It is hard to know what to think about Kant's ‘passionate sermons’ on capital punishment. Kant clearly feels that it is one of the most important punishments in the state's arsenal. But his vehement insistence on the necessity of execution strikes many readers as philosophically suspect. Critics argue that Kant's embrace of the death penalty is incompatible with, or at least not required by, the fundamental tenets of his moral and legal philosophy (Schwarzschild 1985; Merle 2000; Potter 2002; Hill 2003). These arguments typically employ one of two strategies. The first is to deny that execution is required by retribution in even a prima facie sense; arguments along this line typically question the coherence of Kant's doctrine of the ius talionis (Sarver 1997). The second is to show that there are inviolable moral principles that render the death penalty illegitimate; this criticism typically appeals to the value of human dignity or the right to life (Radin 1980; Pugsley 1981; Schwarzschild 1985; Merle 2000; Potter 2002). There is a third strategy that could be used to criticize Kant, although it is not aimed at him specifcally. This strategy invokes legal principles of fairness or due process. It asserts that, regardless of capital punishment's moral appropriateness or legitimacy, capital punishment is unjust due to the fallibility of legal actors and institutions (Nathanson 2001). Someone adopting the third strategy might claim that, while Kant's justifcation may be acceptable in principle, it fails to justify the death penalty in the world we live in.

In §88, entitled ‘On the highest moral-physical good’, in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (hereafter Anthropology for short), Kant argues that ‘good living’ (physical good) and ‘true humanity’ (moral good) best harmonize in a ‘good meal in good company’. The conversation and company shared over a meal, Kant argues, best provides for the ‘union of social good living with virtue’ in a way that promotes ‘true humanity’. This occurs when the inclination to ‘good living’ is not merely kept within the bounds of ‘the law of virtue’ but where the two achieve a graceful harmony. As such, it is not to be confused with Kant's well-known account of the ‘highest good’, happiness in proportion to virtue. But how is it that the humble dinner party and the associated practices of hospitality come to hold such an important, if often unrecognized, place as the highest moral-physical good in Kant's thought? This question is in need of further investigation. Of the most recent studies in English that have taken seriously the importance of Kant's Anthropology for understanding his wider moral philosophy, very few have considered §88 in any depth. This paper aims to help bridge this signifcant gap in the literature.

At a time when the public is increasingly exposed to public scandals, moral defences of privacy are hard to come by. Privacy, it is argued, is merely a cloak for deception and vice. Since the virtuous have nothing to hide, full disclosure of ourselves to others must be a moral obligation. Given the rigour with which Kant defends the prohibition on lying, many have inferred that Kantian ethics must be equally strict on the necessity of truth telling. Do we in fact owe others the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

The second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter, Critique) contains several major and myriad minor emendations. The revision of the mode of presentation is apparent in four sections of the Critique: the Aesthetic; the Doctrine of the Concepts of the Understanding; the Principles of Pure Understanding; and ‘the paralogisms advanced against rational psychology’ (Bxxxviii). A new refutation of psychological idealism begins at B274. Perhaps most importantly, a new Preface frames the Critique.

The central claim of Kant's political philosophy is that rational agents sharing a territory can justifiably be forced to live under a state; they have, in Kant's words, a duty of right to leave the state of nature. Perhaps something along these lines is entailed by any theory of state legitimacy, but the point raises special difficulties for Kant. He believes that rational agents have a right to freedom; that is, he believes that a rational agent's external freedom - her ability to set and pursue ends for herself without being subject to the choices of others - can justifiably be restricted only for the sake of external freedom itself. To establish that human beings can be forced to join a civil condition, it will therefore not do to show that the state promotes security, prosperity or any other such value: Kant has to show that human beings living side by side need a state to be free.

This article examines where Kant stands on the question of the redistribution of wealth and income both nationally and globally. Kant is rightly seen as a radical reformer of the world order from a political standpoint seeking a republican, federative worldwide system; can he also be seen as wanting to bring about an equally dramatic shift from an economic perspective? To answer this question we have first of all to address the question of whether he is an egalitarian or an inegalitarian at the national level. Certainly there are certain social and material inequalities within a civil society Kant is prepared to accept and there are some he is not. This would imply that he would affirm certain inequalities at an international level and that there are others upon which he would recommend action. Thus the question arises as to whether or not it is appropriate for Kantians to regard the current enormous inequalities in wealth and income between individuals living in different parts of the globe as scandalous and in need of change. The paper throughout relates the problem of distributive justice within the state to the problem of distributive justice amongst states, arguing that this approach is warranted by Kant's own method. Particular attention is paid to how Kant's own approach to political philosophy may be deployed to underpin a change to a distinctive type of international distributive justice.

