In the second half of the twentieth century, Kripke and Putnam profoundly transformed central debates in the philosophy of language through two now-classic works – Naming and Necessity and The Meaning of ‘Meaning’. In reshaping the theoretical balance within the familiar triangulation between word, concept (or meaning), and reference, they explicitly returned to Kant, and in particular to an example discussed in the first Critique and Prolegomena – already present in Locke and Leibniz – which has since become one of the most debated cases in contemporary philosophy of language: the judgement ‘gold is a yellow metal’ (Prol, 4: 267; A721/B749; A728/B756).

For Kant, this judgement is analytic and a priori. For Kripke and Putnam, by contrast, it is not. On the basis of their metaphysical essentialism and their semantic commitment to a theory of direct reference, necessity is, for the first time, systematically combined with a posteriori epistemic status in a judgement. Yet it is precisely this disagreement with Kant that brings into view a broader theoretical continuity – one that Kripke and Putnam evidently, and in some respects tacitly, took for granted. This continuity consists in a framework that tightly interweaves metaphysical, epistemic, and semantic dimensions, each articulated through a corresponding distinction – respectively, necessity/possibility, a priori/a posteriori, and analytic/synthetic.

In Kant, from this example in the first Critique through the logical writings and the wider corpus of the critical decade, these dimensions are systematically mobilized in the determination of meaning through a closely integrated nexus that binds concepts, logical essence, and linguistic expression within the framework of transcendental idealism.

There is no doubt that figures such as Strawson and Sellars played a decisive role in placing Kant at the centre of these debates. Indeed, without their work – and without Sellars’s contribution in particular – it is difficult to see how Brandom’s position could have emerged, grounded as it is in a reading of Kant as the philosopher who first articulates a genuinely normative conception of the mind, a conception that, together with its distinctive Wittgensteinian inflection, constitutes one of the most influential traditions in contemporary philosophy of language and mind.

Yet matters – as so often with Kant – are less straightforward than they might initially appear. Despite the largely continuous influence of this theoretical lineage on semantic debates, Kant himself has rarely been regarded, from a strictly historical and interpretative perspective, as a philosopher with a genuine interest in language. Unlike figures such as Herder or Humboldt, he neither developed a theory of linguistic meaning nor treated language as an autonomous philosophical domain. This absence stands in sharp contrast to the sustained engagement with language characteristic of Kant’s predecessors, such as Locke, Leibniz, and Hume, as well as of contemporaries such as Hamann and Herder, who openly polemicized against Kant and treated verbal language as central to the mediation of cognition.

Kantian scholarship inherited this apparent fault line and, throughout the twentieth century, sought to address it in different ways. Some accepted the inevitability of Kant’s silence, arguing that transcendental philosophy is primarily concerned with the conditions of the possibility of experience, abstracted from the irreducible mediation of historically differentiated languages. Others attempted to reconstruct a rudimentary semiotic framework in Kant’s doctrine of synthesis, specifically in the schematism of the imagination as the mediating function between concepts and intuitions. Still others have drawn a different conclusion altogether, showing that linguistic considerations play a structurally significant role in Kant’s critical philosophy, emerging at the intersection of logic and transcendental logic in his accounts of concepts, judgement, and objective validity.Footnote ¹

It is precisely against this backdrop that Kant on Language, edited by Luigi Filieri and Konstantin Pollok, emerges as a landmark editorial intervention. By offering a rigorous reconstruction of linguistic issues internal to the Kantian framework, the volume advances a mature and self-conscious engagement with these questions. Filieri and Pollok have curated a collection that situates itself squarely within a burgeoning interpretative strand, investigating the ways in which linguistic articulation is implicated in the normative structure of the forms that are central to transcendental idealism.

While it is of course true that Kant never devoted a separate, systematic treatment to language, this absence does not preclude – nor did it in Kant’s case – a systematic engagement with distinctly semantic questions, namely with the ways in which linguistic and conceptual representations, and the judgements and propositions they compose, together with the relative weight assigned to their respective relations, come to bear determinate content. Addressing such issues is a necessary condition of any philosophical reflection on language worthy of the name.

