Volume 102, Issue 4

The aim of this article is to analyse Kant's views on the ruler's right of pardon. This particular theme in the Rechtslehre has remained on the margins of Kant research. The few existing commentaries have taken as their starting-point to interpret Kant's conception of the ruler's right of pardon chiefly against the background of his legal philosophy and its criminal law theory in particular. However, it is argued in this article that Kant's conception of the right of pardon cannot be fully grasped without knowledge of the intellectual history of pardoning and the contemporary Prussian law code, Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten , of 1794. It is claimed that in Kant's mind the right of pardon came close to the ruler's personal forgiveness.

The paper analyses the significance of the modern concept of „symmetry“ for the understanding of the concept of „intuition“ in Kant's philosophy of geometry. A symmetry transformation or automorphism is a structure preserving mapping of the space into itself that leaves all relevant structure intact so that the result is always like the original, in all relevant respects. Hermann Weyl was the first to show that this idea can be drawn on Leibniz's definition of similarity: two figures are similar if they are only distinguishable through the simultaneous perception of them ( comperceptio ): „an automorphism carries a figure into one that in Leibniz's words is ‚indiscernible from it if each of the two figures is considered by itself‘“. The author argues that, under the light of this definition, Leibniz's notion of „comperceptio“ turns out to play a similar role for the notion of „intuition“ in Kant's philosophy of space and time. Both cases are about the „difference between conceptual definition and intuitive exhibition“, as Weyl puts it. This result has on the one hand an exegetical significance: it frees Kant's notion of „intuition“ from every vague reference to the „visualisation“ of geometrical figures; on the other hand a theoretical one: it makes easy to compare Kant's philosophy of space and time with modern developments of sciences, in which as Weyl first showed, the concept of symmetry plays a fundamental role.

In their early epistemological writings, Cassirer and Schlick represent two different strategies in their revisionist approaches toward the original Kantian doctrine. While Cassirer attempts a revision in the sense of ‚critical idealism‘, Schlick attempts a revision in the sense of ‚critical realism‘. It will be shown that this contrast in programmatic outlook leads to significant divergences, especially in the respective theories of space and the correlated interpretations of Einstein's general theory of relativity. On the whole, it will be argued that Schlick ‚won out over‘ Cassirer in the end, but only by leaving almost completely the boundaries of the original Kantian epistemological project.

In the works of Kant and his followers, the notion of form plays an important role in explaining the apriority, necessity and certainty of logic. Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), an important early critic of Kant, found the Kantians' definitions of form imprecise and their explanations of the special status of logic deeply unsatisfying. Proposing his own conception of form, Bolzano developed radically different views on logic, truth in virtue of form, and other matters. This essay presents Bolzano's views in the light of his criticisms of the Kantian logicians.