Culture and cognate concepts such as cultivation and civilization have not always been obvious topics for Kantians. Recognition of their philosophical importance in Kant's thought was slow in coming. The reason is not absence of compelling arguments showing that these concepts deserve our attention (examples in the Anglophone literature include Wood, Hampshire, Meld Shell). I suspect rather that the relatively marginal position of culture is due to the dispersal of the relevant material among works of different nature, from systematic to occasional pieces, aimed at different audiences, and covering a wide range of subjects such as aesthetics, history, morality, religion and anthropology. In other words, it seems that Kant himself treated culture as a handmaid, to provide a supporting role in the exposition of these other topics. Ana Marta González gives culture the centre stage. She argues, plausibly I think, that culture has a role to play in Kant's entire philosophy and so deserves systematic treatment (pp. 15–16). I fear, however, that this is not what the book delivers. González discusses a huge range of material, moving with ease from the moral and the political philosophy, the aesthetics, the first Critique, as well as the Religion, the Anthropology and the historical writings. She also suggests in her Introduction that Kant's treatment of culture is of relevance to understanding ‘the increasing relevance of “culture” in modern thought’ (p. 15). Yet despite the ambitious scale of the project, the effect is rather underwhelming. There are two problems: the first is terminological, the second methodological.

The key term is ‘mediation’. The basic thesis is that culture plays a mediating role between nature and morality: ‘culture would appear as a middle terrain: being neither empirical nature nor pure morality’ (p. 15). The task then is to clarify how this role is grounded in and helps illuminate Kant's other philosophical commitments. To do this, however, a consistent conception of mediation is needed. Instead there are at least five senses of mediation employed in the book, which were treated as somehow obviously related to one another. I do not think that they are. González glosses Kant's claim that judgement is ‘the mediate cognition of the object’ (A68/B93) to mean that judgement ‘mediates between different representations’ (p. 124). I am not sure that ‘mediates’ captures the function of judgement in this context: Kant himself describes it as a unifying and ordering function and the adjectival use of ‘mediate’ is contrasted with ‘immediate’ or direct cognition of objects, which is what is being denied in this passage. At any rate, even if we call the role of judgement ‘mediation’, it is not clear how it relates to the task of perfecting human nature through culture, which is ‘the mediating realm between nature and freedom’ (p. 221). One can understand the latter as a sort of practical mediation that describes human effort to create order within and without so to speak. There is yet a different sense of mediation as a teleological judgement that allows us to describe ‘culture as the end of nature and an intermediate stage towards morality’ (p. 224). It seems that mediation here is both a type of judgement and descriptive of yet a different process, the path to morality. Apart from technical questions about the nature of teleological judgement that remain unanswered in this section of the book, the incipient historicization of morality as a stage in human development needs quite a bit more analysis than it receives. Finally, we have mediation understood as the filling of a ‘gap between the universality of the a priori ends of practical reason and the particularity of the end embodied in this empirical action’ (p. 281). This, it seems to me, is better described as applying a rule, rather than mediating. In short, the task of explaining and giving a coherent reading of ‘culture’, a concept which by González's own admission is treated differently by Kant in different contexts, is given over to ‘mediation’, a concept that lacks coherence.

The methodological problem is partly a direct consequence of the terminological one. The lack of a clear guiding concept creates difficulties in organising the material and results in repetitions that affect the coherence of the project. More puzzlingly, quite a few of the chapters and chapter sections are terrifically short, not allowing González the chance to discuss the topic let alone engage with the literature cited in the bibliography. Difficult areas that remain controversial and in need of fresh insight, such as determining and reflecting judgement (pp. 132–4), second nature and natura echtypa (pp. 249–50), are treated in sections of just a couple of pages each, consisting often in large quotations from Kant. Equally, to an issue that is central to her argument, ‘The end of nature for the human species’, González devotes a chapter that is four and a half pages long (pp. 181–5). This authorial choice, perhaps made to enhance accessibility, stops the flow of the argument and impedes sustained discussion of the passages cited.