Volume 113, Issue 4

This article deals with Kant’s intentions in adding § 12 of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason . Here, Kant remarks on the so-called transcendentals ( unum, verum, bonum ) in the metaphysical or ontological tradition. This article focuses on their trans-categorial character to clarify their role in the system formation of Kant’s three critiques. In order to clarify Kant’s difficult terminology in § 12, fragments from his reflections and transcripts of his lectures are analyzed. Furthermore, an examination of Kant’s references to qualitative unity, plurality, and perfection reveals that these logical criteria of cognition in general help him to organize the content of the three critiques.

Arthur Ripstein’s conception of Kantian freedom has exerted an enormous recent influence on scholars of Kant’s political philosophy; however, the conception seems to me flawed. In this paper, I argue that Ripstein’s conception of Kantian freedom as “your capacity to choose the ends you will use your means to pursue” – your “purposiveness” – is both too narrow and too broad: (1) Wrongful acts such as coercive threats cannot choose my ends for me; instead, such acts wrongfully restrict my perceived options. And (2) rightful changes to the context in which I choose that render my means insufficient for my ends restrict my capacity to choose them. Alternatively, my purposiveness reduces to my entitlements; but then freedom as purposiveness is viciously circular or fails as a new approach to the “devastating” objection that motivates it.

In this paper, I use Kant’s theory of the aesthetic power of judgment to solve the problem of nonmoral value choice, which Kant himself did not deal with, and prove that my reconstruction can fit into Kant’s philosophy and function as a harmonization and unification of morality and happiness. First, I revisit Kant’s early view of intellectualized happiness to establish the feasibility of this project in Kant’s ethics. Second, by analogy with the contemplative judgment of taste and practical artistic creation, I argue for the universal communicability of pleasure in value choice from the transcendental perspective, on the one hand, and explain the various choices by individuals in reality from the empirical perspective, on the other. Ultimately, I connect the pursuit of intellectual happiness with the fulfillment of the imperfect duty of one’s own perfection, through which a transition from nature to freedom can be accomplished in Kant’s philosophy.