‘Beautiful is what, without a concept, is liked universally.’ Thus ends the second Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's Critique of Judgment.

What could yield a non-conceptual universality? Kant finds this in the harmonious ‘free play’ of the mental powers, which he characterizes as a mental state that is both non-cognitive and inherently universally valid. In general, any interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory will depend on the view of its relationship to cognition. This relationship itself should be understood in reference to Kant's notion of the mental state (or activity of the cognitive powers) in judging generally, as presented in the Critique of Judgment.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant presents the moral law as the sole ‘fact of pure reason’ that neither needs nor admits of a deduction to establish its authority. This claim may come as a surprise to many readers of his earlier Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the last section of the Groundwork, Kant seemed to offer a sketch of just such a ‘deduction of the supreme principle of morality’ (GMS 4: 463). Although notoriously obscure, this sketch shows that Kant hoped to base the moral law in the freedom that rational agents can claim as members of the ‘intelligible world’ that transcendental idealism makes available to us. In contrast, the second Critique abandons all aspirations of deriving morality from more basic notions of freedom and practical rationality.

In ‘Happiness and Human Flourishing’, Thomas E. Hill, Jr, contrasts Kant's notion of happiness with that of human flourishing, explains the role of happiness in Kant's ethics, and suggests some reasons why Kant portrays happiness rather than flourishing as the non-moral good of the individual. While there is much I agree with in Hill's essay, I disagree with Hill on how best to conceive of human flourishing in Kant's philosophy, and on the importance of human flourishing in Kant's ethics. Comparing my views with Hill's is not what chiefly interests me, however. After section 1, I make little explicit reference to ‘Happiness and Human Flourishing’. Instead, I seek to expand the discussion begun there by Hill of ‘how happiness and human flourishing are (or are not) relevant to [Kantian] ethics’ (HHF 164).

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant conceives of general logic as a set of universal and necessary rules for the possibility of thought, or as a set of minimal necessary conditions for ascribing rationality to an agent (exemplified by the principle of non-contradiction). Such a conception, of course, contrasts with contemporary notions of formal, mathematical or symbolic logic. Yet, in so far as Kant seeks to identify those conditions that must hold for the possibility of thought in general, such conditions must hold a fortiori for any specific model of thought, including axiomatic treatments of logic and standard natural deduction models of first-order predicate logic. Kant's general logic seeks to isolate those conditions by thinking through – or better, reflecting on – those conditions that themselves make thought possible.

In his ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy’ (SRL) Kant makes the astonishing claim that one is not entitled to lie even to save a friend from a murderer. This claim has been an embarrassment for Kant's defenders and an indication of Kant's excessive rigour for his detractors. Responses to SRL fall into three main groups. The first of these groups, that of Kant's critics, claim that SRL demonstrates that Kant's ethical views are so rigorous that they become abhorrent in practice. The second group, Kant's defenders, argues that Kant's conclusions in SRL do not follow from his own ethical principles. The third group, made up of scholars who are generally sympathetic to Kant's position, attempts to explain why a liar is responsible (but an honest person is not) for all the bad consequences that follow from his act by providing an account of Kant's theory of imputation.

Volume 12 (2007) contains a review of my little edition-cum-commentary of Kant's Grundlegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2004; henceforth ‘CG’). As I am familiar with the work of the reviewer, Dieter Schönecker, most of the points mentioned did not surprise me. I was, however, taken aback by the, let us say, unhelpful manner in which they were raised. Schönecker's criticisms concern largely not ‘blunders’, ‘misinterpretations’ or ‘factual mistakes’ (155) but – besides the occasional misunderstanding on his part – matters of philosophical disagreement that might have been of interest to readers of the Kantian Review if set out in an informative, civilized and disinterested fashion. In what follows, I shall try to make these disagreements explicit.