At least Kant thinks it's a part of the concept that gold is to be a yellow metal. He thinks that we know this a priori, and that we could not discover it to be empirically false … Is Kant right about this? (Saul Kripke)

Gold [is] … a yellow malleable ductile high density metallic element resistant to chemical reaction. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Nature considered materially is the totality of all objects of experience. (Immanuel Kant, P, Ak. 4:295)

Kant's joke. Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfound the common man that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Kant has long been known for denying that emotions constitute an adequate basis for morality or for moral motivation. But Kantian ethicists have recently been calling attention to Kant's recognition of the moral importance of emotions. Several philosophers have pointed out that, for example, Kant sees emotions as indicators of appropriate or inappropriate attitudes and as means of prompting us to perform particular morally right actions. In chapter 6 (p. 207) of Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology, however, Marcia Baron points out a passage in the Metaphysics of Morals that sits poorly with these recent, emotion-friendly interpretations of Kant.

Before surveying examples of Kant's transcendental psychologism, it may prove helpful to return to the model after which they are patterned: Hume's associationism. Contrary to what is often supposed, Hume did not confine his enquiries into representational origins to what exists in the mind prior to and independently of association. When the materials available pre-associationally are insufficient to yield an idea able to perform a certain prescribed function in human thought and reasoning, he then typically looked to the actions and affects of the associating imagination itself as the sources of the missing elements. The idea of cause and effect is the locus classicus. The pre-eminent function of this idea is to extend the mind's purview ‘beyond our senses’ and inform ‘us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel’ (A Treatise of Human Nature (THN) 74).

The history of what we now term international relations theory is as rich and as complex as any area in the history of political thought. Yet in the last few decades one particular type of political philosophy has come to be almost unambiguously associated with liberal international relations theory. The dominance of Kantian cosmopolitanism in contemporary liberal international relations theory is quite remarkable. Its position is challenged, within liberalism, only by the utilitarian cosmopolitanism of thinkers such as Peter Singer and, from outside the liberal tradition, by communitarians such as Michael Walzer or Alasdair MacIntyre. At least, this is how the debate is portrayed in the current literature. In this article I want to suggest that the biggest challenge to Kantian cosmopolitanism comes from within the neo-Kantian tradition.

If Kant had never written the section of the Rechtslehre on punishment we would still have known from the Critique of Practical Reason that he held a strongly retributive view of punishment. But it is not a view which we could have inferred from the rest of the Rechtslehre. Despite its intuitive appeal, Kant's justification of judicial punishment simply does not fit the account of right he gives in the Rechtslehre. According to this account the only justification for coercion is that it constitutes a ‘hindering of a hindrance’ to freedom. But there is no way in which this requires punishment to be retributive.

In his incisive and provocative analysis, ‘The place of punishment in Kant's Rechtslehre’, Paul Gorner discusses many aspects of Kant's position. I concentrate on his main contention:

Kant's justification of judicial punishment simply does not fit the account of right he gives in the Rechtslehre. According to this account the only justification for coercion is that it constitutes a ‘hindering of a hindrance’ to freedom. But there is no way in which this requires punishment to be retributive.