This chapter addresses the second main challenge to Kant’s conception of autonomy: the sense that the opposition between nature and freedom renders the actuality of freedom unintelligible. Turning to the Inaugural Dissertation and the three critiques, the second chapter shows that tackling the problem requires us to first overcome a widespread misunderstanding of Kant’s notion of the intelligible world. The intelligible world is not a given world available to theoretical cognition but initially accessible only through practical cognition as a world that ought to be. The chapter develops a new interpretation of Kant’s use of the principle “ought implies can” to show how the moral self-consciousness of the ought provides the realm of freedom with a first degree of actuality that, however, remains insufficient on its own. For freedom to be truly realized, we have to realize our freedom in the natural world by endowing it with a different purposive form. The third Critique offers unrecognized resources to explain how such a realization may be possible. By means of its account of natural purposiveness and the feeling of life, it redescribes external and subjective nature in such a manner that we can see how freedom may take root in them. By means of its account of fine, Kant specifies the general form of processes through which we can transform given nature and produce a second nature expressive of ideas. The chapter closes by considering why Kant did not fully develop these resources and why freedom remains ultimately unreal in his own account, something especially obvious in his discussion of the highest good.

This chapter introduces the fundamental idea of The Life of Freedom in Kant and Hegel: the notion that we can only make sense of autonomy by returning to the concept of life. This return is needed to understand fully the genesis, the form, and the reality of human freedom. Such an account can be developed by means of a systematic reconstruction of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of freedom. As we can learn from Kant’s account, the notion of autonomy is threatened by the paradox of self-legislation and an opposition of freedom and nature that makes the reality of freedom unintelligible. As Kant already indicates and Hegel goes on to develop, we can overcome these problems by reconceiving of autonomy as a form of life. The chapter outlines the reading of Kant and Hegel supporting this view, situates the resulting systematic position in current debates on the sources of normativity and the nature of human freedom, and defines its relation to other approaches norm and nature (ethical naturalism, forms of life, and biopolitics).

This chapter characterizes the very idea of autonomy as a response to two problems: understanding the source of normativity and the reality of freedom. Following debates on normativity (Pufendorf and Leibniz) and freedom (Locke, Hume, Rousseau), Kant introduces the notion of autonomy as a unified response to both problems. On this account, to be positively free and to be normatively bound are one and the same thing: to follow rules one has given to oneself. After discussing the attractiveness of this idea, the chapter elaborates a first fundamental challenge: the so-called paradox of autonomy, suggesting that autonomy at its very foundation reverts to heteronomy or arbitrariness. The chapter shows that Kant’s conception is indeed threatened by this paradox and develops Kant’s ways of avoiding it. It argues that Kant’s most important resource, however, has not yet been fully acknowledged: It consists in his concept of self-organizing beings from the third Critique. To avoid the paradox, we should no longer think of self-determination in terms of self-legislation but rather conceive of it in terms of living self-constitution. The chapter closes by discussing why Kant himself did not fully develop this resource and argues that the main reason resides in his notion of transcendental freedom.

The conclusion clarifies the historical trajectory and the systematic and the systematic upshot of The Life of Freedom in Kant and Hegel. Regarding the historical trajectory, it delimits the new understanding of the transition from Kant to Hegel it has argued for. Rather than depicting Hegel as leaving Kant behind, the investigation has revealed that Hegel’s account has led us deeper into Kant’s problems and has made it possible for us to reaffirm them as part of the vital dialectic of freedom. In terms of the systematic upshot, the chapter clarifies the ways in which we can understand autonomy in terms of living self-constitution. I distinguish the basic freedom of self-constitutive entities shared by living and spiritual beings from the practical freedom of spiritual beings. I clarify the way in which the self-constitution of spiritual beings rests upon and remains dependent upon their self-constitution as living beings. I show that for self-consciously self-constitutive beings, the form of their life necessarily remains a problem. I sketch the necessary internal and external plurality of this form of life, its reflexive character, its self-transgressive nature, and the freedom it requires vis-à-vis its own form. To develop a clear understanding of this form of life, we need a critical theory of second nature.

