This special issue is intended to advance research in the neglected field of ‘first-wave left-Kantianism’. We understand first-wave left-Kantianism as a current consisting of thinkers in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, marked by the commonly held assumption that we are interdependently connected with one another via linguistic concepts that shape our ideas of justice. Critical philosophy is understood in outlining the contradictions in our thinking, materialized in the social and economic conditions. This special issue is meant to revive and continue the work on central authors of that tradition.

In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant raises the ‘casuistical’ question of whether sexual intercourse is ethically permissible only if it serves the purpose of procreation, or whether it is also permissible when procreation is not possible, e.g. during pregnancy. It might seem that Kant is assuming a special permissive law that allows ‘unpurposive’ sexual intercourse to prevent greater vices. However, as I shall argue, Kant merely recites an argument that was widespread in the eighteenth century. As a closer analysis of Kant’s argument shows, he in fact regards sexual intercourse incapable of reproduction as ethically impermissible.

This paper argues that Kant’s theory of truth in the first Critique offers a qualified correspondence account that integrates key insights from both coherence and correspondence theories of truth. By distinguishing between formal and material conditions of truth, Kant shows that truth cannot be defined in real terms. The paper identifies two fundamental requirements any theory of truth must meet – objectivity and epistemic accessibility. It shows how rationalism fails to fulfil them, while Kant’s transcendental idealism transforms the correspondence relation into an epistemic one. In doing so, Kant provides a moderate realist account of truth that avoids both scepticism and dogmatism.

This article aims to show that Ingeborg Maus’s interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy re-establishes Kant as a radical thinker of democracy in the canon of democratic theory, from which Cold War liberalism had excluded him. Using the concept ‘social superego’, Maus argues that trust in elitist authorities is foreign to Kant’s republican politics. In a comparison with Arthur Ripstein, it is shown why Maus rejects the right to resistance and the right to revolution as residues of authoritarian democracy justifications. Finally, the thesis is put forward that populism is a new form of such a superego and that the theory of popular sovereignty is also an effective antidote to it.

The content of Kant’s Enlightenment text has received much critical reception, but the very stance Kant takes as its author has been largely ignored. Similarly, there has been much critical discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in terms of the theses they (purportedly) endorse, while their authorial voice has mostly received either no attention or been criticised as problematically rhetorical. In this paper, I take a different approach, focusing on the two respective writerly stances. I suggest that Kant’s text harbours an implicit epistemic authoritarianism, in contrast to the self-therapeutic stance Adorno and Horkheimer’s text exemplifies.

This paper examines reflective judgement as a crucial aspect of the power of judgement in Kant’s third Critique. Following Ginsborg’s normative-regulative interpretation, it demonstrates how aesthetics and teleology emerge from a single principle of reflection, which takes the form of contingent contingency, or possible lawfulness, in both. This reading establishes a parallel between common sense and the intuitive intellect, and allows one to preserve the normative dimension of Kant’s work while making Kant’s more speculative legacy continuous with it.

Section 1 introduces the notion of transcendental arguments as arguments from the necessary conditions of possibility. What distinguishes them from other forms of deductive reasoning is the so-called transcendental conditional of the logical form ‘p is possible only if q’. Section 2 outlines three models for such arguments, analysing transcendental conditionals in terms of material implication, strict implication, and presupposition (semantic and pragmatic). Section 3 considers competing interpretations of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism presented in the B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Section 4 summarises the main results of the paper.

Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) has often been criticised for its idealism. I discuss Lukács’s critique of reification in light of these charges, identifying two different idealist vocabularies of (neo-)Kantian and Hegelian origin, respectively. I show that the function of the former is critical: refracting Marx’s analysis of social form through a Kantian form/content distinction allows Lukács to critique capitalism as the domination of form over content. Lukács’s Hegelian leanings are more problematic, however, as they constrain his own insights into the conditioned and contingent character of political practice and history.

Kant’s concept of perpetual peace, outlined in Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), has been influential in shaping ideas for lasting global peace. This paper examines how perpetual peace fits into Kant’s broader philosophy, beyond its legal aspects. It contrasts Kant’s highest good with perpetual peace as the highest political good, critiques readings that conflate ethical and political goods, and offers an alternative interpretation based on Kant’s teleology. The paper concludes by addressing potential objections to this approach, aiming to present a more comprehensive understanding of perpetual peace within Kant’s legal and moral philosophy.

This paper examines the pleasant state of virtue in Kantian eudaimonism. I investigate how Kantian virtue can be eudaimonistic for finite agents, for whom conflict is never eliminated. I argue that the pleasant dimension of virtue is realized not through harmony between reason and sensibility but as a pleasant state that is structurally dependent on a negative sensible moment of displeasure for finite agents. Drawing on Kant’s account of rational feelings, I show how virtue’s pleasantness does not erase conflict but is instead intelligible within a non-harmonizing conflict model of Kantian eudaimonism – one that finite agents inevitably face.

This paper explores and criticizes Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist reading of Kant.

