Volume 62, Issue 3

Kant’s and Freud’s respective investigations of the mind obey fundamentally different concerns. And yet their views of the structure of our mental life are strikingly similar. The article explores some of those similarities. It compares Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and the organization of mental processes Freud calls ‘ego’ (Ich). It then proceeds to compare Kant’s categorical imperative of morality and Freud’s structure of ego/superego (Ich/ÜberIch). Freud’s structural view of the mind, it is suggested, might offer a developmental account of just those aspects of mental life Kant thought could be explained only by appealing to our belonging in a noumenal world escaping the deterministic laws of the natural world. However, Freud’s approach is exclusively developmental. He does not take any position on questions of justification, the very questions that are central to Kant’s concern. The paper offers a cautious response to the question: what remains, under the Freudian developmental account, of the justificatory ambition of Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative as an imperative of pure practical reason?

The relevance of Kant to Plessner’s work was long all but ignored and there is hardly any mention of Plessner in the Kant literature. The Plessner renaissance beginning in the 1990s, however, has brought with it a stronger focus on the methodological construction of his theory, so that the Kant connection has at least been acknowledged, but the particular relevance of Kant’s Critique of Judgement has not been systematically explicated. In this essay, I investigate the connection between Kant’s notion of reflective - specifically teleological - judgment and Plessner’s theory. I begin by setting out the characteristics of teleological judgment, with two points being of particular importance: the temporal structure of the final cause and Kant’s reference to an understanding other than the human, that is, to an ordering power other than the human. In a second step, I work out Plessner’s conceptualization of the spatiotemporal appearance of organisms and the way he understands the other of human understanding as nature’s - or history’s - historically evolved and mutable capacity for self-order. He arrives at these conclusions by way of a methodologically controlled process of questioning derived from Kant, which he calls the “principle of the open question.”

This paper asks how property rights in the financial system can be normatively justified. It argues that in the current financial system, we find property rights with very different normative bases, some of which are stronger than others. In fact, there is a systematic gap between the normative priorities (which property rights deserve protection?) and the de facto priorities (which property rights are in fact protected?). I draw on the three traditional approaches for justifying property rights, along Hegelian, Lockean and consequentialist lines, and ask how relevant they are for the property rights that one finds in today’s financial system. As it will turn out, Hegelian and Lockean justifications are better suited for the “real economy” than for the financial system; whereas the most promising approach for justifying many property rights within the financial system (if they can be justified at all) is a consequentialist one. This implies that reform proposals, for example with regard to higher capital ratios for banks, cannot be countered by holding that they interfere with property rights, for the property rights that are interfered with cannot claim to have stronger normative bases than the normative principles involved in the reform proposals.

Understanding the relationship of democracy and property ownership is one of the most important tasks for contemporary political philosophy. Surprisingly, philosophers writing on democracy and ownership rarely discuss their interconnectedness. This paper aims to clarify how a normative concept of property arrangements fosters democracy. On the one hand, it argues that democracy depends on a hybrid form of private and social ownership of productive assets that is a feature of economic democracy. The basic aspect of this conception can be captured by the claim that for securing the political liberties a widespread dispersal of property in productive resources is required that minimizes the formation of prejudices and therefore improves the conditions of deliberative democracy. On the other hand, this paper argues that freedom is most central for the justification of property rights. Instead of justifying property rights by external principles of justice, democracy and legitimacy, it argues that the notion of ownership is not intelligible as long as one leaves the concept of freedom aside.

The problem of a society based on private ownership of productive forces is the unequal and unjust conditions of producing economic wealth and political power. The bourgeois legal concept of private property is a paradigmatic combination of the reification of universal concepts and class-interest. An exemplary case is Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. The essay tries to reconstruct the idea of democratic socialism as a still workable alternative.

In his writings on international and cosmopolitan law, Kant condemns all unlawful annexations and especially European expansionism. Although his late works develop a staunch anti-colonial position, they contain little advice on how historic injustice is to be set right, especially whether and how claims to the restitution of territory ought to be satisfied. In order to give a systematic answer to the question, I introduce a threefold distinction between stages of international law. It is then argued that while Kant is skeptical about restitutive rights and duties as a matter of natural international law, he defends restitutive duties on the level of transitional international law. It can also be shown that violations of cosmopolitan law trigger more stringent duties of restoration than violations of international law.

In order to inform readers about philosophy in Japan, I treat three topics in this letter. Firstly, I talk about the Japanese word “tetsugaku” which means “philosophy”. It is one of many words that were created especially for the translation of Western concepts into Japanese in the latter half of the 19th century when Western culture had been rapidly introduced into Japan. Interestingly enough, Japanese have used this word for thought only since the encounter with the Western world and not before. In fact, what philosophy is, remains quite a complicated question in Japan. Secondly, I mention the dialogue between the Buddhist tradition and the Western philosophy in Japan. I am sure that the dialogue has produced and is still producing rich fruit in the world of philosophy. Finally, I describe how philosophy is received in Japanese society nowadays, especially at university.