Arendt asks, “Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought?” Her answer is yes, and this chapter argues that this thinking–judging connection is central to her moral philosophy. She derives the connection indirectly, by reflecting on three Socratic propositions: that thinking consists in the back and forth of inner dialogue; that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it; and that wrongdoing leads to inner disharmony. The chapter examines these, and from this examination it reconstructs Arendt’s argument for the thinking–judging connection. The chapter connects Arendt's and Kant's conception of “enlarged thinking” with Adam Smith’s sympathy-based moral theory. It spells out additional implications that Arendt never drew explicitly, and concludes by comparing Arendt’s views with those of Stuart Hampshire, who believes that inner conflict is in fact “the best condition of mankind,” contrary to the Socratic and Aristotelian moral psychology – an important corrective that requires modification to Arendt’s view.

One of the major interpretative challenges faced by contemporary readers of Sellars is that he was a deeply systematic philosopher who never articulated a single definitive presentation of his system. Accordingly, scholars need to make sense on their own as to how Sellars’s system hangs together, which requires finding an acceptable place for each conceptual component. Why did Sellars seemingly not present his system itself? The solution to this problem lies by way of solving a second problem: why did Sellars wait until the late 1960s to begin publishing on Kant, when he was interested in writing on Kant as a student in Oxford in the 1930s? I shall argue that he could not begin publishing on Kant until he had developed his concepts of framework analysis and theory development. These innovations allowed Sellars to critically appropriate and innovate on Kant. On this basis I shall show that Sellars’s magnum opus Science and Metaphysics (subtitled ‘Variations on Kantian Themes’) is in fact Sellars’s presentation of his system.

Sellars, like Kant, adopts a conception of what is required for experience which makes it seem as if nonhuman animals could not have experience. This follows from what I call the Sellars–Kant Principle (SKP): the experience of a world requires an integrated holistic interpretation of the world and of oneself as a subject in that world. Nonhuman animals seem to lack the conceptual resources for such interpretation and hence would seem to be unable to experience the world. I argue that the SKP should be replaced by what I call the Activity Domain Principle: the experience of a domain requires an integrated holistic interpretation of a domain and of oneself as an agent in that domain. I distinguish three different kinds of the ADP: ADP-A (animal agency), ADP-M (mental agency), and ADP-D (discursive agency). This allows us to accept what is right in the Sellars–Kant rejection of empiricism while avoiding the implication that nonhuman animals lack experience tout court.

This chapter examines the basic features of Sellars’s conceptual role account of abstract entities by focusing specifically on his account of the categories, beginning with his remarks on Ockham, Wittgenstein, and Kant. Assuming here the general viability of his general “functional classification” account of meaning and abstract entities in response to the usual realist objections, I focus rather on the complex role that ontological categories actually play in certain key aspects of Sellars’s metaphysical and epistemological views. Displaying the categories at work in this way raises fundamental questions both about their nature and about the role of categorial ontology in general, as well as casting a different light on the myth of the given and on the relations between the manifest and scientific images of the world. The overall contention is that Sellars’ nominalism is far more central than has generally been realized to each of Sellars’ most famous and enduring philosophical conceptions: the myth of the given, the logical space of reasons, and resolving the ostensible clash between the manifest and scientific images of the human being in the world.

This chapter transitions from the metaphysical foundations of Kant’s conception of moral character and Gesinnung to its moral philosophical justification and implications. It is argued that Kant introduces the notion of the Gesinnung in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to fulfil the crucial theoretical function of ascribing moral worth to an agent’s individual actions: an action is morally worthy if and only if it expresses a good Gesinnung. It is shown that the conception of the Gesinnung remains consistent while being gradually enriched and elaborated in Kant’s subsequent moral philosophical works, particularly the Critique of Practical Reason and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Insofar as the Gesinnung constitutes the moral dimension of a person’s intelligible character, it must be conceived of as an object of free choice. For Kant, the objects of choice, more specifically, are principles of action, or maxims. Thus, the chapter explores Kant’s intricate, two-tiered theory of moral choice, where a person’s Gesinnung is expressed in the most fundamental, inner maxim guiding their actions.

