Kant is well known for claiming that we can never really know our true moral disposition. He is less well known for claiming that the injunction “Know Yourself” is the basis of all self‐regarding duties. Taken together, these two claims seem contradictory. My aim in this paper is to show how they can be reconciled. I first address the question of whether the duty of self‐knowledge is logically coherent (§1). I then examine some of the practical problems surrounding the duty, notably, self‐deception (§2). Finding none of Kant’s solutions to the problem of self‐deception satisfactory, I conclude by defending a Kantian account of self‐knowledge based on his theory of conscience (§3).

Nobody can or ever will comprehend how the understanding should have a motivating power; it can admittedly judge, but to give this judgment power so that it becomes a motive able to impel the will to performance of an action-to understand this is the philosopher's stone.-Lectures on Ethics (MPC, AA 27:1428). i n t r o d u c t i o n in contrast to his rationalist predecessors, Kant argues that feeling plays a positive role in moral life. Yet the exact nature of this role is far from clear. As much as Kant repeats that moral motivation must proceed from a "feeling of respect" (Gefühl der Achtung), he maintains with equal insistence that to act out of respect for the law is simply to recognize its value and authority. In what way, then, is respect for the law a feeling? And what place does this feeling have-if any-in Kant's ethics? Despite the large body of secondary literature devoted to this topic, the details of Kant's position still remain elusive. 1 In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), for example, Kant argues that our recognition of the moral law must elicit both painful and pleasurable feelings in us. It must be painful, he explains, insofar as

In recent work Stephen Darwall has attacked what he calls J. G. Fichte's 'voluntarist' thesis, the idea-on Darwall's reading-that I am bound by obligations of respect to another person by virtue of my choice to interact with him. Darwall argues that voluntary choice is incompatible with the normative force behind the concept of a person, which demands my respect non-voluntarily. He in turn defends a 'presuppositional' thesis which claims that I am bound by obligations of respect simply by recognizing the other as a person. In this paper I argue Darwall has misidentified the voluntary element in Fichte's account (sections 4-5). This requires me first to explain what Fichte's voluntarism really consists in (sections 1-3), and I suggest an apparent ambiguity in Fichte's position is responsible for Darwall's misreading. Clarifying this ambiguity, however, exposes some limitations to Darwall's thesis, and I end by discussing what those limitations are and what we can learn from them (sections 6-8).

It is commonly held that Kant ventured to derive morality from freedom in Groundwork III. It is also believed that he reversed this strategy in the second Critique, attempting to derive freedom from morality instead. In this paper, I set out to challenge these familiar assumptions: Kant’s argument in Groundwork III rests on a moral conception of the intelligible world, one that plays a similar role as the ‘fact of reason’ in the second Critique. Accordingly, I argue, there is no reversal in the proof-structure of Kant’s two works.

This paper explores the ambiguity in Rudolph Otto's discussion of the mysterium tremendum in order to address a broader set of difficulties in The Idea of the Holy (1917). In doing so, I outline two common criticisms of Otto's position. The first attacks Otto for not providing a secure transition from the numinous experience of terror to the holy experience of faith. The second attacks Otto for upholding a kind of theistic dualism, which seemingly puts his thought at odds with mysticism. Rather than reconstruct Otto's argument in favour of theism, I maintain that numinous experience, while still a form of otherness or alterity, is best characterized as the breakdown of subject‐object dualism. I further suggest that this breakdown is best understood in non‐theistic terms. For examples of the latter, I briefly turn to Jean‐Luc Marion's notion of saturated phenomena.