This paper examines reflective judgement as a crucial aspect of the power of judgement in Kant’s third Critique. Following Ginsborg’s normative-regulative interpretation, it demonstrates how aesthetics and teleology emerge from a single principle of reflection, which takes the form of contingent contingency, or possible lawfulness, in both. This reading establishes a parallel between common sense and the intuitive intellect, and allows one to preserve the normative dimension of Kant’s work while making Kant’s more speculative legacy continuous with it.

The commentators have focused on my interpretations of responses to Kant’s moral philosophy by K. L. Reinhold, Friedrich Nietzsche, and several of the British Idealists, including R. G. Collingwood and John Rawls. I argue that, contrary to Reinhold, Kant’s conception of freedom does include the source of moral normativity in its distinction between Wille and Willkühr; that, in contrast to Nietzsche’s ‘exceptionalist perfectionism’, Kant’s insistence upon the equal right to freedom of all remains a defensible ideal; that Collingwood underestimated the subtlety of Kant’s moral philosophy on a number of crucial issues and, in particular, failed to recognise the importance of Kant’s version of the traditional distinction between perfect and imperfect duties; and that in her critique of both Kant and Rawls, Catherine Wilson demands from their political philosophy what, on their accounts, should be expected only from the other half of moral philosophy, namely ethics – again, primarily the domain of imperfect duty.

Kant frequently states that ‘appearances’ (Erscheinungen) are mere ‘representations’ (Vorstellungen), a claim we can call AR. AR is typically understood as a substantive thesis. This paper argues for a claim that has not been explored at length elsewhere: that AR is an analytic truth, so it does not imply phenomenalism and can be affirmed by a moderate realist reader. I argue that appearances are mental contents directed towards things. Hence, appearances are not themselves the things our minds represent, which exist outside of minds. This reading permits us to accept insights from phenomenalists about Kant’s philosophy of mind, while saving the realists’ metaphysics.

Although we value Guyer’s particular reading of British Idealist works, we nonetheless consider that his largely textualist-focused approach narrows both the scope and ultimate comprehension of Idealist ethics, particularly in relation to Kant. We consider that Guyer’s analysis misses the depth of their moral understanding. Such Idealist argumentation embodies a rich blending of historical, sociological, political, and evolutionary theory, which was employed consistently in their ethical reflections. To miss this contextual point can make many of their writings almost unintelligible. Thus, we consider it of central importance to understand British Idealist moral philosophy within this much broader philosophical frame.

Paul Guyer has shown us how misguided some early criticisms of Kant were, as well as how influential Kant’s views have been on contemporary moral philosophy. Here, I focus on Guyer’s summary judgements of what is of enduring value in Kantian moral philosophy. At issue are the claims that Kantian morality is affirmative of, rather than restrictive on human energy; that the conjunction of universal happiness and universal virtue, the summum bonum, was an important goal for Kant, able to guide individual and collective action; and that the enhancement of freedom, as Kant conceived it, is related to the forms of liberation that characterize contemporary conceptions of social justice and social progress. Such interpretations appear to take Kant in directions he would not himself have wanted to go.

This paper analyses a dispute that flared up in the 1790s about whether Kant’s moral theory leaves room for the possibility of imputable wrongdoing. Contra Paul Guyer’s reading, I argue this was not merely a matter of mutual misunderstanding but reflected its participants’ varying perceptions of an arguably genuine dilemma for Kantian ethics: that what he needs to say to explain how imputable action contrary to duty is possible within his framework is prima facie incompatible with what he needs to say to establish that the moral law is categorically binding. In addition to presenting my interpretation of the controversy, I offer a suggestion as to how Kant might be able to escape the dilemma and further suggest we have good reason to think that Kant himself was both aware of the danger and endorsed the proffered solution.

Nietzsche repeatedly claims that Kant’s supreme moral principle, the categorical imperative, is expressive of a kind of slave morality. Paul Guyer, however, argues that a proper understanding of Kant’s conception of free agency within the boundaries of the categorical imperative reveals that Nietzsche’s criticism of slavishness misses its mark. According to Guyer, Kant, just as much as Nietzsche, rejects slavish conceptions of morality insofar as they undermine the value of self-legislation in determining ends. This paper contends that Nietzsche may in fact have a subtler conception of the categorical imperative’s slavishness in terms of the (un)realisability of our ends, which could allow his criticisms to land, and that Kantians will be responsive to.

Those who have engaged with the moral and political thought of Richard Price have often commented on the striking similarities with Kant. Price, as much a polymath as he was a philosopher, was nevertheless a very different intellectual figure, widely admired at the time in Europe and America as a radical, but sporadic rather than systematic in his writing. This paper will consider his thinking holistically, in particular drawing on recent research on his economic commentaries and work on insurance. This expositional work around Price’s nascent political economy lays the basis for defending his positioning as a proto-socialist thinker – whose commitments also fit with the key tenets of 18th-century Left-Kantianism. It is argued that these claims, and his extant anti-capitalist thought, make Price an important and intriguing foil against which to consider Kant’s own leftist credentials, and for expanding the debate around the latter’s political economy and Left-Kantianism more generally.

The content of Kant’s Enlightenment text has received much critical reception, but the very stance Kant takes as its author has been largely ignored. Similarly, there has been much critical discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in terms of the theses they (purportedly) endorse, while their authorial voice has mostly received either no attention or been criticised as problematically rhetorical. In this paper, I take a different approach, focusing on the two respective writerly stances. I suggest that Kant’s text harbours an implicit epistemic authoritarianism, in contrast to the self-therapeutic stance Adorno and Horkheimer’s text exemplifies.

Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) has often been criticised for its idealism. I discuss Lukács’s critique of reification in light of these charges, identifying two different idealist vocabularies of (neo-)Kantian and Hegelian origin, respectively. I show that the function of the former is critical: refracting Marx’s analysis of social form through a Kantian form/content distinction allows Lukács to critique capitalism as the domination of form over content. Lukács’s Hegelian leanings are more problematic, however, as they constrain his own insights into the conditioned and contingent character of political practice and history.

This paper explores and criticizes Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist reading of Kant.

After a brief overview of Cassirer’s symbolic form argument, the discussion turns to one question: does Cassirer offer a lucid normative position in politics? My core argument is that he does not. Three arguments providing potential insights into his moral and political sensibilities are contested: the first concerns his The Myth of the State text; the second, the Bildung tradition; and third, his arguments on the contract and natural rights tradition. The latter argument, in particular, underpins the claim that Cassirer was sympathetic to liberalism. The concept of left-Kantianism is then examined in the context of the German socialist tradition.

Although not explicitly a socialist, in his political philosophy Kant provides arguments that can be deployed by socialists to argue for radically different forms of social and economic organisation. In this article I contrast Karl Marx’s criticism of capitalist property relations with the general theory of property which Kant outlines in his Doctrine of Right. I demonstrate that Kant’s concept of property provides a sounder ethical basis for the regulating and reform of capitalist economic organisations than Marx’s historical materialist view of economic and social development. Kant’s theory of property relations may fall short of Marx’s in terms of the sociological and historical insights it affords but Kant’s theory more than makes up for this is with its greater moral and political astuteness.

At the turn of the twentieth century, few philosophical ideas in Marx’s work gained as much attention as his account of history. Orthodox Marxists made it their programme to closely follow Marx’s development thesis, which posits that the productive forces determine the course of history. The Austromarxist Max Adler (1873–1937), influenced by neo-Kantianism, took more liberties in interpreting – or, perhaps more accurately, ‘reinventing’ – the law of history in practical terms. This article reconstructs Adler’s neo-Kantian ‘reinvention’ of Marx’s account of history. According to Adler, the notion of ‘necessity’ that underpins critical judgements is not grounded in the regularity of history but rather in the moral judgements we make about how history should develop. More specifically, I defend two claims. First, by interpreting human progress as a possibility that presents itself as a necessity from the standpoint of practical rationality, I show that Adler laid the foundation for a critique of the Marxist development thesis that only later gained traction. Second, while Marxists may fear that Kantian formalism cannot address misguided ideological beliefs, I argue that Adler’s neo-Kantian formalism is robustly anti-ideological, emphasising the ideology-emancipating transformation we undergo when we recognise exploitative structures.