I identify four central instances of what I take to be a puzzle for Kant’s account of our knowledge of a priori and “absolutely necessary” truths or laws: namely, that it seems to depend on certain apparently contingent facts being true of all human beings. These facts include that space and time are the forms of our sensibility, that we have the particular categories that we do, that we can feel respect for the moral law, and can sense the harmony of our cognitive faculties. I consider two questions: first, how does the apparent contingency of these facts bear on the necessity of the truths they are meant to ground? Second, how does Kant establish that these contingent facts are actually true of all human beings? I conclude by suggesting that Kant’s answer to these questions turns on what must be the case if skepticism is to be avoided.

Although Kant’s view of the rational subject has been enormously influential, less attention has been paid to his account of what occurs when a subject fails to reflect on her reasons and falls under the influence of what he calls prejudice. My first goal in this paper is to explain Kant’s definition of prejudice by drawing on related discussions scattered across his published texts, notes and lectures. Next, I discuss his prescriptions for how prejudice can be identified and overcome. Although he is often portrayed as requiring subjects to internally monitor their beliefs and intentions, I show that he in fact takes individual reflection to be a limited tool. Rather, he argues that communication with other subjects can be indispensable in fully overcoming prejudice. Finally, I argue that Kant’s account successfully avoids either over- or under- intellectualizing prejudice. In allowing that subjective causes like a subject’s associations and inclinations can lead her to judge and act in prejudiced ways, I suggest that he anticipates contemporary discussions of implicit bias. At the same time, however, he continues to maintain that a subject is rationally accountable for her prejudices, since, on his view, she can always refrain from unreflectively endorsing her associations and inclinations.

Janum Sethi investigates Kant’s application of hylomorphism to the theory of self-consciousness, as evident in the distinction she draws between transcendental and empirical apperception. According to Sethi, the standard reading of this distinction overlooks that it is drawn in terms of a distinction between transcendental and empirical unity of apperception, which can be traced to the distinct natures of the two faculties that produce these unities: whereas the former is brought about according to the rational laws of the understanding, the latter is a result of the psychological laws of the imagination. In light of this, Sethi argues that the two types of apperception amount to a subject’s awareness of two cognitively essential aspects of herself: namely, her spontaneity and her receptivity – that is, of her capacity to receive the material for cognition through the senses and of her capacity to impart a certain form to this material through the use of the understanding.

A common reading of Kant’s notion of synthesis takes it to be carried out by the imagination in a manner guided by the concepts of the understanding. I point to a significant problem for this reading: it is the reproductive imagination that carries out the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, and Kant claims repeatedly that the reproductive imagination is governed solely by its own laws of association. In light of this, I argue for a different division of the labor of synthesis between the imagination and the understanding. On my view, while the reproductive imagination puts representations together in accordance with laws of association, the understanding recognizes (some of) these combinations of representations as necessary in virtue of corresponding to a connection in the objects represented. I conclude by suggesting that a virtue of my account is that it can make sense of Kant’s claim that the relational categories are merely regulative for intuitions.

Kant’s notion of common sense (Gemeinsinn) is crucial not only for his account of judgements of beauty, but also for the link he draws between the necessary conditions of such judgements and cognition in general. Contrary to existing interpretations which connect common sense to pleasure, I argue that it should be understood as the capacity to sense the harmony of the cognitive faculties through a sui generis sensation distinct from pleasure. This sensed harmony of the faculties is not only the ground of judgements of beauty and the basis of pleasure in the beautiful, but is also essential, I argue, for the reflecting judgements through which we acquire empirical concepts.

Kant is said to be the first to distinguish between consciousness of oneself as the subject of one’s experiences and consciousness of oneself as an object, which he calls transcendental and empirical apperception, respectively. Of these, it is empirical apperception that is meant to enable consciousness of any empirical features of oneself; what this amounts to, however, continues to puzzle interpreters. I argue that a key to understanding what empirical apperception consists in is Kant’s claim that each type of apperception corresponds to a distinct type of unity of apperception—that is, a distinct way in which representations can be related for a subject. Whereas transcendental unity of apperception requires that representations be actively combined by the understanding, empirical unity of apperception obtains when representations are passively combined by the reproductive imagination. In light of this, I develop a novel account of Kant’s two types of apperception, according to which they correspond to a cognitive subject’s consciousness of two essential aspects of herself—namely, her spontaneity and receptivity.

I discuss three sets of worries concerning Watkins’ account of laws of nature in Kant on Laws. First, I argue contra Watkins that Kant’s laws of nature do not depend on acts of prescription in any literal sense. Second, I question how his generic conception of laws applies to empirical laws of nature and suggest that the worries about unknowability or contingency that he raises for contemporary alternatives may equally arise for empirical laws on Kant’s account. Finally, I discuss his claim that Kant’s a priori laws depend on the immutability of human cognitive capacities and ask how this immutability should be understood.

Few of Kant’s distinctions have generated as much puzzlement and criticism as the one he draws in the Prolegomena between judgments of experience, which he describes as objectively and universally valid, and judgments of perception, which he says are merely subjectively valid. Yet the distinction between objective and subjective validity is central to Kant’s account of experience and plays a key role in his Transcendental Deduction of the categories. In this paper, I reject a standard interpretation of the distinction, according to which judgments of perception are merely subjectively valid because they are made without sufficient investigation. In its place, I argue that for Kant, judgments of perception are merely subjectively valid because they merely report sequences of perceptions had by a subject without claiming that what is represented by the perceptions is connected in the objects the perceptions are of. Whereas the interpretation I criticize undercuts Kant’s strategy in the Deduction, I argue, my interpretation illuminates it.

In this paper, I propose a solution to a notorious puzzle that lies at the heart of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The puzzle arises because Kant asserts two apparently conflicting claims: (1) F → J: A judgment of beauty is aesthetic, i.e., grounded in feeling. (2) J → F: A judgment of beauty could not be based on and must ground the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful. I argue that (1) and (2) are consistent. Kant’s text indicates that he distinguishes two feelings: the feeling of the harmony of the cognitive faculties that is the ground of judgments of beauty (F₁ → J), and the feeling of pleasure that is its consequence (J → F₂). I develop and defend a view of Kant’s account of the structure of judgments of beauty that incorporates this crucial distinction. Next, I argue that my view resolves another long-standing problem for Kant’s “Deduction” of judgments of beauty: it allows him to claim that the harmony of the faculties is a condition of judgment in general without implying, absurdly, that all judgments are pleasurable.