I reply to criticisms of my book The Fiery Test of Critique: A Reading of Kant’s Dialectic from Béatrice Longuenesse and Patricia Kitcher on the paralogisms, Allen Wood on the third antinomy and freedom, Des Hogan on the resolution of the antinomies, and Anja Jauernig on the ontological argument.

I focus on two main points in Ian Proops’s reading of Kant’s Paralogisms of Pure Reason: the structure of the paralogisms in the A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and the changes in Kant’s exposition of the paralogisms from A to B. I agree with Proops that there are defects in the A exposition and that Kant attempted to correct those defects in B. But I argue that Proops fails to give its due to what remains fundamental in both editions: Kant’s criticism of the rational psychologist’s confusion between the subjective (albeit universally subjective) standpoint thinkers have on themselves just in virtue of thinking, and the objective, metaphysical standpoint on a thinking thing. In short, Proops fails to give sufficient attention to Kant’s opening statement in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason: ‘“I think” is the sole text of rational psychology’.

Philosophers traditionally interpret Kant as a retributivist, but modern interpreters, with reference to Kant’s theory of justice and problematic passages, instead propose penal theories that mix retributive and deterrent features. Although these mixed penal theories are substantively compelling and capture the Kantian spirit, their dual aspects lead to a justificatory conflict that generates an apparent dilemma. To resolve this dilemma and clear the ground for these mixed theories, I will outline and reinterpret Kant’s penal theory by situating it in his broader moral and political philosophy. This move grounds the followability requirement, which is necessary to resolve the dilemma.

Kant’s position on the problem of free will can be perplexing and frustrating: all the real questions about human agential capacities or even about issues of moral imputability are empirical questions, which have empirical answers. But there remains a metaphysical or transcendental problem about the possibility of freedom, which is forever insoluble. Ian Proops’ discussion in The Fiery Test of Critique is to be commended for displaying the rare virtue of appreciating this last point and presenting Kant’s position about it accurately. The only questionable part has to do with the standard terminology – ‘determinism’, ‘libertarianism’, ‘compatibilism’, and ‘incompatibilism’. I argue that it would be better to say, as Kant does, and Proops also does most of the time, that practical freedom, hence transcendental freedom, must be presupposed whenever we act or even judge, but how freedom is possible is both unknowable and even incomprehensible to us.

The Fiery Test of Critique describes Kant’s indirect proof of idealism from the Antinomy of Pure Reason as the ‘nugget of gold’ in the Critique of Pure Reason’s Transcendental Dialectic. Here, I offer critical reflections on Proops’s reading of Kant’s indirect proof.

Elvira Basevich, Martin Sticker, and Helga Varden offered generative criticism of my monograph, Kant’s Theory of Labour. In this response, I explore how the resources they offer for thinking about gender, labour, and the state’s responsibility to ensure the material conditions of freedom can deepen both our attentiveness to patterns of systemic injustice in Kant’s political philosophy, and the resources Kant offers for addressing contemporary patterns of intersectional and material injustice.

My comments focus on Proops’s treatment of the Paralogisms. I agree with many aspects of his discussion, including his views about the project of Rational Psychology and his analyses of how, exactly, the arguments of the Paralogisms are defective in form, but I disagree with his interpretation of the First Paralogism. I argue that the source of confusion that Kant diagnoses is not the grammatical distribution of ‘I’ as singular, but the fact that the I-representation is both empty and necessary for cognition.

I respond to a challenge raised by Jordan Pascoe: Kant’s conception of obtaining full citizenship through working oneself up necessarily condemns some people to passive citizenship. I argue that we should not focus on work to establish universal full citizenship. Rather, a Universal Basic Income, an income paid regularly to everyone and without conditions, can secure everyone’s full citizenship. Moreover, I argue that such a scheme is more Kantian in nature than hitherto assumed.

This article offers the first systematic investigation of the linguistic forms in which Kant expresses his transcendental idealism since Gerold Prauss’ seminal book Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. It is argued that Prauss’ own argument for the claim that ‘in itself’ is an adverbial expression that standardly modifies verbs of philosophical reflection is flawed and that there is hence very poor exegetical evidence for so-called ‘methodological two-aspect’ interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. A comprehensive investigation of Kant’s adverbial uses of ‘in itself’ rather reveals that there are various groups of verbs that ‘in itself’ modifies, which can more or less all be reduced to a standard use in which ‘in itself’ modifies verbs of predicative being such as the copula. It is also discussed how these findings can be accommodated by the two main alternative kinds of interpretations, that is, two-object and ontological two-aspect interpretations.

There are two main meanings in Kant’s concept of moral certainty (moralische Gewissheit, certitudo moralis): first, it applies to the kind of certainty embodied in rational faith in the existence of God and a future life; second, it applies to the conscientiousness (Gewissenhaftigkeit) required of an agent in the practice of moral judgement. Despite the growing attention to Kant’s theory of conscience and his concept of conscientiousness, this article is the first to discuss ‘moral certainty’ as the aim of ‘conscientiousness’ and to highlight the relevance of both notions in regard to moral education and the purposes of Kant’s ethical doctrines of method.

Kant is invariably read by his followers as antipathetic to all forms of nationalism. Yet he was interested in differences of national character and used an organic metaphor to explain why states should not be broken up or annexed (unfortunately he never commented explicitly on the dismemberment of Poland by Prussia and its allies). He favoured a plural world in which national differences of language and religion prevented the emergence of despotic world government. So his acknowledgement of a limited obligation to provide refuge to vulnerable people should not be amplified into an acceptance of culturally disruptive mass migration.

A core feature of Kant’s Critical account of moral motivation is that pure reason can be practical by itself. I argue that Kant developed this view in the 1770s concerning the principium diiudicationis and principium executionis. These principles indicate the normative and performative aspects of moral motivation. I demonstrate that cognition of the normative principle effects the moral incentive. So, the hallmark of Kant’s Critical account of motivation was contained in his pre-Critical view. This interpretation resolves a controversy about Kant’s apparent eudaimonism in the first Critique and shows that he developed his account of moral autonomy in the 1770s.