The volume is organized around four broad thematic clusters. A first group of essays – by Capozzi, La Rocca, Tolley, and Thielke – examines the relation between language, signs, and the logic of cognition, focusing on the constitutive role of sensible signs, the discursive articulation of judgement, and the analogy between logical form and grammatical structure. A second cluster – represented by Ferrarin, Vidmar Jovanović, and Møller – shifts attention to aesthetics, symbolism, and non-literal language, highlighting the normative functions of metaphor, analogy, and symbolic presentation. A third set of contributions – by Fugate, Luft, Ehrsam, and Lu-Adler – situates Kant’s reflections on language within their historical and anthropological context, reconstructing the development of his philosophical lexicon and critically assessing the normative and exclusionary implications of his views. Finally, essays by Westra, Stroud, Forster, and Schafer address questions of communication, rhetoric, and contemporary semantics, exploring Kant’s relevance for current debates on clarity, inferentialism, expressivism, and the unity of theoretical and practical reason.

The volume exhibits a clear systematic orientation, grounded in a shared commitment to situating linguistic phenomena within Kant’s philosophical framework through a rigorously historical and interpretative approach. Yet this shared philological rigour does not yield a unified picture; on the contrary, it foregrounds substantive tensions concerning the respective roles of sensibility, imagination, and understanding; the status of signs and marks; and the point at which semantic or object-relational features come into play. This outcome should come as no surprise: as is well known, Kantian scholarship has long been characterized by a plurality of approaches and often irreducible interpretations, and the question of language is no exception. To clarify these differences, I single out two intertwined guiding questions that receive sharply divergent answers across the chapters: first, to what extent, and in what sense, linguistic articulation is already operative at different levels of cognition; and second, how the apparent lack of systematicity in Kant’s own treatment of language ought to be understood.

In her contribution, Capozzi offers a careful and textually grounded analysis of the relation between language and logic, focusing on the role of sensible signs in the articulation of concepts and in discursive cognition. The chapter stands in clear continuity with her earlier, influential work on Kant’s logic and theory of signs, which has played a decisive role in Kantian scholarship by situating questions of language within Kant’s theory of judgement and discursive cognition.

Capozzi argues that Kant posits a necessary connection between sensible signs – paradigmatically, words – and general concepts: unlike intuitions, concepts cannot be individuated or operatively employed by the understanding without linguistic signs. On this basis, Kant rejects the traditional separation between judgement as a purely mental act and proposition as its merely verbal expression, insisting that judging itself presupposes words. Capozzi grounds this claim in Kant’s privileging of hearing as the sense closest to reason: lacking determinate form, auditory signs function as abstract linguistic signs that secure the generality and normative articulation of thought. Kant’s remarks on congenital deafness further suggest that fully articulated conceptual thought depends on access to auditory signs, a theme historically contextualized in Ehrsam’s contribution.

Building on this privileging of discursive language, Lu-Adler traces its anthropological and historical extensions, arguing that Kant links linguistic form to cultural and moral progress, and establishes a hierarchy between discursive language, aligned with the understanding, and symbolic or pictorial representation, tied to sensibility. This hierarchy underwrites an anthropological ranking that privileges Greek-derived discursivity as a vehicle of abstraction while marginalizing so-called ‘Oriental’ languages and extends problematically into morality by treating discursive language as a condition of universalizable practical principles. Read together, these cases expose both the systematic ambition and the moral consequences of Kant’s commitment to sound-based language, revealing a tension between his universalist conception of reason and the restrictive conditions imposed on its linguistic realization.

This emphasis on the constitutive role of linguistic signs in discursive cognition provides a natural transition to La Rocca’s chapter, which reconstructs the genesis of empirical meaning within Kant’s transcendental framework. La Rocca shows that the earliest stages of cognition are neither linguistic nor conceptual but consist instead in preconceptual marks (Merkmale) operating as precognitive conditions rooted in the specificity of intuition. Meaning does not arise from these marks as such, but rather from a synthetic act of selective attention that designates certain intuitive features and confers on them a sign function.

Central to this account is the notion of designation (Bezeichnung), understood as a referential act that institutes – through the word – an autonomous cognitive element, operable independently of intuition while remaining systematically linked to it. On this basis, empirical concepts initially emerge as word concepts, whose content is progressively refined through empirical judgement. By situating concept acquisition within the categorial framework, La Rocca avoids the traditional problem of the ‘circle of acquisition’ and shows how linguistic arbitrariness enables the synthetic enrichment of empirical meaning, offering a rule-governed alternative to normativist accounts such as Ginsborg’s.

