Kant’s notes known as Remarks in the ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime’ reveal a deep concern with the way in which the human drives to equality and unity lead inevitably to a drive for honour and its attendant delusions. He developed his thinking about these problems in the context of his reading of Rousseau. In his published Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant tries to overcome the influence of the drive for honour by appealing to a metaphysics that is critical of itself. The problem is how to distinguish what is grounded in reason when that reason is so easily influenced by others.

While scholars are slowly coming to realize that Kant’s moral philosophy has a distinctive theory of moral education, the import of religion in such education is generally neglected or even denied. This essay argues that Kant’s reflections on religion in parts II and III of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason interpret religion specifically as one aspect of moral education, namely moral ascetics. After first clearly distinguishing between a cognitive and a conative aspect of moral education, I show how certain historical religious practices serve to provide the conative aspect of moral education. Kant defines this aspect of moral education as practices that render the human agent ‘valiant and cheerful in fulfilling his duties’ (MS, 6: 484). By this it is meant that certain practices can inspire moral interests either by justifying rational hope in living up to a certain standard of moral perfection (Christology) or by endeavouring to unite human beings in a universal, invisible ethical community that inspires cooperation rather than adversity (ecclesiology).

The article defends three claims regarding the relation between the different formulas of the categorical imperative. (1) On its prevailing reading, FUL gives different moral guidance than FH; left answered, this problem is an argument for adopting a competing perspective on FUL. (2) The prohibitions and commands of the formulas should be taken to be extensionally the same; but FKE adds a dimension missing from the others, gained by uniting their perspectives, namely, bringing the variety of moral laws into systematic unity. (3) The grammatically ambiguous phrase in GMS, 4: 436.9–10 claims that FA alone unites the other formulas in itself.

While Kant’s political writings employ a teleological language, the exact benefit of such language to his politics is far from clear. Against recent interpretations of Kant’s political thought, which downplay or dismiss the role of teleology, I restore Zweckmässigkeit to its place in Kant’s politics as a theoretically and practically useful material principle, and show that a teleological perspective complements the perspective stipulated by the formal principle of Recht. By means of a systematic reconstruction of what I call ‘political Zweckmässigkeit’, we gain a fuller portrayal of and a valuable insight into Kant’s political thought.

Kant insists that the use of concepts must be subject to empirical conditions if they are to have objective validity. This article analyses Kant’s principle of objective validity, focusing particularly on its application to transcendental concepts such as those of sensibility, understanding and transcendental apperception. It distinguishes between two orders of objective validity, based on Kant’s distinction between empirical and transcendental truths. Since transcendental concepts are pure concepts without spatio-temporal content, their objective validity is of the same second-order kind as that of unschematized categories. This characteristic of transcendental concepts implies that the cognitive powers picked out by them are not particular psychological mechanisms, but rather abstract functional structures. Transcendental concepts owe their objective validity to the realizability of the functional structures by empirical cognizers like humans. This relation in turn helps to explain the nature of transcendental truths.