The Rethinking Kant series is a collection of papers presented and discussed at the various regional study groups of the North American Kant Society. As such the volumes are intended to be indicative of the research and conversations of Kant scholars throughout North America. While ‘rethinking’ might suggest a kind of turn or change in position with regard to some traditional or accepted positions (if such things exist) in Kant scholarship, the takes and interpretations are far broader. There certainly are some papers that challenge interpretations that have been around for a while but others defend long-held views in light of certain developments in philosophy and other fields. There are also papers that aim to extend Kantian claims to new questions. The broadness of the range of contributions also covers a variety of themes and topics in Kant, running the gamut from his transcendental idealism to his views on history and claims about theology. The series includes papers from senior and junior scholars as well as graduate students and so it can truly be said to be representative of the best work being done on Kant in North America. To highlight this diversity of scholarship found in the series I will consider in more detail four of the papers found in the first two volumes. My choice in papers is not based on my assessment of quality or on personal interpretation. Rather my choice of the papers is meant to point to the breadth of interpretations and richness of potential for conversation in aiming to understand a very important and very complex philosophical thinker.

In ‘The Merits and Deficiencies of Kant's “Incorporation Thesis” as an Interpretation and a Revision’, Diane Williamson critiques what might seem to be a widely held view of the notion of freedom in Kant's practical philosophy by pointing to a tension between two uses, our freedom as human beings and our freedom as moral agents. She quotes Allison as holding that the incorporation thesis requires that ‘an incentive can determine the will to an action only insofar as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim’ (Ak. 6: 24). This reduces the power of inclination by suggesting that it alone is insufficient to bring us to act. What is required over and above any inclination is the free choice of acting on inclination, the choice to allow an inclination to be a part of our maxim. It is only in this way that we can hold agents accountable by ascribing the free choice of letting inclination into our decision-making. This discussion is attributed most clearly to Kant's discussion in Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason. Williamson suggests that this designates Kant's concern for incorporation as a kind of meta-maxim that is to be distinguished from the maxims of moral actions. The meta-maxim of incorporation is like a religious conversion rather than the subjective principles of normal decision-making. Williamson argues that, in accepting the incorporation thesis, Kant scholars like Allison and Korsgaard prefer the notion of freedom granted us as human beings over our freedom as moral agents and collapse the two: ‘If we subordinate the concept of morality to the concept of rationality, rather than privileging morality and giving it the ability to define a pure form of rationality, the meaning of rationality changes. This watered-down notion of rationality may be both the attraction of and the problem with the Incorporation Thesis’ (vol. 1, p. 86). Williamson's concern here is that in seeking to unite the freedom of a morally right choice and a morally defunct one, the proponents of the incorporation thesis in effect conflate the two and discredit the autonomy Kant wants to ascribe to the agent that can not only choose, but choose in a way that is free of inclination.

In this case, Williamson is right to be concerned with the difficulties that such a conflation brings. Kant on many occasions suggests to us that to act on the categorical imperative rather than hypothetical ones is a freer use of reason. In What is Enlightenment?, Kant suggests that the priest or official drawing upon private reasons has not fully emerged from his ‘self-incurred minority’ and so a move to unite this official's employment of private reason with a freer public use of reason is an error (8: 35). There is, however, an unmistakable unity between acting on the categorical imperative and on hypothetical ones. Both instances require acting on a subjective principle and while in the case of inclination the agent may not be employing the freest use of reason, he is not bound by the laws of nature. It is in this sense that the agent that acts on a hypothetical imperative is free. It is in this way that inclination alone cannot move us to act. If that were the case, the agent would indeed be bound by nature alone. This is a notion of freedom to which Kant regularly appeals throughout his Critical philosophy. It is clear also that, as Williamson points out, Kant regularly appeals to different notions of freedom or autonomy, a move that certainly complicates our discussion of the choices we can and should make.