This chapter discusses an essential feature of human moral life according to Kant. For Kant, human moral life is an ongoing struggle, not only in the sense that we must fight to uphold our moral resolutions once made, but also in the sense that the question of what the right resolutions are can never be fully or definitively resolved at any point in life. In other words, human moral agents for Kant routinely face hard moral choices in the form of choices between being moral or pursuing one’s own interest. This amounts to an additional argument against principle foundationalism: according to the latter view, once we have made a fundamental moral choice, we only ever have to fight to remain strong enough to stay faithful to this choice; the choice itself is no longer contested afterwards. However, I argue, this fails to adequately capture the Kantian conception of moral trial as a contested and therefore hard choice, rather than as a struggle to maintain the strength to carry out the choices already made.

Part III treats systematic challenges to natural perfectionism, and opens with the so-called fact/value dichotomy. This challenge can be parsed in four main ways. First, the metaphysical challenge, which has historical roots in Hobbes and Hume. This holds that the ‘natural’ cannot accommodate the normative: a claim I argue is question-begging, depriving norms, furthermore, of any proper grounds. Second, the inferential challenge, which maintains that one cannot move validly from ‘is’-type propositions to ‘ought’-type ones. This Humean challenge fails, I argue, since natural perfectionism rests its claims on natural facts that are already inextricably inflected with value. Third, G. E. Moore’s semantic challenge. Moore claims that any naturalistic definition of ‘good’ both commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and falls foul of the ‘open question argument’. I argue that the former is a pseudo-fallacy and that the latter conflates not seeming ‘closed’ with being ‘open’. Fourth, the conceptual challenge attacks ‘thick’ concepts, these being purportedly inextricable amalgams of ‘fact’ and ‘value’. I argue that thick concepts are defensible, for pragmatic, grounding and moral reasons.

This chapter begins by discussing the metaphysical foundations of Kant’s conception of moral character in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant argues that we must ascribe to ourselves and others an intelligible character, distinct from our empirically observable, causally determined empirical character, to think of ourselves as transcendentally free or spontaneous. Our spontaneity is reflected in our capacity to make choices (Willkür), which is complemented by our ability to determine ourselves according to normative reasons rather than causal natural laws. The chapter traces the development of Kant’s conception of intelligible character, starting from a broad understanding of intelligible causality in the Critique of Pure Reason, and evolving in his later works toward a morally infused concept closely related to the idea of character as an individual’s unique, persistent identity. Kant refers to this morally charged intelligible character as “Gesinnung.” The chapter explores the etymology, semantics, and usage of this term in Kant’s writings and lectures from the 1770s to the 1790s.

I open Chapter 1 by outlining ‘agathic pluralism’, namely the view that (ultimate intrinsic) goodness is univocally definable yet also irreducibly plural at the metaphysical level. This is my view, but I do not embark immediately on its defence. Rather, Chapter 1 clears the way for such a view by showing how none of the ‘big three’ ethical theories – namely consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics – manages to capture goodness as I understand it. Consequentialism tries, yet fails, to reduce goodness to a single property; deontology tries to sideline or do without goodness altogether; and virtue ethics substantially mislocates goodness, finding it in our moral dispositions. In order to argue for this, I tackle (first) consequentialism’s failed proxies for goodness, namely pleasure and desire- or preference-satisfaction; and I canvas J. J. Thomson’s a priori semantic argument for the incoherence of consequentialism. Second, I look at deontologists’ paradigm examples of promising, lying and retributive punishment. And third, I look at the Stoics’ and Michael Slote’s strong over-estimation of virtue as the only, or at least primary, good.

This chapter brings into view a problem revolving around Kant’s conception of moral character: at first sight, the idea that the notion of moral character plays a significant theoretical role in Kant’s moral philosophy is at odds with central Kantian theses concerning the nature of morality. Kant is committed to the principle that every rational agent can in any situation freely decide to perform a morally worthy action. This idea seems to be at tension with the notion that one needs an enduring character acquired through practice and training in order to perform a morally worthy action. This tension is made explicit in an interpretive dilemma: as a commentator of Kant, one appears to be faced with the choice of either relegating the notion of moral character to a secondary place in Kant, or accepting that Kant has a highly revisionary understanding of what moral character consists in. The chapter gives a suggestion for how to move forward from here, which points the way for the following chapters: the solution lies in understanding that and how in Kant the very idea of moral choice and the moral worth of individual actions is inherently tied to a conception of moral character.

