Con-Textos Kantianos. International Journal of Philosophy
Con-Textos Kantianos aims at boosting the philological and critical research on Kant studies, considering also actual discussions on Kant's thought. That is the reason why its heading hints to contexts with texts. Kant shall be the main focus of the journal, which will tackle subjects such as Moral and Political Philosophy, History of Ideas, Philosophy of Right, Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Education, Aesthetics, Anthropology, Metaphysics and Epistemology, Human Rights, Social Policy, Theories of Justice and Cosmopolitanism. CTK aims at being an international and cosmopolitan inspired e-journal, where the Spanish language receives equal acknowledgement as English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese do. The main purposes of the journal are to enhance the development of a Kant scholarship network at the Latin American scale and to tighten the links between research groups already consolidated in different countries and languages. The editorial team, which gathers Kant scholars from Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Spain, will certainly ease the fulfillment of both purposes
The The public sphere between the Aufklärung and antagonism - the priority of Kant’s social philosophy in his reflections on history
In this work I seek to explain the relationship between the substantially different characterizations of the public sphere made by Kant. In his writings on the Enlightenment, the productive component of this space is emphasized and the conditions that allow social and political progress to be fostered are identified. On the other hand, in the texts on the idea of a universal history, its antagonistic dynamics are rather emphasized. At first glance, the teleological history according to a plan of nature seems to relegate the public sphere and the public use of reason to a secondary role. However, given the epistemic status of the philosophy of history, I will seek to highlight that, on the contrary, this regulative idea only has philosophical significance due to the effects of its public dissemination. Thus, what motivated the elaboration of a philosophy of history was rather the political potential of public thought, and, thus, the teleology of history is secondary to the conception of the public sphere.
Copyright (c) 2024 Con-Textos Kantianos. International Journal of Philosophy
Copyright (c) 2026 Con-Textos Kantianos. International Journal of Philosophy
The Artistic is Political. Review of: Susan Meld Shell, The Politics of Beauty: A Study of Kant’s Critique of Taste. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2022. ISBN 9781009011808
Interview with Luca Fonnesu, conducted by Sandra V. Palermo, in which the Italian philosopher discusses how his philosophical research has evolved since his university days, what the philosophical and political climate was like during his formative years, and how his philosophical interests intersected with Kantian thought. The interview also discusses Kant’s importance for contemporary moral philosophy and epistemology, the role of philosophical societies and the relationship between philosophy and history of philosophy.
Kant and the Puzzle of Respect: a Volitional Account of Achtung. Review of: Jorg Nöller, Kant on Respect (Achtung), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 66 pp.ISBN 978-1-009-51107-0.
Between Derivation and Independence: Testing the Moral Roots of Kantian Right. Review of: Brecher, Martin & Hirsch Philipp-Alexander (eds.), Law and Morality in Kant. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2026, 342 pp. ISBN: 9781009291996.
Las posibilidad de la historia de la filosofía: de un nuevo Kant. Reseña de: Macarena Marey, Voluntad omnilateral y finitud de la tierra, La Cebra, Buenos Aires, 2020, 335 pp.
We Need Ideas Like Kant's for the Climate Crisis. Review of: Zachary Vereb, Kant and Environmental Philosophy: The Climate Crisis and the Imperative ofSustainability. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 274 pp. ISBN: 9781009664921
Between formal wrongs and fatal truths. Kant’s defense of truthfulness as a perfect duty. Review of: Jens Timmermann, Kant and the Supposed Right to Lie, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 216 pp.
Belief, Sincerity, and Certainty in Kant’s “Theodicy” Essay
In this brief paper I offer an interpretation of what “sincerity” and “certainty” mean in the context of Kant’s discussion of the story of Job in the “Theodicy” essay. I argue that, for Kant, the encounter with evil ideally leads various commitments to become reflective.
