In this paper, I shall argue that the most moderate and balanced way to view Kant's transcendental philosophy is as a species of psychological investigation analogous to Hume's, but refounded on a doctrine of pure (a priori) sensibility, such as Hume never allowed himself (and may never even have thought of). This might seem to fly in the face of what many interpreters of Kant deem conventional wisdom: that the burden of proof is on one who claims that psychology is essential to transcendental philosophy. On this view, there is to be found in Kant ‘a more austere strictly transcendental philosophy’, which needs to be carefully distinguished from the psychological doctrines in which it is enmeshed; and they would insist on being convinced of the contrary before abandoning a position that, in their eyes, is the most moderate and balanced an interpreter of Kant can adopt. My purpose in this two-part essay is to urge them to think again. For while there can be no question of Kant's opposition to empiricism, it is equally certain that his praise for Hume was never freer or more unreserved than in respect of the latter's psycho-genetic approach to cognition. So, rather than supposing that Kant ipso facto rejected solutions to philosophical problems grounded on psychology when he rejected Hume's empiricism, it seems to me that the more moderate and balanced interpretive approach is to begin by supposing that Kant's transcendental philosophy is a species of philosophical psychology in the same mould as Hume's, differing from it only by virtue of involving a priori syntheses of a manifold of a priori intuition.

The idea that respect for persons comprises the core of morality has long been associated with Kant and the ethics of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In particular, the second formulation of the categorical imperative (CI), the Formula of Humanity as an End-in-itself (FHE) – ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’ (G, 429) – is often glossed as enjoining us to respect persons as such. On what I think may fairly be called the received view, the injunction to respect persons as such is thus, for Kant, co-extensive with morality itself.

Lucy Allais argues that we can better understand Kant's transcendental idealism by taking seriously the analogy of appearances to secondary qualities that Kant offers in the Prolegomena. A proper appreciation of this analogy, Allais claims, yields a reading of transcendental idealism according to which all properties that can appear to us in experience are mind-dependent relational properties that inhere in mind-independent objects. In section 1 of my paper, I articulate Allais's position and its benefits, not least of which is its elegant explanation of how the features of objects that appear to us are transcendentally ideal while still being ‘empirically’ real. In section 2, I contend that there are elements of Allais's account that are problematic, yet also inessential, to what I view to be the core contribution of her analysis. These elements are the views that the properties that appear to human beings are not really distinct from properties that things have ‘in themselves’ and that Kant embraced a relational account of perception. In section 3, I return to the core of Allais's reading and argue that, despite its multiple virtues, it cannot make sense of key features of Kant's idealism.

In this paper I discuss four ways in which Schulting’s phenomenalist interpretation of Kant faces the challenge of accounting for the possibility of objective cognition. First, I ask whether objective cognition requires the understanding to be a faculty of absolute, not merely relative spontaneity. Second, is objectivity compatible with thinking of the transcendental ‘I’ as an indexical? Third, does objectivity require that the objects have being independently of the understanding? Finally, is it a threat to objectivity if objects can be given to me in sensibility without standing under the categories?

At a time when the public is increasingly exposed to public scandals, moral defences of privacy are hard to come by. Privacy, it is argued, is merely a cloak for deception and vice. Since the virtuous have nothing to hide, full disclosure of ourselves to others must be a moral obligation. Given the rigour with which Kant defends the prohibition on lying, many have inferred that Kantian ethics must be equally strict on the necessity of truth telling. Do we in fact owe others the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

In her new book, Patricia Kitcher supports Onora O'Neill's view that the categorical imperative is the highest principle of both practical and theoretical reason. I claim that neither O'Neill's original interpretation nor Kitcher's additional evidence in favour of it are convincing. At its core, this misconception of Kant's position consists in the identification of self-referential critique of reason with the concept of autonomy. It will be shown that the ‘common principle’ (Kant) of both practical and theoretical reason is not the categorical imperative, but the reflective power of judgement, as Kant claims in the Critique of the Power of Judgement.

Kant states in §76 of the third Critique that the divine intuitive intellect would not represent modal distinctions. Kohl (2015) and Stang (2016) claim that this statement entails that noumena lack modal properties, which, in turn, conflicts with Kant’s attribution of contingency to human noumenal wills. They both propose resolutions to this conflict based on conjectures regarding how God might non-modally represent what our discursive intellects represent as modally determined. I argue that (i) these proposals fail; (ii) the viable resolution consists in recognizing that we modalize human noumenal wills as a merely regulative-practical principle in our judgements of imputation.

Luigi Caranti seeks to find a foundation for a contemporary theory of human rights in Kant, as well as contemporary relevance for his project of perpetual peace and his teleology of political progress. I agree with much of what he says, but provide a different account of Kant’s foundations for morality in general and human rights in particular, and defend my critique of Kant’s conception of a guarantee of progress from Caranti’s defence of Kant.

This article demonstrates the relevance of Kant to the interpretation of contemporary art. The defining properties of contemporary art are the impossibility of definition in material, formal or stylistic terms, and the central role that concepts play in the interpretation of a work. Danto and Osborne suggest how concepts might be applied but they do not develop their proposals. Kant’s theory of judgement can provide a fuller account on the basis of the notions of purposiveness and play. The way in which these notions explain the application of concepts to the world, I argue, provides a model of how concepts can be combined to form an interpretation of a work of contemporary art. A detailed example is given.

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception.

