Of the philosophical problems that Kant sets out to resolve in the Critique of Pure Reason, one of the foremost is how to justify the principle that, necessarily and universally, all events in the world occur because of an antecedent cause. This problem was, after all, the focal point of Kant’s intellectual engagement with Hume, and it served as an impetus for his transcendental idealist system...

In his teleological antinomy in the Dialectic of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment, Kant presents two competing views of the explanatory power of causal mechanism for a science of origins. Kant expresses both the positive (thesis) view and the negative (antithesis) view in the guise of merely “regulative principles for the reflecting power of judgment”. The regulativity of thes...

In the transcendental deduction, the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant seeks to secure the objective validity of our basic categories of thought. He distinguishes objective and subjective sides of this argument. The latter side, the subjective deduction, is normally understood as an investigation of our cognit ive faculties. It is identified with Kant’s account of a threefol...

My purpose in this article is not to offer any original insights into Hegel’s ethics, but merely to provide a brief overview that draws upon the most reliable secondary sources. In order to help organize the material, I compare Hegel’s views with the communitarian critique of liberalism. Following this, there is a brief account of the relation between Hegel’s ethical and religious thought. Hege...