Reconsidering Kant’s Copernican Revolution: From Synthetic A Priori Knowledge to the Metaphysical Status of the Noumenon
This paper critically examines Michael J. Olson’s interpretation of Kant’s Copernican Revolution as a transformation of the object of metaphysics into synthetic a priori knowledge with a twofold structure. While granting Olson’s insight that the Copernican Revolution is not merely a perspectival reversal but a substantive reconfiguration of metaphysics modeled on the methodological revolutions in mathematics and physics, I argue that his account remains incomplete. In particular, Olson’s interpretation risks reducing Kant’s critical project to an epistemological enterprise. By focusing on Kant’s phenomenon–noumenon distinction, I show that transcendental idealism involves unavoidable metaphysical commitments that cannot be captured solely in terms of synthetic a priori knowledge. Although noumena are not objects of knowledge, they function as necessary limiting concepts and as the metaphysical ground of appearances. Consequently, Kant’s Copernican Revolution should be understood as a rearticulation rather than a replacement of metaphysics.
Scholarship on Kant’s religious writings commonly diverges on two related issues: the theological weight and meaning of his endorsement of religious faith, and the apparent inconsistency between his earlier and later, seemingly less secular, treatments of the subject. The questions raised by these disputes are not only theoretical; for at stake is whether in Kant’s considered view a just political community is ultimately sustainable without affirmative theological commitments of some kind.Kant’s brief essay “On the Failure of All Philosophic Efforts at Theodicy” opens a promising window on such questions. It is thematically continuous with the Critique of Judgment, published one year earlier, that itself ends with an implicit proof of the impossibility of theodicy understood as a theoretical justification of God’s moral wisdom based on what experience of the world teaches. [8:255] At the same time, Kant’s essay also differs from the Critique of Judgment in in a number of crucial ways that partly reflect Kant’s darkening assessment of his political circumstances as ones requiring new means of public enlightenment on the crucial question of the true basis of religious faith, as reflected in subsequent religious writings beginning with Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason. One striking feature of that change is the replacement of sincerity, or honesty before the bar of conscience, with conscientiousness, or striving to be honest, as the highest goal of moral aspiration, and of indulgence of the inclinations through self-deception as the ultimate source of human evil. Another is conceptual room for something like grace in the religious sense.
El principio trascendental de la razón y la necesidad de la naturaleza en el Apéndice de la Dialéctica trascendental
This paper presents an original proposal regarding what, in the secondary literature, has been called The Necessitation Account. This theory, on the one hand, defends the necessity of the particular laws of nature based on a metaphysical consideration that holds that the laws are derived from the natures of things; on the other hand, it maintains that the necessity of the particular laws is not knowable by human beings. In this paper, I argue that the latter claim is unsatisfactory and propose to amend the epistemic thesis, pointing out that through the transcendental principle of reason we can understand the metaphysical groundings of nature, and I propose a solution to a skeptical problem that has not been addressed by the defenders of this theory regarding systematic unity and classifications of nature.
On Artistic and Moral Wisdom in the Theodicy
This essay looks at a section of Kant’s ‘On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy’, 8: 263-65, in which he makes two distinctions: first, that between artistic and moral wisdom, and second, that between doctrinal and authentic theodicy. The essay defends Kant’s vindication of Providence from a practical point of view. Kant argues that all the philosophical attempts at theodicy fail, but we can continue to hold onto the faith that the world is wisely governed if we restrict ourselves to moral, as opposed to artistic, wisdom and to authentic, as opposed to doctrinal, theodicy. Kant’s key move is negative, that the workings of the highest wisdom are beyond our experience and so beyond our insight; but where there is no theoretical veto, the practical interest prevails. The essay considers what this priority of the practical amounts to. Kant uses the geographical metaphor of ‘domains’ and argues that Reason, which has both theoretical and practical employments, has an interest in extending its territory, which requires theoretical reason to accept existence claims needed by practical reason even though these claims cannot be legitimated by theoretical reason from its own insight. The ‘authentic’ theodicy is God’s declaration within the practical employment of reason that there is a wisdom behind the creation and maintenance of the universe even though it is inscrutable to us and hidden.
This study examines Immanuel Kant’s 1791 essay on theodicy as a legal proceeding before the “court of reason,” where divine justice is assessed through rational inquiry rather than doctrinal authority. It explores the political context of the essay, Kant’s interpretation of nature, and the role of the Book of Job as a model of sincere religious faith. The study also considers the duties of theologians and clergy and reflects on the essay’s continuing relevance for issues related to religion, morality, and the problem of evil.
Kant's Alleged Ambiguity Toward Leibniz: Revisiting the Critique of Dogmatism
This paper discusses Kant’s critique of Leibniz, especially in the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection in the Critique of Pure Reason. Although Kant’s early criticism suggests an identification of Leibniz with Wolffian dogmatism, later texts reveal a more nuanced attitude, distinguishing between Leibniz’s own metaphysics and its early reception. Examining the four central pairs of concepts of reflection–identity/diversity, agreement/opposition, inner/outer, and matter/form, this article shows that what Kant primarily criticizes is a form of Leibnizianism popularized through Wolff, rather than Leibniz himself. Drawing on Leibniz’s writings, it is shown that the alleged ambiguity in Kant’s position toward Leibniz reflects a certain development in his thought: namely, a movement from critique toward partial retrieval. This study is relevant not only to the question of Leibniz’s reception in the eighteenth century, but also to understanding Kant’s relationship to the rationalist tradition, which he sought both to overcome and to preserve.
Schematic Mediation in the Critique of Pure Reason: Synthesis of Imagination and Schematism
My aim in this article is to propose an interpretation of the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, in order to elucidate the relation between schematism and the a priori synthesis of imagination. The guiding questions may be formulated as follows: What exactly does Kant mean when he claims that the “schema is a product of the imagination”? What is the relation between this statement and the one in §10, according to which synthesis is an effect of imagination, or the one in the B Deduction, according to which imagination performs a transcendental synthesis? I defend the thesis that, insofar as imagination determines time a priori according to the unity of the categories, it translates each of them into a temporal language (or a language of transcendental imagination), that is, it gives sense to the category in the determination of the object when it is thought according to temporal patterns.
«Una fortaleza imbatida a espaldas del nuevo frente» Una nota sobre la doctrina de las facultades cognoscitivas, la crítica de Salomon Maimon y la réplica de Kant
This paper addresses Kant's doctrine of the heterogeneity of cognitive faculties and distinct forms of representation and its critique by Solomon Maimon as presented in his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, a work which acts as both a restoration of the pre-Kantian rationalist perspective of «German-School-Metaphysics» and a precursor to the post-Kantian speculative tendency of German Idealism. The paper emphasizes Kant's defence of his doctrine against Maimon's criticisms as a form of historical-philosophical self-demarcation by the philosopher of Königsberg, both in relation to the rationalist tradition against which his thought turns critically, as well as in connection to those attempts to reformulate and overcome his doctrine that culminated in the emergence of German Idealism. As the core reason for his resistance to both philosophical positions the present paper wants to identify Kant's philosophical commitment to the finitude of human knowledge, which inherently reflects the finitude of the knowing subject.
This paper rests on my claim elsewhere (see Huxford, 2020) that Kant was concerned with the fundamentals of theodicy throughout his career and not just in the short 1791 essay devoted to the subject. It sets out Kant’s positions, developed in the period before the publication of his first Critique, regarding these fundamentals, namely God’s existence, the nature of evil and the reality of free will. Some of these positions were maintained through Kant’s career, others were either present only in embryonic form or abandoned altogether. Three issues dominate. First, Kant downgraded physical evil to natural harm. Second, evil was ontologically real being a negative value on the scale of goodness. Third, Kant continued to advance theoretical theodicies after the publication of his first Critique thus leaving a serious disconnect when his work is viewed in toto. I regard Kant’s thought on these fundamentals to be exploratory. So this paper does not attempt to pull his thoughts together into pre-Critical theodical “system”, although elements of such can be discerned.
