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In 1904, the last January issue of the newspaper “Moskoskiye vedomosti” carried an article by Alexey I. Vvedensky, philosopher and theologian, Professor of the Moscow Theological Academy, entitled “The Great Rationalist. On the Centenary of Kant’s Death”. Although the publication could hardly be called unique for its time, as many Russian philosophers and journalists commented on this date, the article merits attention because of the way it represents Kant, and the fact that it sheds light on Vvedensky’s...

Despite the popularity of many of Kant’s ethical notions, such as autonomy, dignity and respect for persons, there is a perception, even among Kant scholars themselves, that one cannot reliably derive concrete duties from Kant’s moral philosophy. Against this, I shall argue that — properly understood — Kant’s ethics is of prime importance even today. I shall argue that Kant’s preferred procedure is actually the way we develop new ethical rules during the recent Coronavirus pandemic. In order to demonstrate...

On the eve of the tercentenary of Kant’s birth, just as it was a hundred years ago, Kantianism is simultaneously on the receiving end of the blows of history and attacks by rival philosophical parties, both progressivist and reactionary. The radical wings of both parties perceive modernity as a depressing, nauseating period which must be broken with by moving toward the past or toward the future. One of the most original and profound diagnoses of this attitude was offered by Hans Jonas, who discerned...

Kant’s solution for the problem of freedom of the will rests on his transcendental idealism and its differentiation of appearances and things in themselves. Human beings, with their bodies and observable inner and outer activities, are objects of perception (empirical intuition) and therefore appearances. These are only the appearances of their noumenal selves. Human beings are determined by laws of nature in all their perceivable alterations which include all their actions, but their noumenal selves...

The Kantian legacy has had a key impact on the landscape of theoretical philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Philosophers both in Germany and in Russia saw Immanuel Kant’s ideas as seminal for their philosophical research. The main schools of that era were formed in discussions of the problems and the solutions which were proposed by Kant. The methodological legacy of the critical philosophy effectively became the main benchmark of the thinking of a whole generation of intellectuals...

This paper examines two models of language philosophy. The first is the Kantian philosophy which sees language as an instrument of conveying mental content. I have selected Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl from amongst its numerous representatives. In this tradition, a language expression, i.e. an expression that has meaning, is determined by the objectively ideal character of the meanings (“rules”) given through the subject’s intellectual acts. The main task is to fix with a maximum degree of accuracy...

The authors attempt to look back on discussions of Marxist philosophy and historical materialism in this country without censoring, obfuscating, or simplifying issues in order to assess the prospects of their development. They focus on the work of a follower of Georgy Plekhanov, Lyubov Axelrod, who, in developing the concept of historical materialism, turned to Kant. Axelrod’s published works (from early articles and a dissertation on Tolstoy’s worldview, to her mature works on the history of materialism...

... 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 ...

Kant’s theory of enthusiasm has received relatively little attention in Kant studies. This is surprising in view of the fact that Kant was preoccupied with the theme of enthusiasm throughout his life. One of the reasons may be that for Kant enthusiasm is an affect. Therefore, it cannot be used to justify ethics. On closer examination, however, a more differentiated picture emerges. In addition to pathological enthusiasm, Kant recognises an aesthetically sublime enthusiasm, and in his reflections...

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...

This article is a study of literary representations of the text 'Königsberg-Kaliningrad' analysed from the point of view of geopoetics. Based on the descriptions of Königsberg-Kaliningrad in Bolotov's memoirs "Life and adventures of Andrey Bolotov, described by himself for his descendants", Brodsky's poem "Einem alten Architekten in Rom" and the novel "Königsberg" by Buida, the authors explore the sensorial perception of the city by the writers and establish its correlation...

The image of the city as one of the most important elements of modern post-industrial reality is an essential element in the world picture of any individual. The research aims to study the peculiarities of perception and verbal representation of the image of Kaliningrad by the students of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. The objectives of the research determined the choice of a comprehensive methodology, which included the method of unfini­shed sentences, as well as the methods of interpretation...

