Volume 110, Issue 2

This article provides a transcription and analysis of a newly located fragment of Kant’s autograph fair copy of his essay on Perpetual Peace. The 4-page manuscript is part of the John Wild Autograph Collection at Princeton University (USA) and constitutes the immediate sequel to a similar fragment preserved in the Staatsarchiv Hamburg and published in Kant-Studien 77 (1986). The Princeton fragment was not included in volume 23 of the Akademie-Ausgabe and was unavailable to recent editors; it presents a number of textual variants and allows new insights into Kant’s writing process.

The antinomy of teleological judgment has increasingly been understood as a conflict between regulative principles. But it is not clear why regulative principles can be in conflict at all, since Kant otherwise takes the realization that two conflicting principles are regulative to be sufficient to resolve an antinomy. I argue that in Kant’s view regulative principles do not conflict with one another only if they are reducible to reason’s interest in systematicity. Given that the principles of this antinomy do conflict, they must not be reducible to reason’s interest in systematicity. I argue that teleology is thus not reducible to reason’s interest because it is fundamentally unlawful. I then use this irreducibility to account for Kant’s appeal to the supersensible in this context.

I discuss the problem that Kant’s ethics seems to be incapable of capturing our strong intuition that emergencies create a context for actions that is very different from other cases of helping and from other opportunities to further obligatory ends. I argue that if we pay attention to how Kant grounds beneficence we see that distress and emergency function as constitutive concerns. They are vital to establishing the duty of beneficence in the first place, and they also guide the application of duties to specific cases. Kant’s conception of imperfect duties to others, when understood correctly, offers a way to understand why emergencies are morally important, but also why other factors have a place in our moral reasoning.

In this essay, I examine the motive of inner truthfulness in the moral philosophy of Kant, which came to the fore in his work in the 1790s. Truthfulness and sincerity are interpreted as the roots of all morality. In the first chapter, I present two interpretations of inner honesty from two different perspectives: in relation to a duty to oneself and to the issue of conscience. The second chapter (the core of the essay) works out the main demand of truthfulness, especially in the context of the theory of radical evil from  Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason . As a last step, I show that with the motive of truthfulness, Kant’s philosophy meets the thinking of F. Nietzsche, with its emphasis on sincerity.

Salomon Maïmon argues that the formal determination of experience in Kant’s first Kritik insufficiently answers the question ‘quid juris?’ . As an alternative to Kant’s theory, he develops a genetic transcendentalism in which experience is completely determined a priori . Discussing this genetic approach, I focus on how the spatiotemporal determinations of conscious experience are traced back to pure ideal relations. Relying on Leibniz and his theory of space and time, I explain how the extensive magnitudes of consciousness are founded in intensive magnitudes of what Maïmon calls ‘pure thought’. As the latter is the transcendental ground for both sensibility and the understanding, Maïmon’s theory contains a radical form of immanence, much like the philosophy of Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze.