This paper focuses on a single question that highlights some of the most puzzling aspects of Kant’s explanation of the duty of moral self-perfection. What kinds of activity count as striving for purity in one’s disposition to duty, or strength of will? I argue that a dominant strand of Kant’s approach to moral striving does not fit familiar models of striving. I seek to address this problem in a way that avoids the flaws of synchronic and atomistic approaches to moral self-discipline by developing an account of Kantian moral striving as an ongoing contemplative activity complexly engaged with multiple forms of self-knowledge.

Kant’s notes known as Remarks in the ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime’ reveal a deep concern with the way in which the human drives to equality and unity lead inevitably to a drive for honour and its attendant delusions. He developed his thinking about these problems in the context of his reading of Rousseau. In his published Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant tries to overcome the influence of the drive for honour by appealing to a metaphysics that is critical of itself. The problem is how to distinguish what is grounded in reason when that reason is so easily influenced by others.

It has been argued that Kant’s practical philosophy cannot allow for degrees of responsibility for one’s actions. However, it would be uncompromising to allow for only two possibilities: either full responsibility or none. Moreover, in the Metaphysics of Morals Kant himself claims that there can be degrees of responsibility, depending on the magnitude of the obstacles that have to be overcome when acting. I will show that this claim is consistent with Kant’s theory as a whole and thereby make transparent how degrees of responsibility are possible for Kant. The solution is based on the distinction between two senses of responsibility: taking oneself to be an accountable person is an all-or-nothing affair, whereas praise- or blameworthiness for a particular action can still be a matter of degree.

While scholars are slowly coming to realize that Kant’s moral philosophy has a distinctive theory of moral education, the import of religion in such education is generally neglected or even denied. This essay argues that Kant’s reflections on religion in parts II and III of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason interpret religion specifically as one aspect of moral education, namely moral ascetics. After first clearly distinguishing between a cognitive and a conative aspect of moral education, I show how certain historical religious practices serve to provide the conative aspect of moral education. Kant defines this aspect of moral education as practices that render the human agent ‘valiant and cheerful in fulfilling his duties’ (MS, 6: 484). By this it is meant that certain practices can inspire moral interests either by justifying rational hope in living up to a certain standard of moral perfection (Christology) or by endeavouring to unite human beings in a universal, invisible ethical community that inspires cooperation rather than adversity (ecclesiology).

I give an argument against nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s First Critique, according to which one can enjoy a Kantian intuition without possessing any concepts, and present an alternative reading. The argument is that nonconceptualist readings are forced to construe the Transcendental Deduction in one of three ways, none of which is acceptable: The Deduction is seen either (i) as inconsistent with the Transcendental Aesthetic; or (ii) as addressing a question of fact rather than a question of legitimacy; or (iii) as articulating a position that Kant himself criticizes as a form of scepticism. Consideration of the third alternative, in particular, shows that a more promising construal of the Deduction must be based on a different interpretation of Kant’s claim that intuitions and concepts constitute two distinct kinds of representation than is assumed by proponents of nonconceptualist readings. I present such an interpretation and outline the alternative reading of the Deduction that results.

Kant famously claims that the table of the categories of freedom does not require explanation, ‘since it is intelligible enough of itself’ (Critique of Practical Reason 5: 67). Kant interpreters have been baffled by this claim, and the disagreement among the increasing number of studies in more recent years suggests that the table is not as straightforward as Kant took it to be. In this article I want to show that a coherent interpretation of the table depends essentially on a clarification of what have been taken to be three fundamental ambiguities in Kant’s presentation of the table. This assumption about ambiguities in Kant’s text is, I argue, rooted in a hybrid conception of practical rationality assumed by his interpreters. I believe the task of disambiguating the table in all three cases can be completed. But it will require spelling out Kant’s moral cognitivism in such a way that he emerges as holding what I will call a unitary account of practical rationality.

The article defends three claims regarding the relation between the different formulas of the categorical imperative. (1) On its prevailing reading, FUL gives different moral guidance than FH; left answered, this problem is an argument for adopting a competing perspective on FUL. (2) The prohibitions and commands of the formulas should be taken to be extensionally the same; but FKE adds a dimension missing from the others, gained by uniting their perspectives, namely, bringing the variety of moral laws into systematic unity. (3) The grammatically ambiguous phrase in GMS, 4: 436.9–10 claims that FA alone unites the other formulas in itself.

