kant’s legal philosophy. Second, I explore the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in the outsourcing of care tasks available to wealthy European women in Kant’s theory of labour. Third, I bring Kant’s theory into a critical dialogue with some contemporary challenges of a democratic and equal society. Finally, I draw some conclusions about concrete forms of intersectional domination and exploitation underpinning Kant’s republicanism, before proposing that they are clearly inconsistent, insofar as they exclude large groups of people from the republican demos, even if they essentially contribute to its social reproduction.

In this article, I defend and expand on what I call the republican view of the Kantian state’s duty to the poor. Against minimalist sceptics, I argue that the republican view makes a compelling case for the state’s duty with conceptual resources internal to Kant’s philosophy of right. Against maximalist critics, I argue that the republican view need not limit redistribution to poverty relief and that it provides resources to overcome an important interpretative challenge facing attempts at justifying more expansive redistribution on Kantian grounds.

This paper explores the moral import of Kant’s theory of the beautiful in relation to his systematic aim of bridging the gulf between nature and freedom. The aim is to preserve the importance of the beautiful – whether natural or artistic – while also accounting for Kant’s emphasis on the pre-eminence of natural beauty. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between intellectual and empirical interest in the beautiful, this paper argues that only natural beauty enables a transition to the supersensible both within the subject and externally. It concludes by examining whether intellectual interest in natural beauty might be regarded as a duty.

The pre-Critical Kant holds that God is the ground of the possibility of all predicates. Yet it is not clear how God does this. A common approach is to distinguish between fundamental predicates, which God grounds directly by instantiating them, and derivative predicates, which God grounds indirectly. This essay argues that we should not distinguish between two sorts of predicates, some grounded directly and some grounded indirectly. We should distinguish between two sorts of grounding relations. As I will show, this dualism about grounding is both justified by the text and gives a satisfactory solution to the ‘how’ question.

Kant argues that civic freedom amounts to being subject to laws to which citizens could have assented. Fichte conversely argues that personal freedom is only fully realized in a state of civil freedom and that citizens are only legitimately ruled by laws to which they have explicitly agreed. This paper shows how their differing accounts are rooted in a deeper disagreement about the relationship between transcendental and empirical freedom and the role empirical citizens’ assent (Beistimmung) plays in justifying civil legislation. The confrontation also shows why reading Kant as requiring citizens’ active assent may be problematic.