In this chapter, I consider the deployment of the dominant philosophical conception of hope within political theory. I introduce different contexts in which political theorists ascribe hope an instrumental value, based on its suggested power to motivate agency: these theorists claim that belief in the possibility of a specific future can generate the confidence to engage in important political action. After discussing the relationship between agency and hope (found originally in Aristotle), I consider an ambitious neo-Kantian attempt (put forward by Jakob Huber) to vindicate the instrumental value of hope for democratic politics on a non-contingent basis. I argue that this attempt fails but does so instructively, as the power it ascribes to hope comes from an auxiliary concept, which is faith. I find further endorsements of hope that depend on a prior commitment to faith (in a moral sense) in the thought of Kant himself, and (in a predictive sense) in the Marxist tradition, and I suggest the value of separating these two ideas.

This book has considered what role moral considerations should play within markets. But that leaves to one side the question of whether morality prescribes what sorts of things should be on the market in the first place. In this final chapter we consider recent philosophical debates about what kinds of goods should and should not be available on the market as commodities. If there are to be limits, what principles might govern the determination of those limits? We argue that none of the available arguments establish a strict boundary between the commodifiable and the non-commodifiable. Instead, we suggest that the most important considerations concern the risk of harm both to individuals and to social values.

Berlin sees the history of philosophy as a history not just of the struggle to find answers to certain questions, but (because of the distinctive nature of these questions) to find the right means of framing them in the first place, as well as of determining the answers’ viability. He concentrates on how Enlightenment philosophers, thrilled by the success of science, sought to apply scientific procedures to ‘all that related to the social life of men’, and he focusses on the variously implemented theory of ‘ideas’, in which ‘the mind was treated as if it were a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles’. This chapter will argue that the Enlightenment philosophers not only envisaged the mind as a container for ideas, but ideas themselves as containers of ‘ideas’ in the other sense. Hume especially seems to assume that we can use empirical observation (by means of ‘the inner eye’) to discover how the mind functions – that we introspect the idea-particles moved by a Newton-like force of attraction while simultaneously observing the sensory impressions and concepts that they represent.

This chapter presents Kant’s argument for the application of all of the categories to all of our spatial and/or temporal experience. This is the heart of the project of the Critique of Pure Reason, while the critical project is based on the argument that the categories can yield coherent concepts of objects of pure reason but no actual cognition except in their application to spatial and/or temporal inputs (“intuitions”). Kant argues that all knowledge takes the form of judgment; that judgments all have or express some quantity, quality, relation, and modality, each of which has several values (the “functions” of judgment); and that our concepts of objects must be formed so that judgments with these functions can apply to objects. The forms by which concepts of objects must thus be formed are the categories. But to prove that all of the categories must be applicable to all of experience – to complete the proof of their “objective validity” – Kant demonstrates that each of the categories has a role in making our judgments about our spatio-temporal experience determinate; this is how his “system of all principles of judgment” completes his deduction of the categories.

Kant shares with Locke the project of establishing the limits of human knowledge. But they execute this project differently. Locke is primarily concerned to establish the limits of empirical knowledge based on the limits of human sensibility, while Kant is concerned to establish the limits to claims of metaphysical knowledge based precisely on the necessity of sensibility as well as understanding for all human cognition. Kant places no a priori constraints on the possible refinement or extension of our senses and thus no particular limits on empirical knowledge, but instead derives the limits of metaphysical knowledge from his transcendental analysis of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or his transcendental theory of experience. But his delimitation of human knowledge depends on his inference to transcendental idealism from his transcendental theory of experience, by means of an argument that is criticized in this chapter as well as in Chapter 5.

This chapter was written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Sir Peter Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense in 1966. Strawson’s book contributed greatly to the revival of interest in Kant’s theoretical philosophy in Anglo-American philosophy in the 1960s and thereafter. But, the chapter argues, Strawson read Kant through a meaning-theoretical approach that led him to mischaracterize some of Kant’s most fundamental arguments and unduly restrict their results. In particular, he held that Kant’s transcendental deduction showed only that we need a concept of an objective world in order to form a concept of the self, and thus could not find in Kant an argument of the kind that is developed in this book’s Chapter 1, that all of the categories must apply to all of our experience. This chapter argues by contrast that Kant’s conception of the transcendental unity of apperception as applying to all of our possible experience and his analysis of the conditions of time-determination, or making judgments about the temporal relations among all of our experiences, are meant to show that the categories must apply to all of our experience.

Kant’s transition from a constitutive to a regulative conception of teleology can also be understood as his revision of Leibniz’s “principles of grace” from constitutive to regulative. Or, while Leibniz understood the “principles of nature” and the “principles of grace” as in “pre-established harmony,” Kant took Leibniz’s conception of the realm of grace as the model for his own conception of the “empire of ends” as that which is to be established by our adherence to the moral law and as what ought to be rather than what is, and what must be brought about by our own moral efforts rather than as that which is already destined to exist by God’s choice of the best of all possible worlds.

This chapter argues that we must interpret the meaning of Kant’s conception of transcendental idealism from his arguments for it. It argues that the popular contrast between “one-world” and “two-world” interpretations of transcendental idealism is misleading, because Kant (and his contemporaries) always recognize an ontological distinction between things outside us and our representations of them (thus, two worlds) – the question is, rather, whether Kant leaves it open that things as they are in themselves might be spatio-temporal or actually denies that they are. This chapter argues that his main argument for transcendental idealism is clearly intended to prove that things as they are in themselves are not spatio-temporal, and cannot be interpreted as leaving that question open. It also argues that Kant’s argument for this assertion is not sound; rather, it depends on an assumption that the general propositions about space and time made in his “metaphysical expositions” of those concepts as well as the specific propositions of geometry are necessarily true of whatever objects they are true of at all, to which he is not entitled. Thus the chapter argues that we can accept Kant’s transcendental theory of experience without accepting transcendental idealism.

This chapter addresses central aspects of Kant’s late engagement with the internal obstacle to the realisation of the highest good, the inadequacy of the human will. It argues that his idea of a moral ‘revolution’, whereby the good disposition of a human fallen into evil is restored to its original power, involves an account of moral progress that produces an irresolvable tension: in necessitating an appeal to a doctrine of grace, it in fact reintroduces the paradox of Kantian theodicy. However, Kant’s account also points the way beyond the paradox, opening up a second path towards implicating the will in its concrete phenomenal environment. The possibility Kant brings into view is that neither whether an agent has adopted an end nor what that adoption commits them to is ascertainable independently of the pursuit of the end itself. What prevents Kant from taking this path is his enduring understanding of the very nature of moral constraint. That understanding, however, which also underlies his introduction of radical evil, arguably reflects a misguided conflation, between his core thesis about the logic of autonomy and a strictly independent metaphysics of the human person.

This chapter turns to the execution of Kantian theodicy. Concentrating on the external obstacles to realising the highest good, it surveys the various theological commitments Kant regards as concomitants of hoping for their removal. Of especial importance is Kant’s socio-historical theodicy, which exploits a notion of purposiveness to explain how human social dynamics facilitate an imminent, historical progression towards the realisation of the good. Attention to the content of Kantian theodicy, however, shows how it not only reintroduces central elements of its Leibnizian predecessor, albeit within a radically altered epistemic framework, but involves a structural invocation of divine freedom that reveals fundamental continuities with Kant’s own pre-critical theodicy. This invocation in fact leads to a paradox at the heart of Kantian theodicy: echoing the dialectical contradiction between motivation and execution that afflicted Leibnizian theodicy, the finite, practical perspective that motivates Kantian theodicy proves impossible to maintain in light of the divine, infinite perspective integral to its execution. With this paradox in mind, we can ask whether Kant’s own critical, ‘authentic’ theodicy in fact survives the critique launched in On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy.

This chapter begins by examining the emergence of Kant’s conception of the highest good in his pre-critical engagement with Stoicism and Epicureanism. His critiques of these schools and concomitant endorsement of Christianity anticipate both his later notion of heteronomy and an enduring commitment to the constitutive inadequacy of the human or finite will. The chapter then turns to explaining the nature of Kantian theodicy as an attempt, undertaken solely from the perspective of the autonomous subject, to show that and not just how rational criteria are instantiated. Since the content of Kantian theodicy is the idea of the highest good, we need to understand both why Kant thinks we need to hope for its realisation and the nature of this need, especially given his contention that the very reality of the moral law depends upon the possibility of the highest good. Seeing how the need for the highest good arises from the condition of finite autonomous beings allows us to understand the existential motivation behind Kantian theodicy. But it also alow us to identify a first path opened up, but not taken, by Kant towards rendering the content and possibility of autonomy dependent on the actual conditions of its development and exercise.