In the interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, a textual stalemate between two camps has evolved: two-world interpretations regard things in themselves and appearances as two numerically distinct entities, whereas two-aspect interpretations take this distinction as one between two aspects of the same thing. I try to develop an account which can overcome this dispute. On the one hand, things in themselves are numerically distinct from appearances, but on the other hand, things in themselves can be regarded as they exist in themselves and as they appear. This reveals a mutual entailment of both accounts. Finally, I suggest that this approach most naturally leads to a kind of ‘phenomenalism’, but of a sort not normally attributed to Kant.

Kant’s enigmatic term Gesinnung baffles many readers of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. This study clarifies the notion in Kant’s theories of both general moral decision-making and specifically religious conversion. It is argued that Kantian Gesinnung is volitional, referring to a person’s principle-based choice to live a certain way. More specifically, interpreted as principled ‘conviction’, Kantian Gesinnung is a religiously manifested, moral form of Überzeugung (‘convincing’). This is confirmed by a detailed analysis of the 169 occurrences of Gesinnung and cognate words in Religion. It contrasts with what is suggested by translating Gesinnung as ‘disposition’, which reinforces a tendency to interpret the notion more metaphysically, and also with Pluhar’s translation as ‘attitude’, which has too strongly psychological connotations.

I argue for a novel, non-subjectivist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Kant’s idealism is often interpreted as specifying how we must experience objects or how objects must appear to us. I argue to the contrary by appealing to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. Kant’s Deduction is the proof that the categories are not merely subjectively necessary conditions we need for our cognition, but objectively valid conditions necessary for objects to be appearances. My interpretation centres on two claims. First, Kant’s method of self-knowledge consists in his determining what makes our cognitive faculty finite in contrast to God’s infinite cognitive faculty. Second, Kant’s limitation of our knowledge to appearances consists in his developing an account according to which appearances and our finite cognitive faculty are conceived of in terms of each other and in contrast to noumena in the positive sense and God’s infinite cognitive faculty.

There are several senses in which Kant’s moral law is independent of sensibility. This paper is devoted mainly to Kant’s account of ‘physical conditions independence’, or the idea that the moral law can compel us to pursue ends that might be impossible to realize empirically. Since this idea has received little attention from commentators, this paper addresses both its textual basis in Kant’s writings and its overall philosophical viability.

While Kant’s political writings employ a teleological language, the exact benefit of such language to his politics is far from clear. Against recent interpretations of Kant’s political thought, which downplay or dismiss the role of teleology, I restore Zweckmässigkeit to its place in Kant’s politics as a theoretically and practically useful material principle, and show that a teleological perspective complements the perspective stipulated by the formal principle of Recht. By means of a systematic reconstruction of what I call ‘political Zweckmässigkeit’, we gain a fuller portrayal of and a valuable insight into Kant’s political thought.

Kant insists that the use of concepts must be subject to empirical conditions if they are to have objective validity. This article analyses Kant’s principle of objective validity, focusing particularly on its application to transcendental concepts such as those of sensibility, understanding and transcendental apperception. It distinguishes between two orders of objective validity, based on Kant’s distinction between empirical and transcendental truths. Since transcendental concepts are pure concepts without spatio-temporal content, their objective validity is of the same second-order kind as that of unschematized categories. This characteristic of transcendental concepts implies that the cognitive powers picked out by them are not particular psychological mechanisms, but rather abstract functional structures. Transcendental concepts owe their objective validity to the realizability of the functional structures by empirical cognizers like humans. This relation in turn helps to explain the nature of transcendental truths.

In Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account, Jeanine Grenberg argues for the centrality to Kant’s ethics of the experience of the feeling of moral constraint, especially as that feeling is described in Kant’s fact of reason argument. She criticizes interpretations of the fact of reason that interpret it as primarily a certain kind of act. I defend my version of an act-based interpretation against Grenberg’s criticisms, flesh out the Fichtean background of that interpretation and raise some further questions about Grenberg’s account.

This paper offers an analysis of Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime with reference to his claim that ‘Nature is thus sublime in those of its appearances the intuition of which brings with them the idea of its infinity’ (CJ, 5: 255). In undertaking this analysis I challenge Paul Crowther’s interpretation of this species of aesthetic experience, and I reject his interpretation as not being reflective of Kant’s actual position. I go on to show that the experience of the mathematical sublime is necessarily connected with the progression of the imagination in its move towards the infinite.

In this article I offer a critical commentary on Jeanine Grenberg’s claim that, by the time of the second Critique, Kant was committed to the view that we only access the moral law’s validity through the feeling of respect. The issue turns on how we understand Kant’s assertion that our consciousness of the moral law is a ‘fact of reason’. Grenberg argues that all facts must be forced, and anything forced must be felt. I defend an alternative interpretation, according to which the fact of reason refers to the actuality of our moral consciousness.