Surprisingly often Kant asserts that it is possible to behave in such a degrading way that one ‘throws oneself away’ and turns oneself ‘into a thing’, as a result of which others may treat one ‘as they please’. Rather than dismiss these claims out of hand, I argue that they force us to reconsider what is meant and required by ‘respect for humanity’. I argue that to ‘throw away’ humanity is not to lose or extinguish it, but rather to refuse or otherwise fail to claim the respect that it authorizes one to claim. If I refuse or fail to make this claim, there is a sense in which I become a thing, and I leave others no choice but to treat me as such. This is compatible with their respect for humanity in my person.

In the third Critique, Kant collapses his deduction of the universal validity of judgements of sublimity into his exposition of such judgements, a decision called into question by commentators. I defend Kant on this score, explaining how the exposition of judgements of sublimity serves as their deduction. Kant’s key move is his claim that natural objects are not, strictly speaking, sublime. I argue that ideas of reason, on Kant’s view, are the only truly sublime objects and show how this allows him to establish that the imaginations of all observers operate in the same way in experiences of sublimity.

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.

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant explicitly states that his motivation for writing this work is to make room for faith or the practical employment of reason (Bxxv, xxx). How does Kant accomplish this? The topics of God and the immortality of the soul do not arise until the conclusion of the antinomies. How does Kant get from the desire to make room for faith to its fulfilment in the latter parts of the first Critique? A common response to this question is a discussion of the constitutive and regulative employment of the ideas of reason. It is this distinction that sustains Kant's attempt at reconciling empirical knowledge and moral discourse. The constitutive and regulative analysis, however, has its roots deep within the initial stages of the Critique of Pure Reason. It is, in fact, the mathematical/dynamical distinction, which Kant introduces early in the analytic, that makes possible the constitutive/regulative distinction. Not only has the mathematical/ dynamical distinction itself been disregarded, but the relation between the mathematical/dynamical and the constitutive/ regulative has been almost universally ignored by commentators. If a commentator does mention the mathematical/dynamical distinction, it is usually in a dismissive tone. Walsh, for example, calls the distinction ‘hard to interpret’ and ignores it for the rest of his commentary.

In his incisive and provocative analysis, ‘The place of punishment in Kant's Rechtslehre’, Paul Gorner discusses many aspects of Kant's position. I concentrate on his main contention:

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.

According to Kant, the opacity of human motivation takes two distinct forms – a psychological form: man ‘can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind [his] covert incentives’ – and a social form: ‘everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely’. In other words, first, men's ‘interior’ (i.e. their intentions, motives, thoughts, etc.) cannot be entirely revealed to themselves and, second, they tend not to reveal their ‘interior’ to others. A number of Kant scholars have acknowledged the importance of the first form of opacity in Kant's thought and have attempted to draw out from it implications for moral deliberation and ethics in general. The aim of this paper is to examine the second, social form of opacity and draw out its anthropological implications, an issue that has been overlooked in the literature. To do so, I focus on Kant's contrast between men and beings that I would like to call ‘sincere aliens’. These sincere aliens are beings who have the opposite features of man's opacity, namely beings who cannot but reveal their ‘interior’ both to others and to themselves.

In the third Critique Kant shifts the focus in his enquiry from the status of factual statements in the Critique of Pure Reason and the grounding of moral imperatives in the Critique of Practical Reason to investigating two methods of considering the world which go beyond the strictly verifiable. This is a move from evaluating the interplay of a ‘determinate’ set of facts and intellectual preconditions to forming what Kant calls ‘reflective’ judgements on these facts. There are two major questions which the Critique of Judgement tackles. On the one hand Kant ambitiously considers how we might properly interpret a set of facts as comprising a larger teleological system and, on the other hand, he is interested in the seemingly quite separate issue of the appreciation of objects as beautiful. It is this latter issue which shall concern us here. Consistent with the reflective stand in the third Critique, Kant argues from the very outset that beauty is not an empirical concept with which we might describe the world. Beauty is not objective in the sense that size, colour or weight might be. Objective properties of this kind belong to the world of scientific understanding. Instead, he holds that judgements of aesthetic merit should be based upon the subjective pleasure we take in experiencing works of art and natural objects.

Kant criticizes the so-called ‘preformation’ hypothesis – a nativist account of the origin of the categories – at the end of the B-Deduction on the ground that it entails scepticism. I examine the historical context of Kant's criticism, and identify the targets as both Crusius and Leibniz. There are two claims argued for in this paper: first, that attending to the context of the opposition to certain forms of nativism affords a way of understanding Kant's commitment to the so-called ‘discursivity thesis’, by contrasting the possession conditions for the categories with those for innate ideas; secondly, it provides an insight with regard to Kant's understanding of the dialectic with scepticism. Kant's claim is that a certain explanatory lacuna that attaches to Humean empiricism can be seen to apply equally to any nativist theory. The lacuna concerns the explanation of the modal purport of a priori necessity, i.e. how it is that our consciousness can even distinguish contents that are represented as necessary features of objects.

