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This paper critically addresses the unwitting gender oppression underpinning Kant’s anthropological and legal approach to domestic labour, highlighting the helpfulness of his analysis of reproductive tasks for casting light on some of the historical causes behind the current view of such labour. With this general aim in mind, I first address the multiple meanings of the term ‘social domination’ as it is used in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Second, I focus on the figurative sense Kant assigns to this term in his account of the domestic order in the section ‘The Character of Sex’ from the same essay. Third, I highlight the social class biases that determine Kant’s examination of the role that women play in bourgeois families, where they are expected to outsource their caregiving and childrearing tasks thanks to the patrimony their husbands have accumulated. Finally, I draw some conclusions regarding the social agency that Kant considers available to women, suggesting that his account prioritises the privileged circumstances of wealthy women in eighteenth-century Prussia, neglects key challenges faced by more vulnerable groups in his time, and fails to support the extension of citizenship rights to the entire commonwealth.

By reading Kant on chemistry as a science, including his definition of science as such, this essay reviews Kant and the history of chemistry. Kant’s Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens is read in terms of contemporary axiomatic systems, via the astrophysicist Rudolf Kurth’s 1956 account, along with Nietzsche’s account of logic and causality. Nietzsche cites Kant’s theory in the context of a sustained discussion of Anaxagoras’ pre-Platonic cosmology. The paper includes reflections on alchemy, the history and historiography of chemistry, and recent contributions to the philosophy of chemistry. Since the foundations of chemistry are essentially non-mathematical, it cannot, following Kant, fully meet the criteria of a ‘science’. The same argument holds for alchemy (‘chymistry’ or spagyric), which is likewise not regarded as a science. Hermeneutic history and philosophy of science are useful, not only for developing an understanding of Kant’s conception of chemistry as a science, but also of his invocation of Stahl’s spagyric ‘art’, and his example of the mutable properties of a specific ore of mercury, Zinnober or cinnabar (HgS). A significant property of cinnabar (HgS) in this regard is that it changes colour, turning from red to black, depending on exposure to light. This can be interpreted as a metaphor illustrating problems of metamorphosis, and calling into question the widespread application of chemical principles. Together with his criticism of chemistry, Kant’s philosophical reflections open up possibilities for further research into concepts that first arose with alchemy.

This article examines the attempts of many libertarian philosophers to justify the self-ownership principle using the second formulation of the categorical imperative. It begins by reconstructing the self-ownership principle, according to which each person has a natural property right over her body and person. There are many versions of this principle, each recognizing a different set of such property rights; but what all formulations have in common is their radical anti-paternalism and, consequently, the permissibility of self-destructive behaviour. The paper then reconstructs and analyses two Kantian arguments for self-ownership. According to the first, persons have intrinsic value and should therefore never be used as mere means for someone else’s ends, which forbids ownership of other people. According to the second, persons must own their own bodies and persons in order to realise the personal and moral autonomy needed to uphold the moral law. Next, the article describes two ways in which self-ownership can be reconciled with different theories of personal identity: internalist and externalist. Internalism holds that the body is either identical with the person or part of the person. Externalism holds that the body is external to the person, which is a nonphysical mental substance. For Kantian libertarians, these two approaches present a dilemma. If they accept internalism, then self-ownership is incompatible with the categorical imperative because it involves self-instrumentalization. Since all persons are of equal value, instrumentalizing oneself is just as impermissible as instrumentalizing other persons. However, if Kantian libertarians accept externalism, then self-ownership simply does not follow from the categorical imperative because violating property rights to external re­sources is not itself an instrumentalization of their owner. Thus, the categorical imperative and self-ownership are incompatible.

While working on the archive materials of Gustav Gustavovich Shpet, one of the authors of this article came across notebooks in black covers in which, over the years, he had made entries (ranging from self-observations to tentative formulations of his thoughts which became part in one form or another of works that were later published or prepared for publication. One such notebook was the “1913 Diary”, which contains hurried jottings belonging to the period when Shpet was in direct communication with Edmund Husserl, Lev Shestov, Natalia Guchkova and others. Understanding the meaning of these hasty notes requires hermeneutic reconstruction, including chronological comparison of the “1913 Diary” with other archive materials (dating from Shpet and his interlocutors) as well as the works of Shpet and Husserl published at that time. The article presents the results of the hermeneutic reconstruction of one entry which deals with the theme of the conversation about Kant and phenomenology that took place between Shpet and Husserl on 30 (7) June 1913. The authors sequentially uncover the possible thematic layers of their intellectual conversation, dwelling on such topics as “the Kantian dilemma”, “the reflection theory”, “psychologism”, “pure ego”, “reality” and “experience”. Each problem involves, in one way or another, their assessment of Kant’s philosophical journey (especially in the theory of cognition). The modern context is provided by the philosophy and methodology of science, since the “conversation” between Shpet and Husserl throws new light on such key problems in the theory of knowledge as “human-sizedness”, “historicity” and continuity.

Before Emil Lask wrote The Logic of Philosophy (1911) he outlined the main theses of his future philosophical project in The Philosophy of Right (1905): critique of the “two worlds theory”, the problem of pre-reflective cognition, the emphasis on the role of “pre-scientific” pre-theoretical reality. But how, according to Lask, does the transition from “pre-legal” to “legal” reality take place? The Philosophy of Right criticises the “two worlds theory”, interpreted in the spirit of Platonism, as a mixing of value and reality in the natural law and historism. Lask claims that such a shift can be avoided in the critical philosophy of law. Instead of choosing between absolutisation of extra-historical legal norm and absolutisation of historical factuality the critical philosophy of law works with the real world as a “semi-finished product” (Halbfabrikat) which corresponds to the meanings of culture. In the “semi-finished product” the realm of right is partly “scientific” and partly “pre-scientific”, which makes the question of transition from the “pre-legal” to “legal” reality particularly important. The transition is revealed through the creation of legal concepts, in which their pre-scientific formation (vorwissenschaftliche Begriffsbildungen) and the teleological principle, which is responsible for the selection of the pre-legal empirical substrate of right that can become legal, play a significant role. The Philo­sophy of Right and The Logic of Philosophy are seen as keys to understanding each other. Therefore the “two-storied building” metaphor used in The Logic of Philosophy to explain the two levels of cognition can be applied to the concept of right. I arrive at the conclusion that the philosophical-legal practice of norm formation, according to Lask, involves “two necessities”: the necessity of recognising the pre-scientific element in right and the necessity of converting it into a “scientific” one. Thus, normativity in the philosophy of right, according to Lask, is not introduced from “above-outside”, but is formed in a “semi-finished product” of the right itself.

The Seventh Immanuel Kant International Summer School devoted to the themes of enthusiasm and history in Kantian philosophy was held in Kaliningrad from 28 July to 5 August 2025. Organised by the Academia Kantiana at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, the Petersburg Dialogue and the Sochi Dialogue Forums, it was addressed to budding scholars, i.e. undergraduate and post-graduate students and young doctors. The lectures of the School’s scientific supervisor, Vadim A. Chaly, and the discussions that followed covered topics ranging from methodological foundations of the work with Kant’s legacy to the context in which Kant formed his philosophy of history. This is also linked with the historical role of the emotions. These stem both from the characteristics of Kant’s concept of enthusiasm and from the applicability of this concept to the interpretation of some recent varieties of technological enthusiasm. Reviewed below are nineteen papers presented at the conference of young scholars.