The Duisburg Nachlaβ is a bundle of Kant's handwritten notes (R4674- 4684 in volume 17 of the Academy Edition). These notes almost certainly go back to some time in 1775. Though very obscure, they replay issues in Kant's early metaphysics just as clearly as they anticipate issues in the Critique of Pure Reason. This makes them an important way-station in Kant's philosophical development — all the more important, because he published nothing in the 1770s and left no other extended writings in his own hand. A proper understanding of the Duisburg Nachlaβ might therefore explain some of Kant's later ideas: their origins in his earlier thinking and their philosophical motivations. The purpose of this paper is to lay the groundwork for such an explanation—at least a partial one. I shall argue that Kant's efforts in the Duisburg Nachlaβ to correct certain difficulties in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 anticipate and naturally lead to the crucial claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that the understanding legislates laws to nature (A125-128; B163-165).

In the lengthy debate over the question of scientific realism one of the least discussed positions is structural realism. However, this position ought to attract critical attention because it purports to preserve the central insights of the best arguments for both realism and anti-realism. John Worrall has in fact described it as being ‘the best of both worlds’ that recognizes the discontinuous nature of scientific change as well as the ‘no-miracles’ argument for scientific realism. However, the validity of this claim has been called into question by Stathis Psillos. He questions its ability to correctly account for the examples of scientific change that its supporters, like Worrall (following Poincaré), claim ought to be understood in a structural realist light.

In this paper I examine these arguments for and against structural realism and demonstrate that neither Worrall nor Psillos is fully correct. I agree with Psillos’ claim that realism with regards to a theory ought not to be ‘all or nothing,’ that one should not always take the whole of a theory to be true or else commit only to the belief in its directly empirical content.

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that from the agent's subjective perspective, morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations.

Respect is a feeling that is generated by the agent's reflection on the nature of her own agency. It is not directed to anybody in particular, but to the very idea of rational agency, which is characterized by self-mastery and self-legislation. Contrary to animals, we do not derive our ends from nature, but we are capable of setting ends of our own, by exercising practical reason, that is, by engaging in the activity of law making.

Infinitism, a theory of the structure of justification most recently developed and defended by Peter Klein, is the view that justification is a matter of having an infinite series of non-repeating reasons for a proposition. I argue that infinitism is preferable to foundationalism in that only infinitism can plausibly account for two important features of the structure of justification: 1) justification admits of degrees and 2) complete justification makes sense.

Meta-ethical non-cognitivism makes two claims—a negative one and a positive one. The negative claim is that moral utterances do not express beliefs which provide the truth-conditions for those utterances. The positive claim is that the primary function of such utterances is to express certain of the speaker's desire-like states of mind. Non-cognitivism is officially a theory about the meanings of moral words, but non-cognitivists also maintain that moral states of mind are themselves at least partially constituted by desire-like states to which moral utterances give voice. Non-cognitivists need a plausible account of what distinguishes whims, addictions and cravings from genuinely moral judgments. For while non-cognitivists maintain that in a suitably broad sense moral judgments just are constituted by desire-like states they also insist that not any old desire constitutes a genuinely moral judgment. Since the challenge is to demarcate what is distinctive about moral attitudes we might usefully call this the demarcation challenge.