Unlike that of most liberal thinkers, Kant's theory of punishment is unabashedly retributive. For classical liberals punishment is justified only by the harms it can prevent, not by any allegedly intrinsic good served by making the guilty suffer. Here Hobbes' blunt insistence that the aim of punishment ‘is not a revenge, but terror’ is prototypical in substance, if not in style. Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Bentham and Beccaria, for all their differences, agree that punishment must look to future good rather than to avenging past wrongs. This attitude on the part of classic liberalism toward retribution is not surprising, given its association with the kind of theocratic politics liberalism arose to combat.

In this article, I want to argue that scepticism for Kant must be seen in ancient and not just modern terms, and that if we take this into account we will need to take a different view of Kant's response to Hume from the one that is standardly presented in the literature. This standard view has been put forward recently by Paul Guyer, and it is therefore his view that I want to look at in some detail, and to try to correct.

Kant’s theory of citizenship replaces the French revolutionary triptych of liberty, equality and fraternity with freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit) and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). The interpretative question is what the third attribute adds to the first two: what does self-sufficiency add to free consent by juridical equals? This article argues that Selbständigkeit adds the idea of interdependent independence: the independent possession and use of citizens’ interdependent rightful powers. Kant thinks of the modern state as an organism whose members are agents possessed of rightful (productive) powers, whose interdependent mode of exercise independently of unilateral permission matters for right. The empirical form of that ideal, according to Kant, is a republic of independent commodity producers. I will show that this reading of Selbständigkeit can consistently explain Kant’s disenfranchisement of women, wage labourers and landless farmers; that it offers a robust alternative to influential republican, libertarian and proprietarian interpretations of the Kantian state; and that it can buttress an original account of community as productive interdependence.

I demonstrate that the pre-Critical Kant is essentialist and intellectualist about the relational properties of substances. That is to say, God can choose whether or not to create a substance, and whether or not to connect this substance with other substances, so as to create a world: but God cannot choose what the nature of the relational properties is, once the substance is created and connected. The divine will is constrained by the essences of substances. Nonetheless, Kant considers that essences depend upon God, in that they depend upon the divine intellect. I conclude by gesturing towards some possible implications of this interpretation, when considering the role that might be played by God – both historically and conceptually – in relation to the notion of ‘laws of nature’, and when understanding Kant's transcendental idealism and his Critical conception of freedom.

For several decades, Kant scholars, inspired by the Groundwork false-promising example, have constructed consent-based criteria for using another merely as a means. Unfortunately, these consent-based accounts produce assessments that are both counter-intuitive and un-Kantian in relatively simple cases. This article investigates why these consent-based accounts fail and offers an alternative. The Groundwork false-promising example has encouraged a problematically narrow understanding of the conditions for using another merely as a means in virtue of the fact that the example involves a consent-sensitive duty. This article demonstrates that the scope of the prohibition on using another merely as a means includes both consent-sensitive and consent-insensitive duties and offers a duty-based account that reflects this.

In this essay I argue that Kant remained committed to the necessity and fundamental importance of education throughout his career. Like Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–90), Kant holds that a ‘total transformation’ of schools is necessary, and he holds this view not only in the 1770s but in his later years as well. In building my case I try to refute two recent opposing interpretations – Reinhard Brandt’s position that Kant’s early ‘education enthusiasm’ was later replaced by a politics enthusiasm, and Manfred Kuehn’s view that the increasing importance of autonomy in Kant’s mature ethics leads him to de-emphasize education.

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.

There has been a groundswell of interest in the account of modality that Kant sets forth in his pre-Critical Only Possible Argument. Andrew Chignell's reconstruction of Kant's theistic argument in terms of what he calls ‘real harmony’ has a prima facie advantage in that it appears to be able to block the plurality objection (namely, that even if every modal fact presupposes some ground, this does not entail that all modal facts share the same ground). I argue that it is both textually and philosophically problematic to interpret Kant's argument in terms of real harmony. Then, I set forth an alternative response to the plurality objection which does not require the adoption of the problematic notion of real harmony. Instead, I argue that the objection can be overcome by observing that the argument seeks to ground modal facts as a totality and that, according to Kant, such relations can be accounted for only by their schematization in a single intellect.

In recent times, a number of authors have systematically criticized Kant's 1768 ‘proof’ of the reality of absolute space. Peter Remnant may have been the first do to so, but many others have since joined him, either challenging the argument itself or showing how relationist conceptions of space can account for incongruent counterparts just as well as absolutist conceptions. In fact, Kant himself abandoned his main conclusion soon after publication, favouring instead the doctrine of transcendental idealism. I do not see how the 1768 proof can be saved, nor will I defend it here. However, in dismissing it some critics seem to have gone too far, and either failed to fully acknowledge Kant's contribution, or attributed to him thoughts he is unlikely to have had. Kant's treatment of incongruent counterparts in his Dissertation of 1770 has also met strong opposition. In particular, his claim that the difference between a pair of incongruent counterparts cannot be apprehended by means of concepts alone has been taken to be a mathematical falsehood. Indeed, incongruent counterparts have been shown to be mathematically distinguishable, with no intuitions needed for that purpose.

