Although Kant defends a cosmopolitan ideal, his philosophy is problematically vague regarding how to achieve it, which lends support to the empty formalism charge. How Kant would respond to the crisis in Syria reveals that judgement plays too central a role, because Kantian principles lead to equally reasonable but opposite conclusions on how to weigh the duty of hospitality to refugees against a state’s duty to its own citizens, the right of prevention towards ISIS against the duty not to harm non-combatants, and the responsibility to protect the people of Syria against the duty of non-interference in its internal affairs.

This article argues that alienation (as Entfremdung) should be understood as a particular form of individual and social heteronomy that can only be overcome by a dialectical combination of individual and collective autonomy, recovering a deontological sense of normative authority. If we think about alienation in Kantian terms, the main source of alienation is a denial of standing or, in the extreme, losing a sense of oneself as a rational normative authority equal to all others. I call the former kind of alienation, where persons deny others equal standing as a normative authority in moral or political terms, first order noumenal alienation, as there is no proper mutual cognition and recognition of each other in such a social context. I call the latter kind of alienation, where a subject does not consider themselves an equal normative authority – or an ‘end in oneself’ – second order noumenal alienation (again, in a moral and a political form). In this sense, alienation violates the dignity of humans as moral and political lawgivers – a dignity seen by Rousseau, Kant and Marx as inalienable: It can be denied or violated, but it cannot be lost.

The paper provides a systematic account of Kant’s ‘right to be somewhere’ as introduced in the Doctrine of Right. My claim is that Kant’s concern with the concurrent existence of a plurality of corporeal agents on the earth’s surface (to which the right speaks) occupies a rarely appreciated conceptual space in his mature political philosophy. In grounding a particular kind of moral relation that is ‘external’ (as located in bounded space) but not property-mediated, it provides us with a fundamentally new perspective on Kant’s cosmopolitanism, which I construe as a cosmopolitanism for ‘earth dwellers’.

It is commonly thought that the distinction between subjectively valid judgements of perception and objectively valid judgements of experience in the Prolegomena is not consistent with the account of judgement Kant offers in the B Deduction, according to which a judgement is ‘nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception’. Contrary to this view, I argue that the Prolegomena distinction maps closely onto that drawn between the mathematical and dynamical principles in the System of Principles: Kant’s account of the Prolegomena distinction strongly suggests that it is the Analogies of Experience that make it possible for judgements of perception to give rise to judgements of experience. This means that judgements of perception are objectively valid with regard to the quantity and quality of objects, and subjectively valid with regard to the relation they posit between objects. If that is the case, then the notion of a judgement of perception is consistent with the B Deduction account of judgement.

This article offers an account of human dignity based on a discussion of Kant’s moral and political philosophy and then shows its relevance for articulating and developing in a fresh way some normative dimensions of Marx’s critique of capitalism as involving exploitation, domination and alienation, and the view of socialism as involving a combination of freedom and solidarity. What is advanced here is not Kant’s own conception of dignity, but an account that partly builds on that conception and partly criticizes it. The same is the case with the account of socialism in relation to Marx’s work. As articulated, Kantian dignity and Marxian socialism turn out to be quite appealing and mutually supportive.

Phenomenalist interpretations of Kant are out of fashion. The most common complaint from anti-phenomenalist critics is that a phenomenalist reading of Kant would collapse Kantian idealism into Berkeleyan idealism. This would be unacceptable because Berkeleyan idealism is incompatible with core elements of Kant’s empirical realism. In this paper, I argue that not all phenomenalist readings threaten empirical realism. First, I distinguish several variants of phenomenalism, and then show that Berkeley’s idealism is characterized by his commitment to most of them. I then make the case that two forms of phenomenalism are consistent with Kant’s empirical realism. The comparison between Kant and Berkeley runs throughout the paper, with special emphasis on the significance of their theories of intentionality.

For Kant, ‘wish’ is a technical term denoting a strange species of desire. It is an instance in which someone wills something that she simultaneously knows she cannot bring about. As a result, it is, in one sense, antithetical to morality, which deals with ‘ought implies can’. I will argue that Kant re-evaluated wishing as (to some extent) causally efficacious and, further, of moral relevance. This re-evaluation has not been discussed in the literature, yet has been lurking in plain sight in a subtle shift in two versions of a footnote from the Critique of the Power of Judgement.

A well-known trilemma faces the interpretation of Kant’s theory of affection, namely whether the objects that affect us are empirical, noumenal or both. I argue that, according to Kant, the things that affect us and cause representations in us are not empirical objects. I articulate what I call the Causal Power Argument, according to which empirical objects cannot affect us because they do not have the right kind of power to cause representations. All the causal powers that empirical objects have are moving powers, and such powers can only have spatial effects. According to Kant, however, the representations that arise in us as a result of the affection of our sensibility are non-spatial. I show that this argument is put forward by Kant in a number of passages, and figures as a decisive reason for rejecting empirical affection and instead endorsing affection by the things in themselves.

It is commonly thought that on Kant’s view of action, ‘everyone always acts on maxims’. Call this the ‘descriptive reading’. This reading faces two important problems. First, the idea that people always act on maxims offends against common sense: it clashes with our ordinary ideas about human agency. Second, there are various passages in which Kant says that it is ‘rare’ and ‘admirable’ to firmly adhere to a set of basic principles that we adopt for ourselves. This article offers an alternative: the ‘normative reading’. On this reading, it is a normative ideal to adopt and act on maxims: it is one of the things we would do if our reason were fully in control of our decision-making.