The Power of Illusion. Disgust and Representability in Moses Mendelssohn’s Aesthetics
In the context of the emergence of aesthetics as an autonomous discipline in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, Moses Mendelssohn was one of the leading voices in the development of a new theory of sentiments and representation. In this context, Mendelssohn understood the need to delineate the limits of aesthetic representation and addressed the issue through an in-depth study of sentiments. In this article, I propose a study of the category of disgust in Mendelssohn's aesthetics, starting from his theory of aesthetic illusion. Disgust is, in fact, a feeling that cannot be reduced to the illusion created by the work of art but always refers to reality. To this end, I will refer mainly to the 82nd Literaturbrief, in which Mendelssohn expounds his study of disgust, and secondly to the Rhapsody as a text that reveals the need to deepen the theory of aesthetic illusion in light of the limits indicated through disgust. Finally, an aesthetic paradigm will emerge, which is also relevant to the contemporary debate on the possibilities of aesthetic representation
Copyright (c) 2025 Con-Textos Kantianos. International Journal of Philosophy
This paper aims to reconstruct Kant’s Refutation of Idealism as a successful world-directed transcendental argument against Mendelssohn’s “problematic idealism.” Mendelssohn’s problematic idealism arises from both a metaphysical and an epistemological doctrine that has an undeniable Cartesian root. Metaphysically, he assumes what we may call a “commonsense realist” view: that appearances outside our mind in space are, in themselves, material in nature, just as appearances within our mind are, in themselves, mental in nature (a position he refers to as “dualism”). Epistemologically, Mendelssohn holds that there is a fundamental hiatus between the material and mental worlds since the inference from our internal representations to the purported external material things they supposedly copy is, at best, problematic—this is what we refer to as “indirect realism.” Kant’s Refutation challenges both aspects of this view. On the epistemological level, Kant argues that we have direct awareness of the existence of external material things in space. On the metaphysical level, he claims that the ultimate nature of external things is neither material nor mental but consists instead of mind-independent things-in-themselves—noumena in the negative sense. However, Kant’s argument can only succeed as a world-directed transcendental argument if it is able to establish the truth of a persistent mind-independent thing in itself is a necessary condition for the conscious of our existence determined in time.
The Bias Against Dependence: Women and Passive Citizenship in the Doctrine of Right.
Kant distinguishes between passive and active citizens; only the latter are entitled to vote. The difficulty is that he never justified this restriction, so two main theses have been proposed to explain it: the corruption thesis, which holds that passive citizens, by virtue of their dependence, lack autonomous judgment and therefore cannot vote; and the interdependent-independence thesis, which argues that the issue is not judgment but social position—those who depend on others cannot be co-legislators. This article advances a middle position: passive citizenship is a social condition of dependence, yet there is also evidence that Kant distrusted the judgment of certain groups he deemed passive, such as women. I will argue that his analysis treats dependence through a bias: the dependent are presumed unable to judge on a par with active citizens.
Kant on Individual Noumena and the Limits of Discursive Understanding
It is relatively uncontroversial among scholars that, according to Kant, we cannot have determinate theoretical cognition of noumena. In this paper I shall argue that Kant’s account of the limits of human understanding allows us to draw a more radical conclusion: the very notion of an individual ‘intelligible being’ lies beyond human comprehension. I further suggest that this claim best conveys Kant’s ban of a positive use of the notion of noumenon. My investigation is guided by a question: Is it possible for concepts to successfully refer to an individual object in absence of sensible intuition? Or, to put it differently, is it possible to single out one or multiple individual noumena (and not mere concepts thereof) falling under a certain concept? I shall argue that, while we cannot exclude this possibility, we cannot comprehend (and thus admit) it either. My hope in this paper is thus to shed further light on Kant’s stance towards noumena.