This chapter begins with the Phenomenology’s brief critique of Kantian moral theory. Hegel credits Kant with reconciling the objective validity of rational criteria with their status as self-authored, while failing to make good on his own insight. Since, on Hegel’s diagnosis, Kant’s conception of the will is a reified abstraction from social ‘actuality’, he assigns it a spurious self-sufficiency, leading to an unsatisfactory picture of the nature of practical reason. The chapter then turns to Hegel’s strategy for undoing this conception, namely by traveling the two paths Kant opened up but did not take. Taking the first path means appreciating that rational criteria cannot have their basis in features of the individual agent considered in isolation; instead, criteria must be those agents can act upon in institutional actuality while still recognising themselves as their authors. Taking the second entails seeing resistance and alienation as productive phenomena, symptoms not of structural deficits of the human will, but of conflicts between what freedom seems to demand at a given socio-historical juncture and what it really does. Taking both paths, therefore, entails a recognition that what counts as respectively internal and external to free subjectivity is subject to both synchronic and diachronic variation.

This chapter charts the evolution of Kant’s thinking about theodicy and explains the fundamental shifts in his attitude towards the project. It begins by examining his pre-critical sketch for a theodicy that remains firmly within the Leibnizian mould while repairing its structural inconsistencies and gaps. At the heart of his reparative measures is a different conception of divine freedom, one that Kant will retain throughout his critical period. The chapter ends with a consideration of his late essay On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy of 1791, in which he rejects the entire tradition of rationalist theodicy, whilst still maintaining the importance of an ‘authentic’ alternative. The basis of his rejection of previous theodicies is moral: the very pursuit of such a theodicy involves sacrificing individual freedom and rejecting an autonomous stance. Accordingly, the central sections of the chapter explain Kant’s critical concept of autonomy and how the theory of normativity it entails is fundamentally incompatible with a rationalist conception of value.

Several authors have connected Hegel’s view on action with Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge. This chapter first develops the notion of practical knowledge in Kant and Fichte, noting their similarity to Anscombe’s view. Practical knowledge is a knowing of what one is doing in acting. Yet Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit goes beyond this. Practical knowledge yields products or “works” (Werke), which are also products of concepts. Conceptual knowledge of such works, which often stem from institutional histories, is what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge.” It is argued that Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge is qualitative rather than quantitative: it concerns a transparent form of knowing rather than a certain massive extent or even finality of knowing. The constellation between the topics of concepts, artifacts, and social-historical realities present in the Phenomenology becomes a precedent for the more abstract argument for concrete conceptual truth in the Logic.

This chapter concerns the relation of the Concept Logic to the prior main division of the Logic, the Objective Logic. Hegel’s goal in the Objective Logic is not to develop a theory of the entities it discusses. Instead, Hegel’s work should be read as employing a device here called suspended reference, a way of using a concept without being committed to the reality of its referent. Since Hegel does not offer a metaphysical theory in the Objective Logic, that book can be primarily critical in function. It is then argued that the Concept Logic aims to demonstrate the grounds of the metaphysical concepts of the Objective Logic. It does so by showing that each of them are based in the mere form of thought, especially in judgment and syllogism. This makes Hegel’s conception of metaphysics non-theoretical in the sense that its objects are not separable from the thought that thinks them.

Chapter 5 argues that Hegel’s interest in the Concept Logic is to determine when a concept and its object are in a “true” or fully unified relation. This requires developing both the least adequate logical relation of concept to object, which he calls judgment, and the most adequate such form, which is the syllogistic form of teleology. For Hegel, what best corresponds to its concept is what is conceptually constituted. And Hegel’s model for conceptual constitution is a teleological process governed by some universal. It is argued that the Teleology chapter of the Logic does not reject the artifactual model for teleology but in fact embraces it, for the teleology of artifacts requires that an intention come “first” in the construction of its object. Artifactual teleology shows in a concrete way how the moments of conceptual form can be unified in the objective domain.

The chapter focuses on the two main thinkers in the German idealist tradition, Kant and Hegel. They present antithetical views about concepts (Begriffe): for Kant, a concept is something subjective, which results from the spontaneous activity of the mind; for Hegel, a concept is something objective, an ontological structure and activity. The contrast between the two conceptions of concept raises important and difficult questions: Why did Hegel reject Kant’s view of concepts? Why did he think, pace Kant, that they are ontological? A prior issue that must be settled here concerns Kant: whether he is a nominalist or realist concerning universals. As basic as this question seems, it has not been directly tackled by Kant scholars; and yet it is of utmost importance in order to understand the shift of the concept of concept in German idealism.