Kant, Immanuel [addendum]

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Immanuel Kant's philosophy continues to exercise significant influence on philosophical developments and generates an ever-growing body of scholarly literature. Work on Kant has progressed in two main directions. Central doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason have been reconstructed, examined, and revised in the light of current philosophical concerns and standards; and the focus of scholarship has widened to include aspects and parts of Kant's work hitherto neglected, especially in the areas of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, political philosophy, anthropology, and philosophy of science.

Further advances in interpreting the first Critique have occurred in three related areas: the nature and validity of Kant's overall argumentative procedure, with special emphasis on the deduction of the categories; the meaning and function of transcendental idealism and the associated distinction between things in themselves and appearances; and the role of mental activity in Kant's theory of experience.

The deduction of the categories, in which Kant sought to identify and justify the basic concepts underlying all experience and its objects, has become the center of major interpretive efforts. Stimulated by the neo-Kantian analytic metaphysics of Peter F. Strawson, philosophers have attempted to distill a type of argument from Kant's text that refutes skeptical doubts about the reality of the external world and other minds by showing how the skeptical challenge tacitly and unavoidably assumes the truth of the very assumptions it sets out to deny, namely, the reality of external objects and other minds.

While the force of such transcendental arguments remains controversial, the analytic–reconstructive approach to the deduction of the categories has also resulted in more textually based interpretations that reflect the whole spectrum of Kant scholarship. Readings of the deduction start either from the assumption of experience and proceed from there analytically to the necessary conditions of experience (the categories and the principles based on them), or take as their starting point some conception of self-consciousness or self-knowledge, either understood in Cartesian purity (a priori unity of apperception) or in phenomenological embeddedness (empirical self-consciousness), and argue from there to the synthetic conditions for the very possibility of such self-awareness. A key insight shared by many interpreters is the mutual requirement of object-knowledge and self-knowledge in Kant.

In interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism, a major alternative has opened up between those scholars who see things-in-themselves and appearances as different aspects of one and the same things (two-aspect view) and those who regard the two as so many different sets of objects (two-object view). On the former view appearances are genuine objects. On the latter view they are representations. While the textual evidence is not conclusive for either view, the two-aspect theory has found many adherents because of its ontological economy and its avoidance of a phenomenalist reduction of things to representations.

The central role of human subjectivity in the deduction of the categories and in the defense of transcendental idealism has led to a renewed interest in Kant's philosophy of mind. Kant's theory of subjectivity is more and more seen as an integral part of his theoretical philosophy. Special areas of interest are the essential role of imagination in perception and experience, the distinction between inner sense and apperception, the relation between subjective or psychological and objective or logical grounds of knowledge, and the functional unity of sensibility and understanding. While no one advocates the derivation of the logical from the psychological in the manner of a reductive psychologism, the exact function of specifically psychological considerations in transcendental philosophy remains controversial. There is a minimal consensus that the self involved in the grounding of experience is distinct from the transcendent, noumenal self of the metaphysics of the soul, so forcefully rejected by Kant in the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, and equally to be distinguished from the empirical self known through inner experience. Interpreters typically stress the formal and functional rather than the material and substantial sense of this third, transcendental self in Kant.

Important new work on other parts of Kant's philosophy has occurred in three main areas: his practical philosophy, especially ethics; the Critique of Judgment, especially its aesthetics; and his philosophy of science. Scholarship on Kant's ethics has widened beyond the limited concern with the principle of morality (categorical imperative) to include other aspects of Kant's ethics as well as the position of Kant's moral theory within his social philosophy in its entirety and within the wider architectonic of the critical philosophy. A main inspiration of the work on Kant's ethics has been the neo-Kantian political philosophy of John Rawls, who sought to extract from Kant's formal approach to morality procedural guidelines for the ideal construction of the principles of social conduct. Increased attention has been paid to Kant's account of agency, the possible grounding of the categorical imperative in a generic conception of practical rationality, and the key features of Kant's moral psychology—including the theory of motivation, the role of moral judgment, and the function of subjective principles of action (maxims).

The move beyond the confines of Kant's foundational writings in moral philosophy has extended not only to his philosophy of law and theory of moral duties contained in the Metaphysics of Morals but also to his work in the philosophy of religion, political philosophy, philosophy of history, and anthropology to be found in a number of his smaller works, often written in a more popular vein. The picture of Kant's practical philosophy that emerges from these reconstructions, revisions, and rediscoveries is that of a highly complex theory that is sensitive to the social dimension of human existence and well being able to respond to the charges and challenges posed by utilitarianism and communitarianism as well as virtue ethics.

In work on the Critique of Judgment, the standard emphasis on Kant's theory of aesthetic judgments has been widened considerably in recognition of the role of the third Critique as a synthesis of theoretical and practical philosophy in a comprehensive philosophy of human cultural development. A main focus of the scholarship on Kant's philosophy of science has been the Opus postumum and its attempts to specify the transition from an a priori theory of material nature to physics proper.

Cartesianism; Communitarianism; Neo-Kantianism; Psychologism; Rawls, John; Strawson, Peter Frederick; Utilitarianism.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, general editors Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. 15 vols. This set is the first comprehensive edition of Kant's published works, literary remains, correspondence, and lecture transcripts in English. The individual volumes of this edition are as follows: Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, translated and edited by Michael Walford with Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lectures on Logic, translated and edited by Michael Young. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Opus postumum. Translated by Eckart Förster and M. Rosen; edited by Eckart Förster. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Religion and Rational Theology, translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lectures on Ethics, translated by Peter Heath, edited by Peter Heath and Jerome B. Schneewind. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Lectures on Metaphysics, translated and edited by Karl Ameriks and Steve Narragon. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Correspondence, translated and edited by Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and E. Matthews, edited by Paul Guyer. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, translated by Henry E. Allison, M. Friedman, G. Hatfield, and Peter Heath, edited by Henry E. Allison with Peter Heath. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Notes and Fragments, edited by Paul Guyer. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Anthropology, History, and Education, translated and edited by Günter Zöller and Robert Louden. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Natural Science, translated and edited by Eric Watkins. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Lectures on Anthropology, translated and edited by Robert Louden. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Allison, Henry E. Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Allison, Henry E. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Allison, Henry E. Kant's Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Rev. ed., 2004.

Ameriks, Karl. Kant's Theory of Mind. An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Förster, Eckart. Kant's Final Synthesis. An Essay on the Opus postumum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Friedman, Michael. Kant and the Exact Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Guyer, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Guyer, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1979.

Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Jacobs, Brian, and Patrick Kain. Essays on Kant's Anthropology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kuehn, Manfred. Kant. A Biography. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

O'Neill, Onora. Constructions of Reason. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Strawson, Peter F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. London: Methuen, 1966.

Timmons, Mark, ed. Kant's Metaphysics of Morals. Interpretative Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Van Cleve, James. Problems from Kant. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Watkins, Eric, ed. Kant and the Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Wood, Allen W. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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