Volume 112, Issue 1

Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum , the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.

In this paper, I will reconstruct Kant’s theory of illusion from the perspective of his transcendental philosophy. I argue that it is Kant’s theory of dialectic as the “logic of illusion” that grounds both theoretical and practical error and that traces them back to a common root: the operation of rationalizing by theoretical and practical reason. I analyze different kinds of theoretical and practical errors and show how they are grounded in reason’s general propensity to rationalize. The paper exposes this common root and shows which rules Kant develops in order to avoid rationalizing.

The first section of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals contains a teleological argument, the aim of which is to show that the natural purpose of human reason lies not in securing happiness but in morality. While the teleological argument is widely considered to be digressive and unconvincing in the secondary literature, in this article I attempt to show that the argument is neither digressive nor unconvincing. I argue that it fulfills an important synthetic task in the Groundwork (even if in a preliminary manner), that it is consistent with Kant’s views on natural teleology at the time, and that the criticism of happiness contained therein is as convincing as Kant’s criticism of happiness in the rest of the treatise.

This paper argues that the political adage “ Be ye prudent as serpents and guileless as doves ” involves three different types of relation between prudence and morality, namely: unification ( Vereinigung ), subordination ( Unterordnung ), and association ( Beigesellung ). I maintain that these relations are set up according to the same principle that determines the relationship between mechanical and teleological causality in the third Critique . Thus, I argue that morality and prudence are much more systematically related within the system of critical philosophy than is normally assumed in the literature and that this is made possible by way of an intimate relationship between prudence and teleological judgment.

Kant makes and elaborates upon a distinction between active citizenship and passive citizenship. Active citizens enjoy the right to vote and rights of political participation generally. Passive citizens do not, though they still enjoy the protection of the law as citizens. Kant’s examples have left commentators puzzling over how these distinctions follow from his stated rationale or justification for active citizenship, namely, that active citizens possess a kind of political and economic self-sufficiency. This essay focuses on one subset passive citizenry – that of traveling blacksmiths, barbers, and day laborers in order to examine Kant’s distinctions. I argue that these examples show that Kant’s concerns regarding dependence are, at least in some cases, pragmatic rather than political.

Recently (2019/20), a new autograph written by Immanuel Kant in October 1786 was found and identified. It is a quotation from Horace’s  Epistles I. 1, 60  dedicated to Johann Friedrich Lange (1760–1826), a preacher and former student of Kant’s at the Albertina University: “Let this be a man’s brazen wall (rule of life), to be conscious of no ill, to turn pale with no guilt.” Kant quoted the passage several times; one time in his  MS . Horace was one of Kant’s favorite Latin poets.