Commentators have recently shown that Kant’s view of moral examples is more complex than what appears in the Groundwork. Throughout his works, Kant presents explicit reasons for and against the use of moral examples. Reconciling these opposing attitudes has proven difficult. Lacking a satisfactory account of how Kant thinks we should engage with and learn from moral examples, the difficulty has remained. In this paper, I construct and defend an account that resolves the prima facie inconsistency by viewing moral examples as analogous to scientific models, thus leading to ‘new’ and plausible perspectives on recent debates in Kant scholarship.

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.

This paper argues that Kant’s theory of truth in the first Critique offers a qualified correspondence account that integrates key insights from both coherence and correspondence theories of truth. By distinguishing between formal and material conditions of truth, Kant shows that truth cannot be defined in real terms. The paper identifies two fundamental requirements any theory of truth must meet – objectivity and epistemic accessibility. It shows how rationalism fails to fulfil them, while Kant’s transcendental idealism transforms the correspondence relation into an epistemic one. In doing so, Kant provides a moderate realist account of truth that avoids both scepticism and dogmatism.

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.

Kant’s concept of perpetual peace, outlined in Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), has been influential in shaping ideas for lasting global peace. This paper examines how perpetual peace fits into Kant’s broader philosophy, beyond its legal aspects. It contrasts Kant’s highest good with perpetual peace as the highest political good, critiques readings that conflate ethical and political goods, and offers an alternative interpretation based on Kant’s teleology. The paper concludes by addressing potential objections to this approach, aiming to present a more comprehensive understanding of perpetual peace within Kant’s legal and moral philosophy.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant defines the relation of harmony between the faculties as constituted by the freedom of the imagination and the lawfulness of the understanding. The freedom of the imagination, however, has been broadly understood as directed towards the cognitive needs of the understanding. I propose a novel interpretation, based on Kant’s statements in the General Remark: freedom should be understood as signifying an activity emanating from imagination’s own spontaneity, directed towards the satisfaction of imagination’s own needs, and is revealed through a distinctive phenomenology in the apprehension of the beautiful forms of nature.

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.

In this paper, I attempt to interpret Kant’s early reported thesis that the historical practice of senicide (i.e., killing the elderly) among certain Inuit communities constituted a ‘loving service’ and was ‘to some degree justified’ insofar as it was carried out to prevent one’s parents from facing a ‘more ignominious death’. On my interpretation, Kant’s verdict on Inuit senicide sheds new light on a core idea within his mature ethics – that persons are obligated to preserve themselves for as long as they remain a subject of duty. As I argue, Kant’s verdict implies that those subject to senicide were no longer bound by the duty of self-preservation insofar as they were no longer able to live as persons with inviolable moral dignity. If my argument holds, this invites further exploration of the relationship between Kant’s notion of dignity and the duty of self-preservation in the broader context of end-of-life decision-making.

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.

The foundation of the Kantian theory of right is the one innate right to freedom. Here, I offer a comprehensive philosophical comparison between Kantian rightful freedom and the conception of freedom as negative liberty or non-interference, a hugely influential view in terms of which Kantian rightful freedom is often understood. This fruitful comparison clarifies the fundamental differences between the two views, emphasizing the resources the Kantian approach offers for contributing to contemporary debates on freedom as a distinctive rights-based republican view. This Kantian perspective also offers a useful lens for critiquing negative-liberty-based views, revealing a dilemma they face.

We argue that scholars involved in debates on Kant’s writings on race and racism are deeply entangled with a tacit methodological debate about the use of a ‘priority principle’. We identify three variants of the priority principle in Kant scholarship. To illustrate, we focus on interpretations of Kant’s Physical Geography. The methodological approaches we analyse offer three opposite and mutually exclusive interpretative recommendations. We articulate a taxonomy of methods commonly employed and suggest that focusing on individual texts reveals value-laden methodological assumptions guiding the debate. To address substantive issues surrounding Kant’s raciology, we suggest commentators should carefully justify their methodological choices.

This paper argues that, far from supporting, an oft-cited passage of the Phenomena and Noumena chapter (A247/B303) instead belies, Allison’s influential thesis that Kant’s transcendental idealism is not an ‘alternative ontology’ but a methodological or meta-epistemological ‘alternative to ontology’ that is devoid of specific metaphysical content. Following a programmatic sketch of Kant’s system of principles as a regional ontology of nature, it is argued that the precise wording and original punctuation of that passage suggest that the transcendentally realist ontologies of the past are to ‘give way’ to just such an immanent ontology of the world of outer experience.

This paper explores the moral import of Kant’s theory of the beautiful in relation to his systematic aim of bridging the gulf between nature and freedom. The aim is to preserve the importance of the beautiful – whether natural or artistic – while also accounting for Kant’s emphasis on the pre-eminence of natural beauty. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between intellectual and empirical interest in the beautiful, this paper argues that only natural beauty enables a transition to the supersensible both within the subject and externally. It concludes by examining whether intellectual interest in natural beauty might be regarded as a duty.