Like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we now have both an A- and a substantially revised B-edition of Henry Allison's commentary to and defence of that work: Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (Allison 1983, 2004). Unlike Kant's Critique, however, Allison's first edition is unlikely to persist as an occasional rival to the second, since reviewers rightly consider the second to have superseded the landmark scholarship of the first. Nevertheless, before Allison's first edition is entirely supplanted, I would like to save a neglected insight from its treatment of the B-deduction that is not retained in the second edition.

The so-called ‘possibility proof’ in Kant's pre-Critical Beweisgrund has been widely discussed in the literature, and it is a common view that he never really abandoned it. As I shall argue, this reading is mistaken. I aim to show that the natural illusion in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is usually taken to be the possibility proof turned into a transcendental illusion, has both a different conclusion and a different argument than the possibility proof. Rather, what remains from Beweisgrund is what I will call the ‘proof a posteriori’, which the Critique turns into a transcendental illusion that is of regulative use for reason.

In the third Critique, Kant argues that it is “always the mark of a good soul” to take an immediate interest in natural beauty, because it indicates an interest in harmony between nature and moral freedom. He, however, denies that there can be a similarly significant interest in artistic beauty. I argue that Kant ought not to deny this value to artistic beauty because his account of fine art as the joint product of the “natural gift” of genius and the discipline of taste commits him to the claim that artistic beauty expresses such a harmony between nature and freedom.

After examining the ethical and political writings of Immanuel Kant, one finds an apparent paradox in his philosophy as his perfectionist moral teachings appear to be linked to his anti-perfectionist political theory. Specifically, he writes that the perfection of moral character can only take place for an individual who is inside of civil society, a condition where no laws may legitimately be implemented expressly for the purpose of trying to make individuals moral. Kant believes that living in civil society is a necessary condition for an individual to refine his talents and reason completely, a process required by morality. I believe, however, that the connection between his moral and political theory runs much deeper than simply facilitating the refinement of talents. Kant's moral theory focuses on an individual's cultivation of virtue, but this cultivation cannot be most satisfactorily completed unless that individual is a member of civil society. Put differently, civil society plays a necessary role in cultivating an individual's character so that he is able to act from maxims consistent with the moral law, out of the respect for the law itself. However, because he believes that civic laws primarily intended to encourage moral cultivation cannot be implemented legitimately, it seems curious that this condition should play such a significant role in Kant's moral philosophy. Through this examination of Kant's moral and political theory, it will be shown that Kant's political society establishes a condition necessary for an individual's complete cultivation of virtue, not by implementing laws that make men moral but by weakening the forces of heteronomy, thereby removing barriers to moral action.

On my interpretation of Kant, feeling plays a central role in the mind: it has the distinct function of tracking and evaluating our activity in relation to ourselves and the world so as to orient us. In this article, I set out to defend this view against a number of objections raised by Melissa Merritt and Uri Eran. I conclude with some reflections on the fact that, despite being very different, Merritt and Eran’s respective views of Kantian feelings turn out to have something potentially problematic in common: they blur the boundary between feelings and other kinds of mental states.

Since the publication of Dieter Henrich's classic paper, ‘The proof structure of the transcendental deduction’, in The Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969), the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding has been under focus in Kant studies in a very special way. The B-deduction seems to be a proof in two steps. Consequently, the focus has been on questions like, ‘What is the structure of the deduction?’, and ‘Why is the deduction carried out in two steps?’ No doubt the structure of the deduction has been the most debated exegetical issue in Kant's theoretical philosophy, and the most important too, while the answers mirror one's overall understanding of Kant.

Kant famously claims that the table of the categories of freedom does not require explanation, ‘since it is intelligible enough of itself’ (Critique of Practical Reason 5: 67). Kant interpreters have been baffled by this claim, and the disagreement among the increasing number of studies in more recent years suggests that the table is not as straightforward as Kant took it to be. In this article I want to show that a coherent interpretation of the table depends essentially on a clarification of what have been taken to be three fundamental ambiguities in Kant’s presentation of the table. This assumption about ambiguities in Kant’s text is, I argue, rooted in a hybrid conception of practical rationality assumed by his interpreters. I believe the task of disambiguating the table in all three cases can be completed. But it will require spelling out Kant’s moral cognitivism in such a way that he emerges as holding what I will call a unitary account of practical rationality.