In ‘The End of Kant's Critiques: Kant's Moral “Creationism”’, Karl Ameriks looks to the end of the Critique of Judgement to point to a particular aspect of Kant's teleology. Ameriks holds that at the end of the third Critique there is reason to see Kant as offering some objective validity to the acknowledgement of a human telos. To make sense of this claim we must situate concerns about God, immortality and the highest good in relation to concerns about human freedom. For Ameriks, Kant misspeaks when he refers to the moral law and our freedom as matters of faith alone since there is sufficient subjective and objective ground to consider it a matter of fact:

Based on Kant's own qualifications, Ameriks suggests that human freedom is objectively valid. This is to be contrasted with our concerns of the highest good, immortality and God. These are concerns that Ameriks holds to be appropriately considered matters of faith. This faith is a reasonable, public and necessary faith for all finite rational beings. While the subjective and objective grounds of freedom we can find within our very intention to follow the moral law, the grounds for God, immortality and the soul rely on that intention and the hope of attainment or realization of that intention. Thus the holding true of God, immortality and the soul requires a Kantian notion of faith that stems from practical indispensability but recognizes the impossibility of objective verification. In this, Ameriks situates faith as lacking the grounds of matters of fact but standing on sturdier ground than matters of opinion.

Ameriks's paper brings into focus an important and often overlooked aspect of Kant's Critical philosophy. While Kant's first Critique is seen by some as putting faith in God beyond reach, Ameriks points to the necessary role of faith in God in the completion of the Kantian opus. He highlights the distinction between the holding true of faith and the holding true of opinion, a distinction that regards Kant as far more pious than he is traditionally given credit for. The conclusion, however, from the facticity of human freedom to a claim of objective validity seems in conflict with the claims of the first Critique in which the phenomenal experience or facticity of freedom is separated from a noumenal claim about humanity. While there can be an objective validity to the experience of freedom, this is not the freedom with which determinists and compatibilists concern themselves.

Similarly concerned with the conclusions of the third Critique is Eckart Forster's ‘What is the “Highest Point” of Transcendental Philosophy?’ Forster suggests that the obvious answer to the question is the synthetic unity of self-consciousness but that a closer look at the Critiques suggests a multiplicity of highest points. This is due to Kant's pervasive distinction between two notions of highest, namely, highest as supreme and highest as most complete. The unity of apperception is the supreme condition of the use of the understanding while addressing the question of how nature is possible is the most complete employment of the understanding. The former is the highest subjective condition of theoretical philosophy while the latter is the highest objective condition of theoretical philosophy. There is an analogous occurrence in Kant's practical philosophy where he is more direct in addressing the vagueness of ‘highest’: ‘It can mean “supreme” (supremum) or the “complete” (consummatum). The former is the unconditional condition, i.e., the condition which is subordinate to no other (originarium): the latter is the whole which is no part of a yet larger whole of the same kind (perfectissimum)’ (Ak. 5: 110).

This brings to light a symmetry between Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, each with a supreme and most complete highest point. According to Forster it is the link between these analogues that calls for a critique of the power of judgement and points to a central distinction for Kant. This distinction is the difference between conceptual or logical possibility on the one hand and real possibility on the other, between thinking something and knowing something. For the former all we need is the law of non-contradiction. For the latter the concept must also correspond to something that is objectively valid. This distinction, which is quite clear in Kant's theoretical philosophy, Forster suggests we must make in his moral philosophy as well while keeping in mind the distinction between supreme and most complete good. In moral philosophy we must keep in mind not just the logical possibility of the highest good but its real possibility. For Forster it matters whether we concern ourselves with the realizability or objective possibility of the supreme moral good – the realization of moral ends in the physical world – or a complete good – the proportional relation between virtue and happiness. Forster sees the third Critique as holding that God is the solution to the concern of the most complete good but recognizes this as an error in Kant's thinking. He holds that Kant is here conflating the supreme and most complete good.