This article applies Charles W. Mills’ notion of the domination contract to develop a Kantian theory of justice. The concept of domination underlying the domination contract is best understood as structural domination, which unjustifiably authorizes institutions and labour practices to weaken vulnerable groups’ public standing as free, equal and independent citizens. Though Kant’s theory of justice captures why structural domination of any kind contradicts the requirements of justice, it neglects to condemn exploitive gender- and race-based labour relations. Because the ideal of civic equality must position all persons as co-legislators of the terms of political rule, the state must dismantle exploitive race- and gender-based labour relations for all persons to command political power as civic equals.

At least Kant thinks it's a part of the concept that gold is to be a yellow metal. He thinks that we know this a priori, and that we could not discover it to be empirically false … Is Kant right about this? (Saul Kripke)

Gold [is] … a yellow malleable ductile high density metallic element resistant to chemical reaction. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Nature considered materially is the totality of all objects of experience. (Immanuel Kant, P, Ak. 4:295)

Kant's joke. Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfound the common man that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

If Kant had never written the section of the Rechtslehre on punishment we would still have known from the Critique of Practical Reason that he held a strongly retributive view of punishment. But it is not a view which we could have inferred from the rest of the Rechtslehre. Despite its intuitive appeal, Kant's justification of judicial punishment simply does not fit the account of right he gives in the Rechtslehre. According to this account the only justification for coercion is that it constitutes a ‘hindering of a hindrance’ to freedom. But there is no way in which this requires punishment to be retributive.

Close attention to Kant’s comments on animal minds has resulted in radically different readings of key passages in Kant. A major disputed text for understanding Kant on animals is his criticism of G. F. Meier’s view in the 1762 ‘False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures’. In this article, I argue that Kant’s criticism of Meier should be read as an intervention into an ongoing debate between Meier and H. S. Reimarus on animal minds. Specifically, while broadly aligning himself with Reimarus, Kant distinguishes himself from both Meier and Reimarus on the role of judgement in human consciousness.

John Rawls's account of Kantian constructivism is perhaps his most striking contribution to ethics. In this paper, I examine the relation between Rawls's constructivism and its foundation in Kantian intuitions. In particular, I focus on the progressive influence on Rawls's approach of the Kantian intuition that the substance of morality is best understood as constructed by free and equal people under fair conditions. Rawls's focus on this Kantian intuition, I argue, motivates the focus on social contract that grounds both his accounts of the original position and of reflective equilibrium. Critics, including Onora O'Neill and Larry Krasnoff, object that Rawls's view distorts various aspects of Kantian moral reasoning. I argue that these objections (i) exaggerate the distinctions between Kant's and Rawls's decision procedures and (ii) reflect an unnecessarily constricted view of Kant's moral thought.

In this article, I argue that in the sense of greatest epistemological concern for Kant, empirical cognition is ‘rational sensory discrimination’: the identification or differentiation of sensory objects from each other (whether correctly or not), occurring through a capacity of forming judgements (whether correct or not). With this account of empirical cognition, I show how the Transcendental Deduction of the first Critique is most plausibly read as having as its fundamental assumption the thesis that we have empirical cognition, and I provide evidence that Kant understood Hume as granting this assumption.

I attempt first to disentangle three aspects of Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duty. There is the central distinction between principles of duty contrary to that which is contradictory in conception/consistent in conception but contradictory in will. There is also a distinction between essential and non-essential duties: those which cannot, or occasionally can, be passed over consistent with the requirements of morality. Finally, there is a distinction between duties that exhibit a scalar aspect – degrees of goodness or virtue – and duties that do not. My aim is to show how these distinct considerations can be reconciled as aspects of a single distinction, and I conclude that the remarkable complexity of Kant’s perfect/imperfect distinction is actually a strength, rather than a weakness.

One usual understanding of Kant's moral theory identifies agents as solitary individuals who reflect on the moral quality of actions ‘in the loneliness of their souls’. Their reflection is autonomous, independent and ‘monological’, with the result that ‘by presupposing autonomy’ Kant ‘expels moral action from the very domain of morality itself’. Instead of an ‘interplay of an intersubjectivity’ in which moral issues arise and are resolved, the autonomous solitary individual seems to derive rules for action from a categorical imperative. Yet this imperative itself is only a statement of the formal character of reason independent of particular contexts, and so cannot clearly guide actual actions and choices. From another direction, Iris Murdoch has maintained that, ‘confronted even with Christ’, the Kantian moral agent ‘turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason’. He insists on being ‘free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, [and] heroic'; and, Murdoch contends, the proper name of this individual ‘is Milton's Lucifer’. This moral agent is individualistic to the point of being damnably isolated.

In this article I offer a critical commentary on Jeanine Grenberg’s claim that, by the time of the second Critique, Kant was committed to the view that we only access the moral law’s validity through the feeling of respect. The issue turns on how we understand Kant’s assertion that our consciousness of the moral law is a ‘fact of reason’. Grenberg argues that all facts must be forced, and anything forced must be felt. I defend an alternative interpretation, according to which the fact of reason refers to the actuality of our moral consciousness.

In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Kant claims that no women are currently enlightened. Here I argue that this exclusion is due to certain legal restrictions guiding Kant’s conception of enlightenment. As enlightenment is intended to take place in society, it appears that Kant has a specific legal context in mind that affects its enactment. His twofold conception of citizenship and the dimension of subordination he puts forward by restricting the private use of reason will prove useful in clarifying those legal restrictions. It thus seems unlikely that Kant intended women to take an active part in enlightenment.