This chapter introduces the Aristotelian conception of moral character that is predominant in philosophical virtue ethics as well as in adjacent disciplines such as social psychology. According to the Aristotelian conception, moral character traits – virtues and vices – are hexeis, or dispositions to experience emotions, feelings, and desires, as well as to make choices. Following this, the chapter points to the growing number of studies in recent decades that have engaged with Kant’s concept of moral character and virtue. It concludes by sketching a philosophical problem that serves as the starting point for the subsequent study: central aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, particularly his emphasis on transcendental freedom as the freedom of choice, seem to make it difficult to assign a significant role to the concept of character within his moral philosophy, at least as long as it is interpreted along Aristotelian lines. This suggests that the best way forward is to examine the aspects in which Kant’s conception of moral character fundamentally diverges from Aristotle’s.

I open by charting by the well-worn philosophical distinction between intellection and perception, and unpack the debate over whether (or to what degree) the latter is separable from the former. I conclude that the ‘cognitivist’ position is correct: that human perception is properly infused with conceptual content, this marking us out as the species we are (viz. rational animals). With all this in place, I ask whether there is a cognitive hierarchy among the senses. Aristotle and recent researchers like Viberg answer ‘yes’, vision being at the top, smell at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I argue that this depends on an undue privileging of cognitive extent and precision. I then investigate the imagination and the alleged threat it poses to cognitivism. I argue that the imagination – when functional, and not reducible to fantasy – is in fact a profound aid to cognition (since it enhances it and lends it more ‘colour’). I end by looking at aesthetic perfection, where the role of the imagination is of peculiar importance – though I express scepticism about the traditional hyper-valuation of aesthetic over everyday perceptual experience.

The austere scientific naturalism that gained ascendancy during the twentieth century led many philosophers to embrace error theory about morality; others lapsed into what Sidney Hook called “the new failure of nerve,” fleeing into supernaturalism. Sellars formulates his own theory of practical reasoning to be consistent with his austere naturalism. His Kantian view is that to be a practical rational agent implies – as a conceptual matter – membership in the community of moral agents (SM Ch 7 §144). Thus, Sellars attempts to show that to act on moral requirements is to act autonomously. However, Sellars rejects Kant’s individualistic conception of reason in favor of an understanding of reason as social. Further, Sellars attempts to situate reason within a purely naturalistic framework. For Sellars, understanding morality and autonomy as related in this way solves a variety of deep problems in moral theory – such as reconciling the existence of moral imperatives with an austere scientific naturalism; explaining the categorical validity of such imperatives; and explaining how moral reasons have their own original authority, not reducible to reasons of prudence. This is Sellars’s reply to the challenge of naturalism – and his path to avoiding the “new failure of nerve.”

Chapter 12 offers a provocative and jurisprudentially ambitious argument: that sovereign equality requires states to submit to international adjudication or arbitration even in ordinary legal disputes that do not involve overlapping sovereign rights or powers.

This chapter raises the question of whether in Kant’s view there is a psychological mechanism or entity that renders an individual’s virtuous moral character or Gesinnung abiding and stable. Several recent Aristotelian interpretations of Kant that aim to identify a parallel between Kant and Aristotle in this regard are being discussed. These readings seek to identify psychological structures inherent in a person’s empirical character that render support to a person’s good Gesinnung. The readings are challenged on the grounds that such psychological structures cannot provide support, either as necessary and sufficient conditions or as enabling conditions, for excellent moral choice in Kant. What results from this is a picture of human moral identity as fundamentally precarious and exposed to uncertainty which is radically unlike the Aristotelian conception. The chapter closes by showing how this Kantian picture naturally opens up a space for divine grace to intervene in human moral life.

This chapter challenges foundationalist interpretations of Kant’s conception of moral character, or Gesinnung. Central to such readings is the belief that moral character functions as a foundational ground, preceding and pre-determining particular moral choices and actions. This idea also underpins the Aristotelian conception of character, which asserts that actions and decisions can be explained and predicted by reference to a person’s character, as it precedes and shapes those choices. Two forms of foundationalist readings are examined: Dispositional foundationalism, which likens Kant’s moral character to Aristotle’s notion of character as a disposition or habitus, and Principle foundationalism, which views moral character as the choice to commit to a fundamental principle that pre-determines future moral decisions. The latter is the dominant interpretation among contemporary readers of Kant. The chapter presents arguments against both versions of these foundationalist readings of Kant’s notion of Gesinnung.