Normativity and Transformation in Immanuel Kant’s Legal Philosophy

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sofie Christine Møller
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 506630139

This project focuses on normativity and transformation in Kant’s legal philosophy: It will confront the principles of right in Kant’s Doctrine of Right with the dynamic development presented in his philosophy of history through a series of analogies. It aims is to understand how Kant conceives legal normativity as transforming states and institutions. To assist this analysis, the project will survey Kant’s central political analogies of the state as an organism, the establishment of a civil condition as a contract and the relationship among states as a state of nature. Although Kant primarily understands reason as ahistorical, his writings on history reveal that he had a sophisticated account of the teleological development of human predispositions throughout history. This reading challenges the common view that Kant’s presents a static ideal of legal normativity. Even though Kant’s legal philosophy and his writings on history stem from the same period, scholars have rarely analyzed these texts together; doing so allows us to understand Kantian legal normativity as a transformative force.This project will: (1) comprehensively interpret the role of transformation in the realization of Kant’s legal philosophy by incorporating Kant’s writings on history and anthropology to demonstrate the ways in which Kant considers the role of Nature and existing institutional arrangements in the realization of normative principles. To support this analysis, the project will (2) pursue this account through a systematic analysis of Kant’s analogies of the state, (3) investigate the importance of gender for Kant's dynamic understanding of active and passive citizenship and (4) critically survey the way in which Kant's account of perpetual peace and international relations relates to his account of human races and their different predispositions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants