This paper explores the ‘puzzle of the nomads’ in the Metaphysics of Morals: the apparent tension between Kant’s argument about the duty to leave the state of nature and his insistence that European colonizers cannot permissibly force nomads to enter a civil union. Arguing that the puzzle is twofold, I suggest that the answer lies in the relationship between the state and territory in Kant’s work. After showing the shortcomings of an approach which suggests that nomadic peoples cannot enter the civil state without settling, I defend an alternative interpretation, which conceives the territoriality of the state as contingent.

Herder is often recognised as the intellectual originator of a tradition that stresses that language assimilation is a wrong. In what follows, I argue that that the way in which he has influenced that tradition is often misunderstood. Herder’s originality does not lie in his development of ‘linguistic constitutivism’ – the view that language plays a constitutive role in human cognition. Herder surely endorsed linguistic constitutivism, but so did earlier theorists, like Condillac, as well as French revolutionary theorists such as l’Abbé Grégoire. The original move that Herder made, I argue, is to add a normative, recognitionalist argument to the constitutive argument, and to intertwine the two. It is his constitutive recognitionalism that makes him the trailblazer of a new tradition.

According to the ‘rigorist’ interpretation, the imperfect duty of (e.g.) beneficence does not permit agents to fail to perform any beneficent act that is available to the agent in order to pursue some nonmoral interest, whereas on the latitudinal interpretation, agents are permitted to fail to do so. I defend the latitudinal interpretation by criticising recent defences of rigorism offered by Jens Timmermann and Pauline Kleingeld, arguing that they conflict with important features of Kant’s moral theory, and that the latitudinal interpretation better coheres with Kant’s overall view.

Although scholars agree that Fichte’s earliest political writings are Kantian, they contain a theory of individual emancipation through a culture of perfection that is foreign to Kant’s Doctrine of Right. I argue that Fichte based his theory on Kant’s moral duty and therefore derived the conclusion that individual morality should be the constitution’s aim. As a result, principles of right are not limited to securing relations of external freedom among equals but concerned with creating a society of autonomous individuals. Reaching that end goes through emancipation both from the oppression of sensibility over rationality and from the false consciousness that upholds voluntary servitude to unjust regimes. As an alternative Kantian path, Fichte provides philosophical grounding for movements seeking political emancipation through cultural awakening.

In this article, I propose a Kantian framework for moral trust – trust in another person to only act with us in morally permissible ways. First, I derive an understanding of trustworthiness from Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. I argue that trustworthiness embodies a moral imperative, guiding us to act in ways that are reliable and recognizable as conducive to engaging in trusting relations. However, this alone is not enough, as it does not provide a means to assess whether someone is truly committed to the moral law and thus morally trustworthy. Therefore, in the second part, I explore a basis for assessing their moral conduct found in a local version of the Kingdom of Ends: given an ideal or archetype of a morally perfect interpersonal relationship, an archetype of the morally trustworthy agent allows us to comparatively assess the moral disposition of fellow agents.

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.

Kant argues that civic freedom amounts to being subject to laws to which citizens could have assented. Fichte conversely argues that personal freedom is only fully realized in a state of civil freedom and that citizens are only legitimately ruled by laws to which they have explicitly agreed. This paper shows how their differing accounts are rooted in a deeper disagreement about the relationship between transcendental and empirical freedom and the role empirical citizens’ assent (Beistimmung) plays in justifying civil legislation. The confrontation also shows why reading Kant as requiring citizens’ active assent may be problematic.

The pre-Critical Kant holds that God is the ground of the possibility of all predicates. Yet it is not clear how God does this. A common approach is to distinguish between fundamental predicates, which God grounds directly by instantiating them, and derivative predicates, which God grounds indirectly. This essay argues that we should not distinguish between two sorts of predicates, some grounded directly and some grounded indirectly. We should distinguish between two sorts of grounding relations. As I will show, this dualism about grounding is both justified by the text and gives a satisfactory solution to the ‘how’ question.