Forster is right to highlight the distinction between logical and real possibility, a distinction that is regularly discussed in the theoretical philosophy and often overlooked in the practical philosophy. This distinction is certainly central to Kant from the outset of his Critical philosophy when he points to the duality of knowing as depending on a receptive sensibility and an active understanding. Of course, the antinomies arise from those moments where we are drawn to conflate the two concerns of logical possibility and real possibility. Reason brings us to the most pressing or most complete concerns of our nature – God, freedom and immortality – but we err if we offer them an objective validity they do not have. Forster suggests that Kant must be more agnostic than he has been in his account of God and that unfortunately Kant has conflated the two notions of possibility. In effect, Forster is suggesting a kind of moral antinomy or subreption on Kant's part concerning God and the highest good of morality.

In ‘The Place of Race in Kant's Physical Geography and in the Writings of the 1790s’, Robert Bernasconi argues that Kant's racism can be interpreted as underlying all his work. Bernasconi takes Philip Sloan as representative of those who defend Kant by arguing that in his later work he comes to abandon many of his earlier racist claims. Bernasconi argues that there are two central errors in the view that Kant changed his mind about race and its role in natural history. The first is that Sloan holds that the later Kant valued natural description over natural history and the second that Kant abandoned his views on germs in the species. Bernasconi argues that both claims are rejected by looking at Kant's lectures on physical geography of the 1790s. In the case of the first, it is only Kant's account of race that allows him to distinguish between natural history and natural description. Without an account of race, natural description could not reconcile the seeming permanence of differences in skin colour and a united origin of humanity. Others, like Buffon, had used the term ‘natural history’ before but Bernasconi suggests that Kant is imbuing new meaning into the term, an attempt at explaining: ‘in his use of the term “natural history” and the centrality he subsequently gave to it, Kant was not following precedent, but, as I have suggested, following the direction imposed on him by the matter at hand: the unity of the human species’ (vol. 2, p. 279). Bernasconi argues that Kant as a result gave an intelligible purpose to the concept of race, a role that race continued to play, as evidenced by Kant's lectures on physical geography into the 1790s. On this view, the concept of race – and germs as fundamentally linked to it – holds together a possible explanation of the origins of humanity.

If we grant the historical persistence of a mention of race in Kant's lectures on geography then a critical investigation is merited. An immediate distinction to be noted is that in his concerns for history, geography and anthropology Kant does not consider himself to be employing a critical method that strives to admit only synthetic a priori principles. These investigations of human nature are intended to provide data and empirical principles. Kant makes clear that not all investigations can attain objective validity and, while history might aim to provide a narrative, it will fall short of being able to provide the kind of explanation possible in the pure and natural sciences. So that to whatever extent the concept of race is necessary, it is not because that which constitutes, race, germs or the subsequent differences between people is necessary but rather that in order for us to provide for ourselves a narrative of human history we employ concepts that are logically possible but with questionable real possibility. Bernasconi holds that ‘Kant is not denying race. He is denying that it is visible to direct observation, while insisting, as he goes on to say in the same paragraph, that it is “necessary from viewpoint of natural history” ’ (vol. 2, p. 288). Kant's denial is even stronger. Kant's denial is that race is not a thing in itself. Race is not a noumenon but a phenomenal concept found only in the structure of the subject's knowing. It is thus necessary only insofar as man attempts to provide a narrative that unites the origin of those with different skin colour. Bernasconi's critique is a necessary one. First it is demanded by Kant's own insistence on auto-critique. More importantly, it is called for because Kant's philosophy is such an important entry in the discourse on rights and the dignity of the person. Regardless of whether or not Kant the person can be pardoned or saved from racism altogether, the importance of his philosophy for concerns of morality, politics and human freedom requires a critical examination of the place of race in Kant's philosophy.

Pablo Muchnik has successfully edited the first two installments of this series to offer unique discussions on a breadth of Kant's philosophy and a depth of examinations of those aspects central to Kantian thought. At times it is accessible to those new to Kant and at other times it engages the most seasoned of Kantian veterans. There is a great deal of disagreement to be found within the series and this should help point not only to the scope and variety of Kant scholarship in North America but also to the complexity and intricacy of the work of Kant himself.