Kant on Freedom of the Will and the Development of Classical German Philosophy. Review of: Jörg Noller and John Walsh (translators and editors), Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, XLVII + 315 pp., ISBN: 978-1-108-72967-3
Kant's cosmopolitan interest in knowledge
This article draws attention to the problem of the meaning of knowledge in Kant and the need for an orientation of knowledge. In this perspective, it takes into consideration the kantian distinction between the scholastic concept of philosophy and the cosmic concept of philosophy. Isofar as this concept of philosophy defends the orientation of knowledge towards the moral ends or moral destiny of humanity, it is possible to speak of a cosmopolitan interest of knowledge. The thesis of the article is that this concept of philosophy is linked to the presence of the notion of the interest of reason in Kant, being, moreover, consistent with Habermas's assessment of pure practical interest as a guiding interest of knowledge. It is structured in two points: 1. The interest of practical reason as a mobilising interest and a guiding interest of knowledge 2. The cosmic concept of philosophy as an expression of the cosmopolitan interest in and meaning of knowledge
Situated universals (visions from the Third World)
This note is a version of an online talk I gave at the Workshop “Kant and Universalism from a Global Perspective”, October 25th 2024, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The event was organised by Marcus WIllaschek and Simon Rebohm. I took the chance to talk about the meaning of reading Kant in the Third World and my experience with the geopolitics of knowledge.
Kant, the European Commission, and the Unity of Reason
The text examines the Treaty of Rome’s (1957) decision to designate the European executive body as the “Commission,” replacing the ECSC’s “High Authority.” It argues that this ostensibly bland, technical naming sought to avoid the appearance of supranational sovereignty while at the same time installing technocratic grammar that depoliticizes power. In light of Schmitt and Heidegger, it questions the alleged neutrality of technique and its capacity to conceal political decisions under the veil of the “technical.” The guiding thread is Kant: the distinction between the technical-practical and the moral-practical, and between the “moral politician” and the “political moralist.” Only the primacy of the moral-practical —of laws grounded in freedom, with every decision arising from natural determinations bracketed— can limit politics and orient the State toward perpetual peace; technical prudence yields management, cunning, and simulation. Applied to Europe, calling the executive a “Commission” would have been a ploy that predisposes the Union to the hegemony of technique, weakening transparency and even the possibility of understanding cosmopolitan right as a mandate. The essay concludes that this drift favors nihilism and civic disaffection: without a rearticulation of the unity of reason and of the person’s place, the institutional machinery becomes gearwork without a horizon.
The Role and Scope of Intuition (Anschauung) in Kant Transcendental Philosophy
Kant's notion of intuition is usually associated with the a priori forms of space and time. In my paper, firstly, I want to demonstrate that intuition is very complex and has different functions for transcendental consciousness and plays an important role in each function, secondly, to substantiate the thesis that this concept is key to understanding the principle of Kant's transcendental philosophy, and thirdly, to point out some aporias or problems associated with this concept. Here are some difficulties: the relationship between pure intuition and empirical intuition is problematic, and the function of intuition and representation is difficult to distinguish unambiguously. In my article, I will consider several key points in Kant's philosophy for which the concept of intuition plays its own special function.
Marcos Thisted’s Defense of the Thematic Unity and Doctrinal Consistency of the Fortschritte der Metaphysik
«The human being is the only creature that must be educated». On the relationship between Kant’s education and philosophy of History
This essay aims to show the dialog that Kant’s suggestions for education establish with his philosophy of History. Starting from the thesis present in the Lessons on pedagogy which suggests that «The human being is the only creature that must be educated», we seek to justify it based on the Kantian concept of Bestimmung, according to which the realization of man’s vocation depends on a permanent effort of an intergenerational nature. Within this framework of ideas, the question concerning education reveals its importance in two senses: both the educational process which is intrinsically presupposed in the pathway towards the integral development of reason and the cultural and civilizational progress, and the educational process in the strict sense, considered as an institutionalized mechanism. On this level, we see Kant reinforcing the urgency of thinking about an educational system in line with the purposes of the human species and therefore reflecting in his suggestions for education – and in its four tasks: to discipline, cultivate, civilize and moralize – the path of maturation of reason in its various stages.