Kant's brief ‘Postscript of a Friend’ serves as a peculiar coda to his life work. The last of Kant's writing to be published during his lifetime, it is both a friendly endorsement of Christian Gottlieb Mielcke's newly competed Lithuanian–German and German–Lithuanian Dictionary and a plea in Kant's own name for the preservation of minority languages, Lithuanian in particular. This support for minority languages has no visible precedent in his earlier writings, in which national, civic and linguistic identities and associated loyalties tend to overlap. Indeed, Kant's understanding of the commonwealth as nation-state seems predicated on the fact or myth of ethnic and linguistic unity and homogeneity. The same apparent lack of precedent also applies to the Nachschrift's singling out as a people of peculiar civic merit of the Lithuanians, who are not otherwise mentioned in any of Kant's published or unpublished writings. The work thus raises an obvious question: why does Kant devote his last published work (and declining powers) to a topic and cause in which he does not seem to have taken much earlier interest?

Theories of global justice range from the utilitarian philosophy of Peter Singer to the institutional design arguments of Thomas Pogge. These works have grappled with a wide range of issues, but almost all of them have been driven by the recognition of two core problems: the huge numbers of people mired in poverty and the increasing levels of inequality. Much of this literature begins with these two problems and then proposes schemes to resolve them. This problem-solving approach to the issue of global poverty and inequality has tended to avoid engagements with figures in the history of political thought. One thinker who has certainly inspired much of this literature, either explicitly or implicitly, is Immanuel Kant. With his rigorous method, systemic structure of metaphysics and morality, and celebration of Enlightenment reason over staid authority structures, Kant presents a model for how to undertake rational arguments in response to moral dilemmas.

Humanity (die Menschheit) is an important notion within Kant's moral theory. The humanity formulation of the categorical imperative (FH) commands: ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’ (G 4: 429). Kant's analysis of ethical obligation and his expositions of rights and duties in the Metaphysics of Morals refer frequently to humanity. How we understand this concept, then, has signifcant implications for how we understand Kant's ethics.

In recent years Nick Zangwill has gone a long way in championing a moderate aesthetic formalism in an attempt to accommodate those objects that many of us call beautiful despite their lack of any formal beauty. While there is some dispute in the literature about the extent to which Kant can be interpreted as an aesthetic formalist, the appeal of his famous distinction between free and dependent beauty should present a fairly natural ally for Zangwill's project. Indeed, such an alliance has been expressed by Zangwill, who first reaches for this ‘invaluable but misunderstood and underappreciated distinction’ in his ‘Feasible aesthetic formalism’ (1999: 613). Here, Zangwill claims that this essential distinction can be cut loose from Kant's terminology and views about aesthetic judgement. More recently he expresses more strongly that ‘Kant was also a moderate formalist, who opposes extreme formalism when he distinguished free and dependent beauty in §16 of the Critique of Judgement’ (2005: 186n). Yet, a decade on from the initial suggestion, there has been little further exploration or elucidation of this move, or indeed this potential characterization of Kant's aesthetics. It is the aim of this paper to begin to address that deficiency by identifying the extent to which a moderate formalist position is available in Kant's aesthetic. I will suggest that Kant's account does not require substantial modification in order to cast him as a moderate formalist. Taking the time to isolate the plausible grounds for characterizing Kant's aesthetic in this way, this discussion will enable us to explore some of the rival interpretations of his work such that we may also identify the kind of Kantian the moderate formalist is likely to be.

James Van Cleve has argued that Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories shows, at most, that we must apply the categories to experience. This falls short of Kant's aim, which is to show that they must so apply. In this discussion I argue that, once we have noted the differences between the first and second editions of the deduction, this objection is less telling. But Van Cleve's objection can help illuminate the structure of the B deduction, and it suggests an interesting reason why the rewriting might have been thought necessary.