Kant is categorical about the relation between virtue and the controlling of inclinations:

Since virtue is based on inner freedom it contains a positive command to a human being, namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his reason's control and so to rule over himself. (MS, 6: 410)

Virtue presupposes apathy, in the sense of absence of affects. Kant revives the stoic ideal of tranquilitas as a necessary condition for virtue: ‘The true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind’ (MS, 6: 409). In the Anthropology and the Doctrine of Virtue, apathy is taken in the sense of freedom from affects. In these texts, Kant maintains that we must strive toward a state in which affects are absent.

Marx holds that capitalism is exploitative, but not unjust. Kant crafted a theory of right that explains why human beings are treated unjustly when the social system deprives them of the conditions of a free life. This essay attempts to relate Kant’s and Marx’s views to one another and to the capitalist social system, which these two thinkers studied at different stages of development. The economic and social theories of Fichte and Hegel are also employed to help make sense of the points of agreement and of disagreement between Kant and Marx concerning the ways modern capitalism deprives workers of freedom and whether this deprivation should be condemned as unjust.

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.

This article examines Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of religion in its relation to human emancipation. It highlights some important affinities in their accounts of human nature and their critique of religious authority including: the emphasis on freedom as distinguishing human beings from other species, the relation between moral and political progress, the critique of revealed religion, the role of political community and the importance of ethical community to achieve moral emancipation.

In this article I critically engage some of the philosophical ideas Kleingeld presents in Kant and Cosmopolitanism, namely patriotism, poverty and global justice. Against Kleingeld, I propose, first, that perhaps democracy is less important and affectionate love more so to both Kant himself as well as to an account that can successfully refute a Bernard Williams style ‘one-thought-too-many’ objection to Kantian patriotism; second, that guaranteeing unconditional poverty relief for all its citizens is constitutive of the minimally just state for Kant; and, third, that there seem to be more disanalogies between the domestic and the global public authorities in Kant's account of right than Kleingeld's interpretation allows for.

Kant’s conception of conscience has been relatively neglected by Kant scholars and the secondary literature offers no explanation of whether (and if so, how) his treatments of conscience fit together. To achieve a fuller understanding of Kant’s general position on conscience, I question the widespread assumption that conscience is a feeling and account for the nature of conscience and its multiple functions. On my reading, conscience is ‘the internal judge’ whose verdict triggers certain emotional reactions. Through the moral self-evaluative activities of this inner judge, we come to know our character better. In the judgements of conscience, we take account of various psychological conditions while judging both whether these conditions stand in the way of our establishing moral maxims and whether we hold ourselves accountable for our actions. By arousing certain feelings, these judgements also move us to moral action.

Trendelenburg argued that Kant's arguments in support of transcendental idealism ignored the possibility that space and time are both ideal and real. Recently, Graham Bird has claimed that Trendelenburg (unlike his contemporary Kuno Fischer) misrepresented Kant, confusing two senses of ‘subjective/objective’. I defend Trendelenburg's ‘neglected alternative’: the ideas of space and time, as a priori and necessary, are ideal, but this does not exclude their validity in the noumenal realm. This undermines transcendental idealism. Bird's attempt to show that the Analytic considers, but rejects, the alternative fails: an epistemological reading makes Kant accept the alternative, while an ontological reading makes him incoherent. As I demonstrate, Trendelenburg acknowledged the ambiguity of ‘subjective/objective’, focusing on the transcendental, not the empirical sense. Unlike Fischer, Bird denies Kant's commitment to things-in-themselves in favour of a descriptivist, non-ontological reading of transcendental idealism as an inventory of ‘immanent experience’. But neither Bird's descriptivism, nor Fischer's commitment to things-in-themselves, answers Trendelenburg's sceptical worry about transcendental idealism.

The notion of radical evil plays a more important role in Kant's moral theory than is typically recognized. In Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason, radical evil is both an innate propensity and a morally imputable act – a paradoxical status that has prompted commentators to reject it as inconsistent with the rest of Kant's moral theory. In contrast, I argue that the notion of radical evil accounts for the beginning of moral responsibility in Kant's theory, since the act of attributing radical evil to one's freedom is an inauguration into the autonomous stance.

People talk about rats deserting a sinking ship, but they don't usually ask where the rats go. Perhaps this is only because the answer is so obvious: of course, most of the rats climb aboard the sounder ships, the ships that ride high in the water despite being laden with rich cargoes of cheese and grain and other things rats love, the ships that bring prosperity to ports like eighteenth-century Königsberg and firms such as Green & Motherby. By making the insulting comparison - as I am in the course of doing – between us Kant scholars and a horde of noxious vermin, my more or less transparent aim is to mitigate, or at least to distract attention from, the collective immodesty of what I am saying about us. For my point is that, in the past half-century or so, Kant studies has become a very prosperous ship indeed. Its success has even been the chief thing that has buoyed all its sister ships in the fleet of modern philosophy, most of which are also doing very well.

The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the immediate philosophical aftermath of Kant's Inaugural Dissertation. I will try to show what Kant himself took to be the problems left unsettled in the dissertation, and how he tried to deal with them. At the end of the paper, I will briefly sketch how he may have proceeded after the famous letter to Marcus Herz of 1772, and what path he would have had to take to recognize the need for a transcendental deduction.