The first point of divergence concerns Tolley’s chapter, which advances a strong and controversial claim, namely that sensibility already exhibits a robust form of ‘linguisticality’ prior to the activity of the understanding, including formal articulation, compositional structure, and a genuinely semantic or object-relational dimension. It is precisely this claim that comes into tension with the frameworks articulated by Capozzi and La Rocca, and – albeit in a different register – with Ferrarin’s contribution. On La Rocca’s account, sensible representations lack any intrinsic representational power ‘at any level, no matter how basic’ (39), acquiring cognitive relevance only through the synthetic activity of the understanding.

Ferrarin’s analysis of reflective judgement, centred on §59 of the third Critique, converges with this critical stance. By assigning a central role to analogy as the genuine mode of operation of reflective judgement in ethical, aesthetic, political, and cultural domains – precisely where determinative concepts fall short – Ferrarin shows that figurative and analogical forms do not originate in sensibility as such. At their core lies symbolic hypotyposis and the ‘double task’ of judgement: a rule of reflection is first abstracted from a sensible intuition and then transferred to a heterogeneous object, preserving not a likeness of things but an identity in the way relations are reflected upon. In this sense, analogy ‘enlivens’ thought by enabling reflection to move from the sensible to the supersensible, grounding what Ferrarin calls a ‘liberated language’: a symbolic use of language freed from strict sensible reference yet rationally governed by reflective judgement. As Ferrarin puts it, ‘making sense of history, politics, living nature, and culture – in a word, the order of the contingent – requires an analogical language’ (100), one that emerges through the mediated activity of reflective judgement.

A second point of divergence concerns how the apparent lack of systematicity in Kant’s treatment of language should be understood. Forster offers a nuanced response, interpreting this feature not as a theoretical shortcoming but as the result of an internal reconfiguration within Kant’s philosophy. From the 1790s onward, under the influence of Herder (and Hamann), Kant increasingly assigns a constitutive role to language: not only concepts, but judgement itself comes to be unthinkable independently of words. Inferentialism is thus rearticulated, shifting from a purely mental schema to a linguistically mediated one, and opening the way towards the project of a transcendental grammar grounded in the structures of the understanding – an issue examined in Thielke’s contribution.

On this basis, Forster advances both an exegetical and a systematic critique of Brandom’s interpretation of Kant. Kantian inferentialism, he argues, cannot be adequately captured within a purely mentalist framework, nor reduced to a normative pragmatics of responsibility that dispenses with the analytic/synthetic distinction. Precisely by retaining that distinction, Kant can constrain semantic holism, distinguishing meaning-constitutive inferences from merely contingent ones, and thereby articulating a more disciplined and ultimately less radical form of inferentialism.

A full assessment of these continuities and divergences would be of considerable interest but lies beyond the scope of this discussion; nonetheless, the semantic issues addressed in this volume do not appear to be subsequent additions but are already operative at the core of the critical period.

This point is particularly significant when read against contemporary attempts – most notably Brandom’s – to foreground the philosophical relevance of language primarily in terms of its public use within a socially articulated space of reasons. While Kant does not thematize language in these terms, the exegetical work of several contributors to this volume shows that questions of linguistic normativity, shared usage, and the social dimension of meaning nonetheless lie within his horizon. Capozzi’s contribution is exemplary in this respect. As a further example, Kant’s account of words as arbitrary yet norm-governed sensible signs of concepts accords usus loquendi a decisive normative authority over the association between words and concepts, analogous to the authority that fixes the value of currency.

Taken together, these semantic and linguistic considerations – along with the many others developed throughout the volume – suffice to dispel the impression of a lack of systematicity in Kant’s treatment of language. Rather than indicating a theoretical deficiency, this feature reflects Kant’s conviction that the conceptual resources of the critical project were already adequate to address the philosophical problems posed by language. Linguistic considerations thus emerge not as the object of an autonomous theory, but as structurally integrated components of the critical philosophy itself.

By bringing together contributions that address some of the most significant and intellectually demanding aspects of Kant’s thought, the editors have assembled a volume that does more than fill a lacuna in Kant scholarship: it reshapes the way linguistic considerations can be systematically integrated into the critical project. The historical and interpretative discussions developed here show that Kant’s resources for thinking about language extend well beyond the Kantian issues foregrounded by Kripke and Putnam.