The article provides an overview of the VI International Scientific Seminar "Hagiog­raphy in the Russian Cultural Space", dedicated to the 200th anniversary of Fedor Dostoev­sky’s birth. The seminar was organized at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University on October 11—12, 2021. The main ideas and key points of the presentations of the plenary and section meetings are explored.

The article presents a comparative analysis of the translation of basic epistemological terms and attempts to analyse cognitive factors underlying the construction of meaning in the translation process. Apart from linguistic expertise, the translation of philosophical texts re­quires a profound understading of the subject matter. Ambiguity of philosophical terms, which appears as a result of the development of a particular concept within a specific philo­sophical school of thought, may lead to inconsistencies...

... expand­ing the context from the heading to the minimal text and the textual unity within a poetic book and forming micro- and metacycles with movable boundaries. The material of the re­search is Ivan Zhdanov's monoverses, which were considered both immanently and as part of the book. The main methods of research are semantic, contextual and distributive analysis. The author concludes that the heading, interpreting the text, sets its reference, and the mono­verse is both a self-sufficient text and ...

This article is a review of the 2nd research workshop ‘Hagiography in Russian cultural space,’ which was held on October 9—10, 2017, at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. The author defines the scope of Russian hagiography studies, identifies key problems discussed, and outlines prospects for further research.

Kant’s natural philosophy in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is heavily influenced by Newton’s Principia. However, a closer look makes it clear that Kant’s project has also been influenced by other thinkers. One of these thinkers is Leonard Euler. His work was of great influence for Kant, not only with regards to his view on space and inertia but on the relation between metaphysics and natural science in general. Even though Euler’s Physics built on Newton’s work, he differs from...

Both the categories and principles of understanding as well as the ideas and principles of reason build transcendental elements to conceive transcendental philosophy as a philosophical system. Accordingly, in addition to the “Transcendental Analytic”, Kant develops in the “Transcendental Dialectic” an expanded concept of the transcendental. The transcendental ideas do not denote object-constitutive principles but, in a weaker sense, conditions of the possibility of experience. The relation between...

In the mid-1760s, Johann Heinrich Lambert wrote a letter to Kant who offered cooperation with a view to reforming metaphysics. Based on the short correspondence between the two philosophers, it can be shown that this cooperation could never really come about. Nevertheless the thesis was sometimes put forward in research that Lambert had a defining influence on Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, also, and above all, with regard to the Newton-critical moments of this natur­al theory...

The aim of this research is to explore what relations self-affection bears to the intuitions of inner sense. I propose that self-affection makes some contribution to formal intuitions and empirical consciousness by arguing that the functions of self-affection consist respectively in conceptualising and conscious-making. I begin by examining Kant’s concept of inner sense and point out that inner sense as a receptive faculty depends on self-affection. In so doing, I emphasise that self-affection includes...

Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime is examined in the context of the emergence of the epistemological practice of scientific observation. By focusing on the genre-stylistic and semantic-structural features of the text the authors demonstrate the mechanisms of observation as well as the methods of describing the results characteristic of mid-eighteenth century science. The authors consider Kant’s treatise to be a hybrid text: on the one hand, it attests to...

This review of contemporary discussions of Kantian philosophy of mathematics is timed for the publication of the essay Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics. Volume 1: The Critical Philosophy and Its Roots (2020) edited by Carl Posy and Ofra Rechter. The main discussions and comments are based on the texts contained in this collection. I first examine the more general questions which have to do not only with the philosophy of mathematics, but also with related areas of Kant’s philosophy, e. g. the question:...

It is necessary to reconsider P. M. S. Hacker’s assessment of Kant and Wittgenstein’s philosophical affinities and the question concerning Wittgenstein’s alleged use of “transcendental arguments”. First, Alfred Norman’s reading of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a thought experiment receives revision to develop a view of the Critique of Pure Reason as a large-scale thought experiment that shares important logical features with the Tractatus. Then the question is addressed whether the middle...

