2024 Vol. 43. №4

In this second installment (for the first, see Kantian Journal, 2024, vol. 43, no. 2), Kant’s references to ancient consolation writings are elaborated. The general aim is to make Kant’s proximity to the Roman Stoa, and his borrowings from it, more apparent. A comparison with his necrology for Funk then shows more explicitly how Kant takes up this ancient philosophy anew for his time, and for his fellow human beings. In so doing, he continued a trend that had begun in the Enlightenment. In Universal Natural History and Theory of Heavens, Kant showed that the world can exist without God’s constant intervention. Human being must understand his position in the cosmos and his radical finitude. Closeness to God can only arise through the moral feeling and the infinitely distant work of God, heaven itself — a famous motif Kant adopted from Seneca. Therefore, comfort and the resources for coping with life can no longer be drawn from irrational mystical moments and naïve biblical story telling. We can only find comfort in reason, the human capacity which brings us closest to God. Many of the reasons for consolation that Kant applies to Funk in the necrology can be found in Cicero, Seneca, and other authors of that period. With all this in mind, the necrology will have to be viewed philosophically in a completely different light from before. This is because Kant succeeds in reconciling Enlightenment tensions between the return to man alone and the distancing from God, as well as the resulting question of what to do, especially in those moments when it seems that only a God can help. The conclusion and appendix show that Gottsched’s influence on the journalism of the Enlightenment can also be observed in Kant’s reading and adoption of motives from Addison’s “Spectator”: Gottsched commissioned the translation. Kant refers in Funk’s necrology to a story (“The Visions of Mirza”) told by Addison, picturing human life as a dilapidated bridge with many traps. One misstep, and the protagonist falls into the abyss.

The starting point for this study is Kant’s approach to stating the problem of the conditions of possibility of experience and the thesis of the possibility of objects of experience (KrV, В 197). The thesis lends itself to three interpretations: the creationist interpretation, whereby a priori structures of understanding and reason create objects of experience; the moderate interpretation, in which a priori structures of understanding and reason objectify and identify intuitions; and the transcendental realist interpretation, which presents objects of experience as objectively existing. I then analyse the “polemical” style of the reading of Kant presented in the works of H. J. Paton, P. F. Strawson, J. Bennett, and others. This approach focuses on the problem of the possibility of experience, with its main source being Kant’s argument for causality in the Second Analogy from the Critique of Pure Reason. As a consequence of its polemic, this approach, as formulated by Bennett, treats the problem of the conditions of the possibility of experience as the problem of imposing a causal order on nature. Based on the results of my analysis, I propose two formulations of the above problem, which reflect the epistemic and ontological points of view respectively. In the former case, we have the problem of the “vicious circle” of cognition, while in the latter case we have “transcendental collapse” — that is, the problem of the correlation between reason and reality which acquires the transcendental property of “paradoxical compatibility”. Finally, I discuss the importance of the problem, arguing that it is the foundation of transcendental philosophy, and that which makes it productive.

The concept of “moral sense”, introduced into the philosophical lexicon by Ashley-Cooper Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, has found a place in the teachings of many thinkers. Immanuel Kant was one of them. The position of the theory of moral sense, which exerted a formative influence on Kant’s moral philosophy, varied as it evolved from the pre-critical to the critical period of Kant’s work. In order to find out what this influence was, I first reconstructed the views of Shaftesbury on the nature of the moral sense and then proceeded to analyse the place of this concept in Hutcheson’s philosophy. In the case of the former the moral sense is closely linked with the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the ugly which correspond respectively to the aesthetic categories of good and evil. The latter associates the moral sense with reason. I then examine Kant’s attitude to the concept of moral sense. First I look at the works of the pre-critical period in which this concept is used and conclude that Kant may have borrowed the concept from Hutcheson. At the same time Kant makes this concept an object of his immanent critique because already now the question arises of the nature and character of virtue and the possibility of its being estimated impartially. Next I turn to Kant’s works of the critical period in which he is more emphatic in claiming that the moral sense cannot be a criterion in making ethical judgments. However, Kant does not exclude this concept from his practical philosophy, but explains it in a different way from the views both of British sentimentalists and from his own views of the pre-critical period. Accordingly, the moral sense is no longer a sensation, but occupies a place in-between feelings as such and reason.

This paper is concerned with the principles of adjudication (diiudicatio, Beurteilung) and execution (executio, Ausübung) in the notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right (“Feyerbend’s Natural Right”). In this manuscript these principles are used as a binary scheme twice, each time in the introduction to the first chapter. To explain the meaning of these concepts I use other cases of their use in Kant’s philosophy. I have established that they are used as a pair only in the notes of various lecture courses and in rough drafts. The majority of these uses occur in the pre-critical period. In the critical period they can be encountered only in the first half of the 1780s. The latest case occurs in “Feyerabend’s Natural Right”. More often than not these terms are used in moral philosophy. Here they have two main meanings: the principle of adjudication corresponds to the objective foundation of volition, whereas the principle of execution points to the objective foundation; to adjudicate moral duty reason alone is enough, to execute it external (divine) will needs to be posited. The research has established that Kant borrows these concepts from the lecture course on logic where their main meaning is different: the principle of adjudication serving to determine theoretical cognition and the principle of execution, practical cognition. The source of the transformation that occurred in transferring these concepts to the sphere of moral philosophy is Meier’s Compendium. The pair is not used in it but the separation of knowledge into theoretical and practical is present. Meier defines practical knowledge as knowledge that can affect volition. “Feyerabend’s Natural Right” reflects all three meanings of the principles of adjudication and execution.

This research aims to present a coherent analysis of so-called “doctrinal hermeneutics” by examining notable passages from Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is first shown that doctrinal hermeneutics essentially relies on symbolic hypotyposis, which can be understood as thinking by analogy supplemented with a reference to intuition. Here, both an historical and a contemporary interpretation inform the reconstruction of what Kant understands by “symbolic hypotyposis”. Further, the specific nature of the ideas that Kant develops in Religion is examined, and it is shown that these are to be classified as ‘impure’ ideas — in contrast to the ‘pure’ ideas dealt with in the second Critique, e.g., of God. With the analogy and the distinction between pure/impure, it is possible to locate the entirety of ideas within a taxonomy. Finally, it is explored the specific purpose of such “symbolic interpretation”, and it is demonstrated that the value in question lies precisely in the ability to bridge the gap between intuition and concepts of pure reason. In this way, we can approach the incomprehensibilities and paradoxes faced by the human being who, while under the authority of the moral law, is nevertheless constituted “naturally”. This type of moral interpretation also positively influences the moral motivation of the interpreter.