This article has two objectives: first, to bring to the fore Kant's neglected distinction between ‘critique’ and ‘doctrine’ and, second, to relate this distinction to Kant's notion of a philosophy of right. Kant's culminating contribution to practical philosophy, the Metaphysics of Morals, contains a doctrine of right and this ‘doctrine’ has received relatively little attention thus far in English-language writing on Kant. One of the reasons for this relative neglect is, I believe, due to the prevalent attention provided to Kant's practical critique at the expense of his practical doctrine. I aim to provide an account of Kant's critique of right in order to enable an understanding of Kant's doctrine of right to be provided with some initial orientation. I will be suggesting that this critique of right is presented in Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.

According to Alix Cohen, Kant defines emotions as ‘feelings’. Although I find her account of Kantian feelings compelling, I provide three reasons to doubt that it is an account of emotions: (1) it is unclear why Cohen identifies emotions with Kantian feelings; (2) some Kantian feelings are not emotions; (3) some Kantian desires may be emotions. I propose, however, that with some qualifications Cohen’s account may be upheld, provided its extra-textual assumptions about emotions are explicated. Against her claim that Kantian feelings have a derived intentionality, I argue that the text is compatible with their being intrinsically intentional.

Many recent commentators have noticed how Adorno, in his late works, borrows Kant’s definition of enlightenment to define key areas of his own critical practice. These discussions, however, have failed to notice how these late borrowings present an image of Kant’s enlightenment which is diametrically opposed to his previous discussions. By tracing the development of Adorno’s engagement with Kant’s essay, I discover Adorno deliberately sublating Kant’s definition as to enable its incorporation into his own works. Further, the article will examine some problems which appear to arise for Adorno when borrowing Kant’s definition of enlightenment in his late works, which coalesce around the topics of negativism and the prospects for societal change.

Whilst acknowledging that there are several major differences in the approach which Kant and Marx take to political philosophy this article argues that there are also several common themes. These common themes of commitment to critique, freedom, equality, human betterment and cosmopolitanism are first highlighted. Subsequently the most marked contrasts in their approaches are examined and evaluated. Although Kant demonstrates greater political wisdom and a greater respect for law, Marx shows greater insight into social and political forces. Taken together Kant and Marx present an as yet unrealized, powerful programme for political and social improvement.

After summarizing the content of my book, Kant and Mysticism (Palmquist 2019), I warn against four preliminary misconceptions. The book never argues that Kant viewed himself as a mystic, fully acknowledges Kant’s negative view of mysticism, offers no comprehensive overview of mystical traditions, and aims to initiate a dialogue, not to have the final word. I then respond to the foregoing essays by the five critics.

This paper considers whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge of conceptual art. I begin by looking at two competing views of conceptual art by recent philosophers, before settling on an ‘inclusive’ view of the form: conceptual art includes both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ non-perceptual art (NPA). I then set out two kinds of conceptual complexity that I argue are implicated by all aesthetic judgements of art (as art) on Kant’s view: the concept of art itself, and the idea the work is meant to express (dependent beauty and aesthetic ideas, respectively). I go on to demonstrate the applicability of Kant’s aesthetics to conceptual art by considering two works by Lawrence Weiner, which I take to be a work of work of weak and strong NPA respectively.

The article argues that Kant’s argument for ownership entails a standard of meaningful use by which property regimes can be evaluated: a regime must make it possible for usable objects to be meaningfully used. A particular form of fully communal ownership can satisfy this standard. Further, this form of communal ownership is compatible with Kantian freedom more broadly. I conclude that, if this is so, there is a great deal of space for further consideration of the rightfulness of diverse regimes of ownership and exchange within a Kantian framework.

This paper discusses three inter-related themes in Barbara Herman's Moral Literacy – the idea that, for Kant, the will is a ‘norm-constituted power’ whose activity is guided by its own internal norm, that the obligatory ends are reasonably viewed as the ends of all rational choice, and that morality ‘completes’ practical reason or rational agency.

Schopenhauer singles out Kant's theory of the sublime for high praise, calling it ‘by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’, yet, in his main discussion of the sublime, he ridicules Kant's explanation as being in the grip of scholastic metaphysics. My first aim in this paper is to sort out Schopenhauer's apparently conflicted appraisal of Kant's theory of the sublime. Next, based on his Nachlaß, close readings of published texts and especially of his account of the experience of tragic drama, I offer a reconstruction of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime which understands it – against prevailing scholarly views – as a transformation of rather than as a real departure from the Kantian explanation. Finally, I suggest that my interpretation of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime has far-reaching consequences for a proper understanding of his views on freedom.

Alix Cohen argues that the function of feeling in Kantian psychology is to appraise and orient activity. Thus she sees feeling and agency as importantly connected by Kant’s lights. I endorse this broader claim, but argue that feeling, on her account, cannot do the work of orientation that she assigns to it.

One of the more notorious passages in Kant occurs in the Doctrine of Right where he claims that ‘bloodguilt’ will cling to members of a dissolving society if they fail to execute the last murderer (MM, 6: 333). Although this is the most famous, bloodguilt appears in three other passages in Kant’s writings. These have received little attention in Kant scholarship. In this article, I examine these other passages and argue that bloodguilt functions as a symbol for the demandingness of justice. I then offer a sympathetic interpretation of the passage from the Doctrine of Right.

Logicism is Stang’s name for the Leibnizian doctrine that all necessary truths are derivable from identities and definitions. Stang shows that the early Kant opposed this doctrine because he thought the proposition God exists was a counterexample to it; I raise some non-theological counterexamples as well. Formal necessity is the necessity that attaches to a proposition when its truth is grounded in our categories and forms of intuition. Stang treats it as one of several sui generis kinds of necessity in Kant, all of them falling short of logical or metaphysical necessity. I raise several questions for Stang’s account, including the following: Can our having the forms we do really explain the necessity of geometry? Is our possession of those forms self-grounding in an objectionable way? How can our forms ground general truths without grounding particular instances of them?

Since I agree with Schulting’s conclusions, my comments consist mostly of suggestions for further work that he could do, for example further issues that he might want to look into and passages that might give him trouble. One such issue is what is now sometimes called the Localization Problem: if the mind supplies temporal and (where present) spatial organization and most (at least most) conceptual structure to the manifold of intuition, what could be used to place bits of the manifold at one place rather than another, to determine that this concept rather than that applies, and the like? I urge that this in fact a very serious problem for Kant. Among passages that might create a problem for Schulting’s reading, I focus on the Refutation of Idealism, which Kant added to the second (B-)edition.

The subject of this article is a powerful objection to the non-conceptualist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories. Part of the purpose of the deduction is to refute the sort of scepticism according to which there are no objects of empirical intuition that instantiate the categories. But if the non-conceptualist interpretation is correct, it does not follow from what Kant is arguing in the transcendental deduction that this sort of scepticism is false. This article explains and assesses a number of possible responses to this objection.