McDowell's Mind and World is a commentary on a traditional, dualist, epistemology which puzzles over, and offers accounts of, a fundamental division between mental, subjective items, and non-mental, objective items in experience. The principal responses to that tradition which McDowell considers are those of Davidson's coherentism, Evans's form of realism, and Kant; but it is Kant's famous B75 text which occupies centre stage:

Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer; Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.

(Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind).

I shall unfortunately say nothing of the philosophical import of McDowell's reflections on these positions, for my aim here is to focus on his account of Kant. My view is that his account is fundamentally mistaken, and I can indicate the points of disagreement in two related ways. First, as McDowell stresses, his Kant is Strawson's Kant. But, as I have argued elsewhere Strawson's Kant is not Kant, and so McDowell's Kant is not Kant either. Second, more specifically, Strawson's Kant has notoriously two sides, light and dark, insightful and monstrous, in which the dark side, the so-called ‘Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism”, cannot be eliminated, and McDowell follows Strawson in this. Indeed in Strawson's The Bounds of Sense that dark side has equal status with the more promising insights, although more recently he has modified that strong view. My claim is that this bizarre dualism, and especially the dark side which McDowell unwisely calls the “transcendental story” (MW p 41), are not present in Kant in anything like the way that Strawson and McDowell suppose.

For both methodological and substantive reasons Hegel owes us a thorough internal critique of Kant's transcendental idealism. He did not, however, set one out. I have become convinced, however, that Hegel's reading and re-thinking of Kant during his years in Jena is far more thorough and insightful than has generally been recognized, and that he was clearly aware of some very important main lines of internal criticism to which Kant's philosophy is subject.

Here I want to develop one case of an obliquely indicated but nevertheless sound objection Hegel makes to Kant's transcendental idealism. The issue concerns what Kant calls the “transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition.” This phrase denotes the necessary degree of regularity among the content of empirical intuitions such that we are both able and stimulated to comprehend that content under our general concepts and categories in empirical judgments. Kant is quite clear that this is a transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. It is also a formal condition, since it concerns the ordering of something, in this case, of the contents of empirical intuitions. Kant contends that transcendental idealism, and it alone, can account for the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. Against Kant, I shall contend that transcendental idealism cannot account at all for the occurrence of the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. Before turning to some of the details of Kant's views, I shall show that this problem is very much on Hegel's mind in Jena. Afterward I shall show that understanding Hegel's concern about Kant's views on the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition sheds light on some of Hegel's otherwise rather puzzling claims and aims.

Kant's ethics is frequently criticised by Hegel for being merely formal or abstract, for being infected by the vices of abstraction” as one commentator put it. It is tempting for those sympathetic to the general drift of Kant's ethics to attempt to defend him from this criticism by arguing that it is not merely formal at all. But the abstract nature of Kant's ethics was not accidental: neither is it falsely ascribed to him because of poor, or insensitive interpretation. Kant intended his ethics to be formal and saw this as its virtue. The distinctively Kantian way to deal with the charge of abstraction is not to attempt to give some content to his ethics, but to show that it is none the worse for being abstract, and that this has the advantages Kant thought it did. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this line of argument.

Following Henry Allison's terminology in his book Kant's Theory of Freedom I shall take the reciprocity thesis to be the thesis that morality and freedom are reciprocal concepts. To be free, the reciprocity thesis claims, is to be subject to the demands of morality; to be subject to the demands of morality is to be free.

Despite quite different understandings of the domains of ethics and morality, Kant and Hegel both affirm versions of the reciprocity thesis. Kant's best known statement of the thesis can be found at the beginning of Chapter III of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: “a free will and a will under moral laws”, he asserts, “are one and the same. Consequently if freedom of the will is presupposed, morality, together with its principle, follows by mere analysis of the concept of freedom”. This assumption of reciprocity is an explicit premise in the subsequent argument that, since a rational agent must take himself to be free, he must consider himself subject to the moral law. And it reappears again in the Critique of Practical Reason's reversal of this argument, which claims that, since a rational agent has a sense of himself as subject to the moral law (the so-called “fact of reason”), he therefore has a consciousness of his freedom. Finally, it is worth noting that something like the reciprocity thesis underlies much of the argument of Chapters I and II of the Groundwork as well as the opening arguments of the second Critique: for in these texts Kant frequently moves directly from the proposition that the moral will must be determined independently of all of its desires and inclinations (it is free) to the conclusion that it must be subject to the moral law.

This paper is an attempt to sketch the general framework of Kant and Hegel's Aesthetics, which are dealt respectively in sections I and II.

The first section considers Kant's stated aims in the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, his location of judgments of taste within the problematic of reflective judgment, his treatment of reflective aesthetic judgments in the analytic of the beautiful and the distinction between objective reality and subjective universal validity. The second section provides a sketch of Hegel's division of artistic beauty into symbolic, classical and romantic art in the attempt to explain how Hegel's restriction of the subject matter of aesthetics to fine art, may shed light on his critique of Kantian ‘subjectivism’.

Kant's discussion of aesthetics is located within the problematic of reflective judgment in general, that is, within a discussion of the suitability of nature for cognition. Reflective judgments are first contrasted with determinant judgments and then divided into two kinds, aesthetic and teleological. The distinction between aesthetic and teleological reflection, captures the distinction between a kind of pleasure which arises from the conformity or harmony of imagination and the understanding, and a kind of pleasure which arises from the conformity or harmony of the understanding with reason. The fact that pleasure arises in reflective judgments in general, and is not an exclusive feature of aesthetic reflection, is not transparent from Kant's introduction, but is suggested by the claim that although the acknowledgment that the various empirical laws of nature are amenable to systematic categorization, no longer gives rise to pleasure, this is simply due to the fact that the repeated experience of the systematic unity of empirical laws, is no longer an occasion for surprise:

It is true that we no longer notice any decided pleasure in the comprehensibility of nature, or in the unity of its divisions into genera and species, without which the empirical concepts, that afford us our knowledge of nature in its particular laws, would not be possible. Still it is certain that the pleasure appeared in due course, and only by reason of the most ordinary experience being impossible without it, has it become gradually fused with simple cognition, and no longer arrests particular attention.

Despite the existence of a Promethean strain in the history of western thought from the Pre-Socratics down to the time of Kant and Hegel, it is fair to say that mankind generally had some kind of belief in the Gods or the one God. Even before recorded history began, people felt surrounded on all sides by superior supernatural beings who inspired terror and who could only be placated by sacrifice – human, animal and plant – the stage of animism. Since Kant and Hegel, despite the rapid and growing secularisation of society and the decline of overt acts of religion in European societies which lead the word in freedom and material development, census figures show that a large number of people still hold some kind of religious belief.

The subject of religion in Kant and Hegel is too wide to be dealt with comprehensively in a paper of this kind, and I shall be looking very briefly at three areas, viz, epistemology where God is presupposed in both systems, freedom through which the religious dimension in human life is expressed, and the possibility of an after-life traditionally treated under the title of the immortality of the soul. God, Freedom and the Immortality of the Soul have been the fundamental issues that have engaged the minds of the great system-builders in philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel.