Melissa Zinkin

This paper discusses Kant's early writings on optimism with an eye to his later pessimism. Kant's early discussion of optimism makes the distinction between optimism, which defends the goodness of our individual existence despite our suffering, and optimalism, a kind of theodicy that defends God's choice of this world along with all of its evils. It argues that Kant's early optimism, which is about one's present happiness, should be distinguished from his later discussion of hope, which concerns one's future happiness. The paper concludes by interpreting Kant's argument against suicide in the Groundwork in light of his youthful optimism.

In this paper, I explore what Robert Clewis, in The Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics, suggests is an ‘analogy’ between humour and beauty. I do this by focusing on Kant’s concept of wit (Witz), which is central to both reflective judgement and humour. By exploring the concept of Witz as a distinctive kind of cognitive activity, I believe a case can be made that the origin of Kant’s mature aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgement and his discovery of the principle of taste were, in part, a result of Kant’s thinking about Witz. I therefore share Clewis’s puzzlement about why, in the third Critique, humour, arguably the art of Witz, is not considered to be a beautiful art. I conclude by suggesting a possible reason why Kant thought that a judgement of humour is different from a judgement of beauty.

The aim of this chapter is to argue that, for Kant, reason is the faculty of systematic judgment and that such judgment is deep. My focus will be on theoretical reason and Kant's first Critique. I will also discuss the two highest degrees of cognition for Kant, insight and comprehension, and argue that comprehension is deep cognition that results from systematic judgment. In the next chapter, I will discuss the principle of systematicity from the perspective of the power of judgment and the third Critique. Here, however, I will note that in the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant makes the following, seemingly strange, statement. He writes; "the critique of pure reason...consists of three parts: the critique of the pure understanding, of the pure power of judgment, and of pure reason" (KU 5:179). For Kant, the faculty of the understanding is the faculty of thinking by means of concepts (A69/B94), the power of judgment is that by which we determine whether or not something stands under a given rule (or concept) (A133/B172), and the faculty of reason is the faculty of making inferences by means of principles (A130/B169). What, then, does it mean for Kant to say that the critique of pure reason consists of a critique of the pure understanding and, indeed, a critique of the power of judgment as well? Perhaps what Kant means is that his philosophical project consists of a critique of the three higher cognitive faculties, only one of which is reason. So, judgment should not really be considered to be a "part" of the faculty of reason itself. However, it is noteworthy that the section of the Introduction to the third Critique in which this passage appears is entitled, "On the critique of the power judgment as a means for combining the two parts of philosophy into a whole" (KU 5:176). Kant's point in this section is that because all three of the higher cognitive faculties have a priori principles-and hence have a "part" that is rational--the power of judgment, properly critiqued, can mediate between practical and theoretical reason. We can therefore make sense of Kant's puzzling statement above once we see that he considers reason to be the faculty that is the source of all principles of a priori cognition and that a critique of pure reason is an investigation by means of which we assess what we can cognize a priori by means of these principles(A11-12/B24-26). If, therefore, the understanding and the power of judgment contain principles a priori that govern their cognitive activity, then their principles must have their source in reason, and it is the task of a critique of pure reason to investigate these faculties, to discover their principles, and to see what they can and cannot accomplish a priori.

This paper defends a version of Kantian constructivism that focuses on the role of the feeling of respect for the moral law. For Kant, the moral worth of an action is constructed by the subject in a way analogous to the way the subject constructs objects of experience in the first Critique. Just as the formulations of the categorical imperative can be seen to be analogous to the categories of the understanding, so also can the feeling of respect be understood to be analogous to the a priori forms of intuition in the first Critique. By focusing on the role of the feeling of respect in constructing the moral worth of an action, Kantian constructivism can be defended against some of its critics. We can also see that for Kant the nature of moral worth requires understanding the moral law rather than knowledge of it.

Kant’s 1763 essay, Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, is one of the least discussed of all his pre-critical writings. When it is referred to, it is usually just to note a few passages that anticipate Kant’s later, Critical philosophy. I argue that instead of understanding these early anticipations of the Critical philosophy as separable from Kant’s discussion of negative magnitudes, we should take their origin in Kant’s investigation of negative magnitudes to be of central importance, since it can help us to understand aspects of Kant’s Critical view of cognition where negative magnitudes still play a role. I argue that negative magnitudes suggest to Kant a kind of cognitive activity that is neither the spontaneity of discursive thought not the receptivity of the senses. Rather it is an “effort” of the mind, of which we are conscious through a feeling. I show that Kant’s early views about negative magnitudes are retained in his Critical philosophy.

This article discusses the concept of publicity in Kant’s moral philosophy. Insofar as the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ can describe our relations with others, they can be considered to be moral concepts. I argue that we can find in Kant a moral duty not to keep our maxims of action private, or secret. Whereas Korsgaard argues that sometimes in the face of evil it is permissible to sidestep the moral law, I argue that it is rather through publicity that we can deal with evil in the non-ideal world. Moreover, by being open with our maxims, moral progress is possible. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Making the Ideal Real: Publicity and Morality in KantVolume 21, Issue 2Melissa Zinkin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000042Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Making the Ideal Real: Publicity and Morality in KantVolume 21, Issue 2Melissa Zinkin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000042Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Making the Ideal Real: Publicity and Morality in KantVolume 21, Issue 2Melissa Zinkin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000042Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation.

This paper explores Kant's account of force, a topic that was of central philosophical concern in his day, but which he does not explicitly address in any of his Critiques. Just as with the nature of space and time and the nature of the human will, the nature of force was under dispute by the philosophers and natural scientists to whose legacy Kant was responding. Yet, Kant does not make force an explicit topic of his Critiques, and thus provides no explicit transcendental account of force. Nevertheless, I will argue that one can indeed find in Kant a transcendental account of force, one that is a synthesis of empiricist and rationalist accounts, but in an unexpected place; the third Critique, in the discussion of the principle of purposiveness.

Kant's discussion of the feeling of respect presents a puzzle regarding both the precise nature of this feeling and its role in his moral theory as an incentive that motivates us to follow the moral law. If it is a feeling that motivates us to follow the law, this would contradict Kant's view that moral obligation is based on reason alone. I argue that Kant has an account of respect as feeling that is nevertheless not separate from the use of reason, but is intrinsic to willing. I demonstrate this by taking literally Kant's references to force in the second Critique. By referring to Kant's pre-critical essay on Negative Magnitudes (1763), I show that Kant's account of how the moral law effects in us a feeling of respect is underpinned by his view that the will is a kind of negative magnitude, or force. I conclude by noting some of the implications of my discussion for Kant's account of virtue.

This article makes a distinction between two kinds of feminist philosophy. One looks ‘up’ to the realm of philosophy and aims to intervene in this realm in order to make it feminist. The other looks ‘down’ to the world of human experience and aims to make it feminist. This article argues that feminist philosophers’ efforts are better spent on the second kind of feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy can better achieve its aims by applying philosophy to the critical analysis of women's lives and gender norms, rather than by attempting to change the discipline of philosophy itself.

Abstract In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to the pleasure that we feel when judging that an object is beautiful as the pleasure of "mere reflection". Yet Kant never makes explicit what exactly is the relationship between the activity of "mere reflection" and the feeling of pleasure. I discuss several contemporary accounts of the pleasure of taste and argue that none of them is fully accurate, since, in each case, they leave open the possibility that one can reflect without having a feeling of pleasure, and hence allow a possible skepticism of taste. I then present my own account, which can better explain why Kant thinks that when one reflects one must also have a feeling of pleasure. My view, which emphasizes the role of attention in Kant, depicts well what we do when we judge something to be beautiful. It can also suggest a way to explain the relation between judgments of taste and moral feeling, and begin to show how the faculty of feeling fills a gap in the system of our cognitive faculties.