The house which Immanuel Kant bought in Königsberg in 1783 has not survived, having been pulled down in the late nineteenth century. Likewise, hardly any of the great philosopher’s personal belongings have survived. Many pieces of furniture and household utensils were auctioned off after his death. So the Kant museum had few original exhibits from the Königsberg thinker’s house, and almost all these artefacts were lost during the Second World War. Today, digital technologies make it possible to present...

... Being, then, is not a Kantian noumenon, not an X, but a sensible, albeit non-empirical, object created by the power of imagination, a correlate of everything cognisable. So understood, being is created by the human, therefore it is not transcendent but immanent to him/her. I also note that in characterising being Heidegger gradually moves from “time” to “work of art” in the frame of which the power of imagination does not simply reflect reality, but creates multiple diverse worlds. Banham,...

The international conference “Kantian Rationality in Philosophy of Science” was held on 9–11 October 2020 at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) in Kaliningrad. Fifteen participants from different countries discussed aspects of the Kantian understanding of science and the roles of reason in it: the unity, difference, and systematicity of the functions of reason in science, as they are revealed in Kant’s discussions of criteria of scientificity, the classification of sciences, or methods...

The positions of Christian Wolff and Im­manuel Kant on the possibility of proving the existence of God require some examination. Wolff’s critique of the physical-theological proof and his proposed ways of improving it are here analysed. God is central to Wolff’s philosophical system and the fundamental prerequisite of his theoretical and practical philosophy. Although Wolff insists that the natural law is inherent in human nature and can therefore be comprehended by human reason without turning to...

As recent social research demonstrates, the life world is increasingly impacted by a corrosion of social bonds and aggressive habits expressed, for instance, in hate speech in the social media. Significantly, such phenomena have not been prevented from evolving within the framework of constitutional liberal states. In search of an appropriate mode of challenging the current social pathologies, we should examine Kant’s claim that, alongside the “juridico-civil (political) state”, an “ethico-civil...

I critically examine the plausibility of Kant’s conception of rationalising, a form of self-deception that plays a crucial role for Kant’s moral psychology and his conception of the functions of critical practical philosophy. The main problem I see with Kant’s conception is that there are no theory-independent criteria to determine whether an exercise of rational capacities constitutes rationalising. Kant believes that rationalising is wide-spread and he charges the popular philosophers and other...

In this study, I investigate the philosophico-pedagogical concepts developed by German and Russian Neo-Kantians, namely P. Natorp, S. I. Hessen, M. M. Rubinstein. In order to identify the peculiarities of the approaches of the Neo-Kantians to legal consciousness in children, I show that the widely accepted view that Hessen borrowed Natorp’s hierarchical triad of moral development — anomie, heteronomy, and autonomy — lacks a solid ground. Moreover, Natorp generally does not use the concept of anomie...

... proceed from the critical remarks of S. A. Askoldov (Alexeyev), pointing out that these contradictions stem from an absolutisation of intuition in cognition, the renunciation of the idea of gnoseological transcendence, incompleteness of the theory of immanence and discordance between onto-gnoseological categories. Askoldov’s critical comments clarify the substantive features of Lossky’s theory and the essence of the transformations carried out in Frank’s absolute ideal-realism. Alekseyev ...

The concept of appearance within the framework of the transcendental distinction between “appearance” and “thing in itself” is the cornerstone of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. However, its conceptual status seems largely uncertain. This uncertainty is the reason for a wide range of interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. A paradigmatic example is the contemporary confrontation between the “two objects” theory and the “two aspects” theory. In this paper, I develop a semantico-cognitive...

Kant’s concept of Gesinnung reveals the whole range of its problematic potential when it has to be translated into other languages: there are no ready-made equivalents. The problem stems from the evolution of this concept in Kant himself from the pre-Critical (“mode of thinking”, “convictions”, “virtuousness”, “virtues”, “sentiments”, “inclinations”, “aspirations”) to the critical works and then in the Critical period in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. Further problems arise from the complex...

... Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Calderon Press, Oxford University Press. Kozyra, W., 2018. Kant o woli i wolności. Edukacja Filozoficzna, 65(1), pp. 95-116. Lord, B., 2011. Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze. London: Palgrave. Ludwig, B., 2014. Die Freiheit des Willens und die Freiheit zum Bösen: Inhaltliche Inversionen und terminologische Ausdifferenzierungen in Kants Moralphilosophie zwischen 1781 und 1797. In: H. Puls,...

The sources of Kant’s term Gesinnung and a review of the problems of its translation into English were presented in the first part of this article; the second part examines the novel features that Kant brings to the interpretation of this concept in the critical period. In the Critique of Practical Reason these include the questions of manifestation of Gesinnung in the world, apprehended through the senses, the method of establishing and the culture of truly moral Gesinnung, as well as the problem...

his review sums up the main ideas presented at the international conference “Kant and Solovyov: Convergences and Divergences” held in Kaliningrad, Russia on 15-16 November 2018. The Conference was organised by the Academia Kantiana, a research unit of the Humanities Institute, Immanuel Kant Baltic University, in conjunction with the Department of the History of Russian Philo­sophy at the Philosophical Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The presentations were divided into two thematic blocks...

I proceed from the hypothesis that the difficulties in Kant’s presentation of his plan and, accordingly, the implicit reason for the critical attitude to this plan on the part of many contemporary philosophers stem from the fact that he had no theoretical link at his disposal which would offer a more solid scientific grounding for his entire system. I believe that Darwinism is such a link which bolsters the central but ungrounded thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason on the existence of a priori...

... strategy, which differs from the objective one but provides “some objective validity” (KrV, A 664 / B 692; Kant, 1998, p. 602) and therefore has systematic importance for the principles of homogeneity, specification, and continuity. My aim is to offer immanent strategies for a justification of the principles of homogeneity, specification, and continuity in the framework of the Critique of Pure Reason. Allison, H.E., 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven ...

In this essay, I specify types of representational content that can be attributed to Kant’s account of representation. The more specific aim is to examine which of these types of content can be regarded as possible without the application of concepts. In order to answer the question, I proceed as follows. First, I show how intuition (in Kant’s sense) can be seen as providing indexical content independently of empirical concepts. Second, I show in what sense the generation of spatial content can be...

A murder of an Afro-American detainee by a policeman at the end of May 2020 caused a public outrage in the United States, which led to a campaign against the monuments to historical figures whose reputation, according to the protesters, was marred by racism. Some German publicists, impressed by the campaign, initiated an analogous search for racists among the national thinkers and politicians of the past. Suddenly Kant emerged as a ‘scapegoat’. This statement is an attempt to assess such reactions...

My aim is to demonstrate the specificities and differences between transcendental deduction of concepts and deduction of the fundamental principles of pure practical reason in Kant’s metaphysics. First of all it is necessary to examine Kant’s attitude to the metaphysics of his time and the problem of its new justification. Kant in his philosophy explicated not only the theoretical world of cognition, but also the practical world of freedom. Accordingly, the fundamental means of proving metaphysics’...

Kant does not provide clear-cut definitions of apperception, consciousness, and self-consciousness and everywhere uses these terms as synonyms, which creates the problem of the relationship between these faculties. The importance of this problem stems from the colossal significance of each of the above-mentioned faculties which are intimately connected with Kant’s formulation of the key tasks of transcendental philosophy. The prime task is to discover the categories of understanding and to prove...

This paper explores the new frontier within Kantian scholarship which suggests that Kant places so much special importance on the value of rational nature that the supreme principle of morality and the concept of human dignity are both grounded on it. Advocates of this reading argue that the notion of autonomy and dignity should now be considered as the central claim of Kant’s ethics, rather than the universalisation of maxims. Kant’s ethics are termed as repugnant for they place a high demand on...