A rightful condition, according to Kant, requires both a law to limit the freedom of each and a ruler to enforce that limit, a ruler who cannot himself be subject to the law’s enforcement without ceasing to perform his primary function. Kant placed his hopes, circa 1784, in a future ruler who combined worldly experience, a ‘correct conception’ of a possible constitution, and, above all, the good will to accept it. Subsequent historical events, along with the ‘completion’ in 1790 of Kant’s own critical system, suggested a new basis for confidence in civil progress no longer ultimately dependent on the ‘good will’ of rulers, while also making new demands on citizens themselves. I share the view of many others that Kant came to prefer the people’s actual consent to the laws over the merely hypothetical consent that he endorsed in the works of the mid-1780s. My reading of the Metaphysics of Morals Part One differs in treating the work not only as a theoretical treatise but also, and necessarily, a practical intervention in historical time. The resulting reading yields an internally coherent argument favouring representative democracy of a peculiar kind – one whose ‘organic’ character has not been fully appreciated.

Detailed analysis of the expression ‘things in general and in themselves’ reveals two further uses of ‘noumenon’ (and ‘thing in itself’) in addition to the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ senses distinguished by Kant himself. It follows (pace various ‘reductive’ interpretations) that Kant’s transcendental distinction comprises four different contrasts. On a new resolution of the long-running ‘one or two objects?’ dispute, there follows a complete re-interpretation of Kant’s transcendental distinction as a meta-metaphysical thought experiment. It has the ‘metaphysical density’ necessary to forestall charges of ‘innocuousness’ without giving purchase to the well-known objections that have dogged Kant’s transcendental distinction from its inception.

This article provides a new reconstruction and evaluation of Kant’s argument in §IX of the second Critique’s Dialectic. Kant argues that our cognitive faculties are wisely adapted to our practical vocation since their failure to supply theoretical knowledge of God and the immortal soul is a condition of possibility for the highest good. This new reconstruction improves upon past efforts by greater fidelity to the form and content of Kant’s argument. I show that evaluating Kant’s argument requires settling various other issues in the interpretation of his moral philosophy, e.g. his account of moral psychology, motivation, education, and development.

This article uses Böckenförde’s dictum and Williams’s paradox of liberalism as a framework to critically analyse the current theoretical literature on democratic regression and rule of law backsliding in liberal democracies. It argues that the current literature is too strongly focused on (a) the problem of militant democracy (thereby neglecting militant constitutionalism) and (b) on the formal institutional safeguards that are needed to make liberal democracies resilient (thereby partially neglecting the need for a public ethos). In addition, it claims that such an ethos not only implies a democratic attitude but also a patriotic or constitutional attitude.

This paper focuses on the critical relation of reason and language in the work of Kant and Hamann. The biographical and intellectual relationship between Kant and Hamann is briefly outlined. The focus then shifts to Hamann’s essay ‘The Metacritique on the Purism of Reason’. The central themes of Hamann’s essay are unpacked. The discussion then considers the central, if ambiguous, role played by Hume in the whole Kant/Hamann debate. The discussion then moves to Hamann’s critique of transcendental idealism and finally to Kant and the question of language.

Kant’s aim in the Transcendental Deduction is to prove that the a priori categories of the understanding necessarily apply to objects of experience. He claims that he will do this simply by explaining how they could so apply. But the idea that a mere explanation of this possibility should provide a defence of the categories’ actual (let alone necessary) applicability is surprising. We argue that it can be understood by attending to the source of the scepticism that the Critique’s Analytic is supposed to overcome: Hume’s inability to explain causal knowledge in the Enquiry.

This article examines Immanuel Kant’s evolving ideas on race and inheritance, focusing on his early lectures on physical geography. It highlights his engagement with contemporary debates on physiological defects and adaptation. The notes of Georg Hesse, a student of Kant, are analysed to show how Kant’s ideas matured before his first published essay on race in 1775. The article also contextualizes Kant’s relationship with the works of Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Henry Baker, showing how their studies on hereditary anomalies influenced Kant’s ideas. Finally, it sheds light on how Kant navigated the challenges of explaining race and inheritance, balancing environmental and hereditary factors in his conceptualization of human variation.