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In §76 of the third Critique, Kant claims that an intuitive understanding would represent no distinction between possible and actual things. Prior interpretations of §76 take Kant to claim that an intuitive understanding would produce things merely in virtue of thinking about them and, thus, could not think of merely possible things. In contrast, I argue that §76’s modal claims hinge on Kant’s suggestion that God represents things in their thoroughgoing determination, including in their connection to God’s actual will. I conclude by using my interpretation to argue that §76’s modal claims do not entail Spinozism.

A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. Friedrich Schiller advanced a version of this criticism to which Kant publicly responded. Recent commentators have emphasized the role that Kant's reply assigns to the pleasure that accompanies successful moral action. In contrast, I argue that Kant's reply relies primarily on the sublime feeling that arises when we merely contemplate the moral law. In fact, the pleasures emphasized by other recent commentators depend on this sublime feeling. These facts illuminate Kant's views regarding the relationship between morality, freedom, and the development of moral feelings. A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant's moral theory does not provide true freedom but, rather, places the master inside us, as Kant's sharp distinction between reason and sensibility enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. 1 This criticism was first advanced by the poet Friedrich Schiller in his 1793 essay On Grace and Dignity, where he accuses Kant of banishing grace from the idea of duty and providing grounds for the adoption of a monkish attitude-a criticism to which Kant publicly responded in a footnote added to the second edition of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. 2 1 For example, in the Spirit of Christianity, Hegel suggests that Kant's moral agent "carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave. For the particular-impulses, inclinations, pathological love, sensuous experience, or whatever else it is called-the universal is necessary and always something alien and objective" (TW 1:323/ETW 211). And in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel repeats the same objection when he writes, "[A]bstract reflection fixes this moment in its difference from and opposition to the universal, and so produces a view of morality as a perennial and hostile struggle against one's own satisfaction" (TW 7:233/PR §124R). 2 There is, of course, much dispute over the question how seriously Schiller intends to criticize Kant. Guyer suggests that Schiller's 'criticisms' might be better construed as helpful suggestions or clarifications of Kant's own position. For example, Guyer writes: "In the end, surely, the point of Schiller's twofold ideal of grace and dignity is not primarily to criticize Kant's ethics but to use his artistic powers to defend Kant's view, perhaps from the more scornful tendency within himself and certainly from the many critics who had ridiculed Kant's separation between happiness and virtue from the moment the Groundwork was published" (Guyer 1993, 354). As we shall see below, Guyer is absolutely right to emphasize that Schiller was largely sympathetic to Kant's project. In fact, Schiller claims that his major complaints largely concern Kant's presentation of the moral law, rather than Past scholarship often assumed that Schiller primarily intended to object that Kant's philosophy requires people to renounce all happiness and joy in the fulfillment of the moral law. However, rece...

Kant claims that an intuitive understanding—such as God would possess—could cognize things in themselves. This claim has prompted many interpreters of Kant's theoretical philosophy to propose that things in themselves correspond to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. In contrast, I argue that Kant's theoretical philosophy does not endorse the common proposal that all things in themselves correspond to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. Instead, Kant's theoretical philosophy maintains that things in themselves might or might not correspond to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. I then consider whether Kant's moral philosophy and theory of reflecting judgment might provide alternative grounds for claiming that we should regard things in themselves as corresponding to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. I argue that Kant's moral philosophy does not provide such grounds, but his theory of reflecting judgment does. Thus, interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism should attend to the differences between Kant's theoretical philosophy, moral philosophy, and theory of reflecting judgment in assessing the relationship between intuitive understanding and things in themselves.