Commentators have recently shown that Kant’s view of moral examples is more complex than what appears in the Groundwork. Throughout his works, Kant presents explicit reasons for and against the use of moral examples. Reconciling these opposing attitudes has proven difficult. Lacking a satisfactory account of how Kant thinks we should engage with and learn from moral examples, the difficulty has remained. In this paper, I construct and defend an account that resolves the prima facie inconsistency by viewing moral examples as analogous to scientific models, thus leading to ‘new’ and plausible perspectives on recent debates in Kant scholarship.

After a brief overview of Cassirer’s symbolic form argument, the discussion turns to one question: does Cassirer offer a lucid normative position in politics? My core argument is that he does not. Three arguments providing potential insights into his moral and political sensibilities are contested: the first concerns his The Myth of the State text; the second, the Bildung tradition; and third, his arguments on the contract and natural rights tradition. The latter argument, in particular, underpins the claim that Cassirer was sympathetic to liberalism. The concept of left-Kantianism is then examined in the context of the German socialist tradition.

Kant frequently states that ‘appearances’ (Erscheinungen) are mere ‘representations’ (Vorstellungen), a claim we can call AR. AR is typically understood as a substantive thesis. This paper argues for a claim that has not been explored at length elsewhere: that AR is an analytic truth, so it does not imply phenomenalism and can be affirmed by a moderate realist reader. I argue that appearances are mental contents directed towards things. Hence, appearances are not themselves the things our minds represent, which exist outside of minds. This reading permits us to accept insights from phenomenalists about Kant’s philosophy of mind, while saving the realists’ metaphysics.

This paper describes the normative profile of Kant’s ‘provisional property’ in the Doctrine of Right, by highlighting the contrast between a claim that merits the designation of ‘provisional property’ and a mere ‘pretended claim’. In contrast to a pretended claim, a claim of provisional property is duty-implying; moreover, the legitimating conditions of provisional property give it a robust justification, such that its duty-implying force does not rely on a wrong-tolerating permission. I will also argue that the proposed reconstruction does not harm Kant’s argument leading to the normative necessity of civil states.

This paper provides an account of the purpose and methodology of Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786). I show that Kant subordinates the theoretical goal of plausibly reconstructing the origin of humankind to the practical goal of helping the reader understand herself as a moral agent that must contribute to the achievement of humankind’s moral destination. First, I show that Conjectural Beginning is an innovative instance of conjectural history. Second, I argue that its methodology involves experience, imagination, and reason, whose conjoined use explains why Kantian conjectural history fares better than others. Third, I argue that the essay contributes, through a moral exhibition of the imagination, to the reader’s moral self-knowledge and cures some misconceptions that obstruct her commitment to moral progress.

At the turn of the twentieth century, few philosophical ideas in Marx’s work gained as much attention as his account of history. Orthodox Marxists made it their programme to closely follow Marx’s development thesis, which posits that the productive forces determine the course of history. The Austromarxist Max Adler (1873–1937), influenced by neo-Kantianism, took more liberties in interpreting – or, perhaps more accurately, ‘reinventing’ – the law of history in practical terms. This article reconstructs Adler’s neo-Kantian ‘reinvention’ of Marx’s account of history. According to Adler, the notion of ‘necessity’ that underpins critical judgements is not grounded in the regularity of history but rather in the moral judgements we make about how history should develop. More specifically, I defend two claims. First, by interpreting human progress as a possibility that presents itself as a necessity from the standpoint of practical rationality, I show that Adler laid the foundation for a critique of the Marxist development thesis that only later gained traction. Second, while Marxists may fear that Kantian formalism cannot address misguided ideological beliefs, I argue that Adler’s neo-Kantian formalism is robustly anti-ideological, emphasising the ideology-emancipating transformation we undergo when we recognise exploitative structures.

Hermann Cohen’s “neo-Kantian” critique of capitalism is primarily ethical. It is anchored in the principle that social relations must include people as ends in themselves, never merely as means. But Cohen draws on law to exemplify such inclusion: artificial legal persons such as cooperatives incorporate members as free and equal. I criticise Cohen for downplaying the constraints involved and, further, for only gesturing toward the role of law in capitalism. Kantian principles, if not Kant’s own views, can help address these flaws. I suggest that the form of capitalism rests on money, employment, and another sort of legal person, the business corporation.

Nietzsche repeatedly claims that Kant’s supreme moral principle, the categorical imperative, is expressive of a kind of slave morality. Paul Guyer, however, argues that a proper understanding of Kant’s conception of free agency within the boundaries of the categorical imperative reveals that Nietzsche’s criticism of slavishness misses its mark. According to Guyer, Kant, just as much as Nietzsche, rejects slavish conceptions of morality insofar as they undermine the value of self-legislation in determining ends. This paper contends that Nietzsche may in fact have a subtler conception of the categorical imperative’s slavishness in terms of the (un)realisability of our ends, which could allow his criticisms to land, and that Kantians will be responsive to.