While there are many points of opposition between the political philosophies of Marx and Kant, the two can greatly benefit from one another in various ways. Bringing the ideas of Marx and Kant together offers a promising way forward for each view. Most significantly, a powerful critique of capitalism can be developed from their combined thought: Kant’s political philosophy offers a robust idea of freedom to ground this critique, while Marx provides the nuanced understanding of social and political power structures under capitalism that allows this idea of freedom to be properly applied.

In this article, I assess three contemporary criticisms levelled at Kant’s theory of evil in order to evaluate whether his theory can be saved. Critics argue that Kant does not adequately distinguish between evil and mundane wrongdoing, making his use of the term ‘evil’ emotional hyperbole; by defining evil as the subordination of the moral law to self-love his analysis is seemingly overly simplistic and empirically false; and by focusing solely on the moral character of the perpetrator of evil, Kant’s theory apparently ignores the most salient aspect of evil – the suffering of victims. While I will not claim that Kant provides us with a fully adequate theory of evil, I respond to each of these criticisms and conclude that Kant’s theory can still provide significant insight into both the nature of evil and the moral psychology of perpetrators of evil.

My project is to reconsider the Kantian conception of practical reason. Some Kantians take practical reasoning to be more active than theoretical reasoning, on the grounds that it need not contend with what is there anyway, independently of its exercise. Behind that claim stands the thesis that practical reason is essentially efficacious. I accept the efficacy principle, but deny that it underwrites this conception of practical reason. My inquiry takes place against the background of recent Kantian metaethical debate — each side of which, I argue, points to issues that need to be jointly accommodated in the account of practical reason. From the constructivist, I accept the essential efficacy of practical reason; from the realist, I accept that any genuinely cognitive exercise of practical reason owes allegiance to what is there anyway, independently of its exercise. I conclude that a Kantian account of recognition respect enables us to accommodate both claims.

Kant’s notoriously unclear attempt to defend the regulative principle of systematic unity as the supreme principle of theoretical reason in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic has left its status a source of controversy. According to the dominant interpretation, the principle ought to be understood as a methodologically necessary device for extending our understanding of nature. I argue that this reading is flawed. While it may correctly affirm that the principle is normative in character, it wrongly implies that it binds with mere hypothetical necessity. I offer novel grounds for thinking that if reason’s principle is normative, then it binds agents categorically instead.

In this article, I compare Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of women and domestic labour in their mature political works, and argue that Kant offers more analytic tools for understanding the social and economic role of domestic labour than does Marx. While domestic labour becomes visible to Marx only as it is outsourced, Kant develops a clear account of the specific rules governing domestic labour in the emerging bourgeois household. Because of his commitment to the domestic realm as a core feature of the just state, however, much of Kant’s account of domestic labour should be challenged by contemporary Kantian feminists.

Kant’s accounts of moral education, appraisal respect and gratitude each depend on the assumption that human beings see and judge each other’s actions to be morally good. This assumption appears to stand in tension with the Opacity Thesis, Kant’s claim that we can never know if an action is morally good. This paper examines Kant’s discussion of moral illusion to relieve this tension. It is argued that we are required to uphold moral illusion, i.e. to represent others’ actions to be morally good (while knowing that we may be mistaken), due to the duty of beneficence for others’ moral well-being.

Both metaethicists and Kant scholars alike use the phrase ‘Kantian constructivism’ to refer to a kind of austere constructivism that holds that substantive ethical conclusions can be derived from the practical standpoint of rational agency as such. I argue that this widespread understanding of Kant is incompatible with Kant’s claim that the Categorical Imperative is a synthetic a priori practical judgement. Taking this claim about the syntheticity of the Categorical Imperative seriously implies that moral judgements follow from extra-logical but necessary principles. These principles have to do not with the laws of practical thinking but the laws of practical thought about an object. I conclude that historical Kant was not what has come to be called a ‘Kantian constructivist’.

Whilst acknowledging that there are several major differences in the approach which Kant and Marx take to political philosophy this article argues that there are also several common themes. These common themes of commitment to critique, freedom, equality, human betterment and cosmopolitanism are first highlighted. Subsequently the most marked contrasts in their approaches are examined and evaluated. Although Kant demonstrates greater political wisdom and a greater respect for law, Marx shows greater insight into social and political forces. Taken together Kant and Marx present an as yet unrealized, powerful programme for political and social improvement.

This paper gives an account of Kant’s concept of self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit), i.e. the satisfaction involved in the performance of moral action. This concept is vulnerable to an important objection: if moral action is satisfying, it might only ever be performed for the sake of this satisfaction. I explain Kant’s response to this objection and argue that it is superior to Francis Hutcheson’s response to a similar objection. I conclude by showing that two other notions of moral satisfaction in Kant’s moral philosophy, namely ‘sweet merit’ and the highest good, also avoid the objection.

The past decade has seen a sizeable increase in scholarship on Kant’s Religion. Yet, unlike the centuries of debate that inform our study of his other major works, scholarship on the Religion is still just in its infancy. As such, it is in a particularly vulnerable state where errors made now could hinder scholarship for decades to come. It is the purpose of this article to mitigate one such danger, a danger issuing from the widely assumed view that the Religion is shaped by ‘two experiments’. I will begin with a survey of the four current interpretations of the experiments, and then propose one further interpretation, one that hopefully will help dismantle this alleged ‘conundrum’ and thereby help scholarship on the Religion move beyond this early misstep.

One way of understanding Kant’s views about moral emotions is the cultivation view. On this view, emotions play a role in Kantian morality provided they are properly cultivated. I evince a sceptical position about the cultivation view. First, I show that the textual evidence in support of cultivation is ambiguous. I then provide an account of emotions in Kant’s theory that explains both his positive and negative views about them. Emotions capture our attention such that they both disrupt the mind’s composure and serve as a surrogate for reason. As such, Kant cannot recommend that we cultivate our emotions.