Volume 115, Issue 3

The article generally aims to demonstrate that Kant’s endeavor with Swedenborg must be considered productive , meaning that “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” is not merely a slanderous text. Specifically, we will deal with the explanation of “obscure representations”, which, according to Swedenborg, have their basis in the coexistence of the mundus spiritualis (not intelligibilis !) and mundus sensibilis . This theorem proves highly compatible with Kant, leading to an attempt to reconstruct Swedenborg’s considerations ‘within the bounds of bare reason’: Kant’s profane explanation of obscure representations ultimately refers back to semiotics, namely in the sense that the representations are understood as caused by pure rational beings. Obscure representations thus point as signs to a pre-critical ‘realm of ends’. The influence of pure rational beings also manifests itself in a moral-practical sense; it evokes a feeling opposed to egoism, which can easily be traced to the ‘feeling of respect’ or the ‘voice of reason’ from the critical writings. The ‘actual’ spirit-seeing, which Kant explains as a dislocated foco imaginario and thus as a mental defect , is to be distinguished from all of this, as it only describes the special case of the illegitimate externalization of these obscure representations. As will be shown at the end of the article, the theorems taken up in “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” can be traced further to Kant’s very last writings.

In this paper, I propose to resolve the controversy over the derivation of the categories of quantity by spelling out three claims: (1) the three quantitative functions/forms of judgment (universal-particular-singular), qua synthetic categories of quantity (unity-plurality-totality), lawfully direct the determination of sensible manifolds as singular totalities , which (2) brings to light a specifically categorial type of judgmental activity, distinguishable from but presupposed by empirical judgments. This calls for (3) pairing the category of totality with the singular judgment and the category of unity with the universal judgment (‘Order B’), rather than pairing the singular judgment with unity and the universal judgment with totality (‘Order A’). At stake in this controversy is our understanding of the categories’ normativity, their scope, and the division of labor between intuitions and categories in individuating objects.

Markus Kohl, Ruben Schneider and (in substance) Marcus Willaschek have recently argued that Kant’s theoretical philosophy includes a radical negative theology. This article criticises this radical reading. On the one hand, it argues that different Kantian passages that seem to speak for the absolute incomprehensibility of the highest being can be interpreted as showing that Kant merely rejects comprehensibility according to the pattern of schematised cognition of the understanding (there is no concrete cognition of God). The paper goes on to show that Kant advocates a form of ‘regulative deism’ (although he also associates deism with a form of atheism) and that the analytical conclusions of deistic transcendental theology are no less substantial in principle than those of the Transcendental Aesthetic of the KrV. What Kohl’s, Schneider’s and Willaschek’s interpretations lose sight of is the fact that Kant continuously characterises the highest being conceived by reason in the KrV as a “faultless ideal.”

Kant’s duties of love include the duties of beneficence, gratitude, and sympathetic participation. But what is it that allows Kant to bring such seemingly quite heterogeneous duties under one concept, especially under the concept of love? I will argue that it is benevolence as an essential element of love that takes on this unifying role. In order to understand this role of benevolence as the unifying element of the three duties of love, the concept of benevolence will first be analyzed (part 1). Against this background, all three duties of love are then reassessed. Beneficence will be shown to be a proactive form of benevolence (part 2), gratitude to be a reactive form of benevolence (part 3), and sympathetic participation is understood as a form of reciprocal benevolence (part 4).

According to a common reading of Kant, autonomy refers to the idea that pure reason gives the moral law to itself. Pauline Kleingeld and Marcus Willaschek reject this standard view both on textual as well as philosophical grounds. Instead, they argue that autonomy only selects mid-level principles, such as ‘help others,’ and that the moral law is a priori and not given. – In this paper, I first analyze on textual grounds what Kant means when he says that a principle is a priori. I argue that Kant does not conceive of a priori laws as permanently existing entities. Rather they are the product of how reason necessarily functions if it is prompted by sensibility. Kant also uses the word ‘autonomy’ in this context. I then argue that this non-standard view of autonomy as an activity can meet the philosophical objections that Kleingeld and Willaschek raise against autonomy as a giving of the moral law.

Kant uses two metaphors in his early works on cosmogony: “Fire Treasures” and his famous figure of a “Phoenix of Nature”. This study suggests two sources Kant may have known. The first metaphor, goes back to the German translation of Leibniz’s Protogaea (1749) or a review of the Protogaea by Gottsched. Both appeared in the same year as the Latin text. Kant receipts the second metaphor most likely from the English poet Abraham Cowley (his poem: “The Extasie”). Both metaphors are significant because they explain and illustrate Kant’s recourse to the Stoic doctrine of ekpyrosis , i. e. the passing away through a world-fire and the renewal of the cosmos from the elementary particles created in this holocaustic process.