Volume 109, Issue 4

In this paper, I put forth a novel interpretation of how the third categories under each heading in the table of categories (totality, limitation, community, and necessity) are derived. Drawing on a passage from the first Critique and a letter to Schultz, I argue that in order to derive these categories, a special act of the understanding is required. I propose that we interpret this special act as consisting of an application of the third logical function under the corresponding heading that unites the combination of the first and second categories (under that same heading) so as to produce the third.

Kant conceives of chemical dissolutions as involving the infinite division and subsequent blending of solvent and solute. In the resulting continuous solution, every subvolume contains a uniform proportion of each reactant. Erich Adickes argues that this account stands in tension with other aspects of Kant’s Critical philosophy and his views on infinity. I argue that although careful analysis of Kant’s conception of dissolution addresses Adickes’ objections, the infinite division inherent to the process is beyond our human cognition, for Kant. Nevertheless, such infinite division may be considered as an idea of reason to make comprehensible chemical reactions, revealing reason to play a pivotal role in the foundations of chemistry.

In this paper, I examine Kant’s reception of and solution to the problem of the unity of the political will. I propose that Kant distances himself from the modern paradigmatic foundations of sovereignty principally with his theses of the ideality of the general will (section II) and of the apriority of the justification of popular sovereignty (section III). My interpretative hypothesis is that Kant solves the problem by grounding sovereignty in a conceptual element which is new in the history of political philosophy, i. e. the a priori unified omnilateral will. In section IV, I explain why my reading of the ideality of the general will can respond to seemingly plausible objections arising from Kant’s own texts and how it works in the face of concrete political states of affairs.

Pauline Kleingeld’s “Contradiction and Kant’s Formula of Universal Law”, published in this journal in 2017, presents a powerful challenge to what has become the standard (‘practical’) reconstruction of the categorical imperative. In this response to Kleingeld, I argue that she is right to emphasise the ‘simultaneity requirement’ - that we must be able to will a proposed maxim and ‘simulataneously’, ‘also’ or ‘at the same time’ the maxim in its universalised form - but I deny that this removes the categorical imperative test from the world of universalisation because the agent must be understood as part of that world. There are two distinct types of conflict: a contradiction that results from non-universalisability and Kleingeld’s ‘volitional’ conflict, located within the will of the immoral agent. The standard ‘practical’ reconstruction of the categorical imperative remains largely intact.