Leyva, G. (ed.), Guía Comares de Immanuel Kant, Comares, Granada, 2023, 694 pp. ISBN: 9788413695822

Eduardo Charpenel

Universidad Panamericana (campus Ciudad de México), Facultad de Filosofía

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2773-1212

DOI: 10.24310/nyl.19.2025.20135

Recibido: 13 de junio de 2024

Aceptado: 16 de septiembre de 2024

For some years now, the Comares Guides collection has become a highly valuable resource in the study of philosophy in the Spanish speaking world. Comares as a publishing house has presented a series of monographic works where different texts are compiled that deal with the multiple facets of either a central or relevant author in the philosophical tradition, or of some prominent school of thought. This editorial work is really beneficial not only to facilitate the knowledge of great milestones within the history of philosophy; in my opinion, it also serves as a platform from which it is possible to become familiar with a whole series of specialists and interpreters –mainly, in this case, from the Spanish-speaking world, but not only– who have developed an important academic work worthy of consideration and who have inaugurated new interpretative paths in the respective areas of discussion for which they have been summoned.

The Guía Comares de Immanuel Kant edited by Gustavo Leyva –a renowned Mexican specialist in Kant and in the German philosophical tradition in general– is no exception to the above. With a generous extension, this book offers a valuable contribution in terms of presenting and discussing with precision and clarity the main thematic areas of Kant’s philosophy. Unlike other volumes of a similar nature in other languages where generally a disproportionate part of the work concentrates on Kant’s theoretical philosophy, I consider Leyva’s editorial work to be very balanced, given that, in this Guía Comares, the areas of Kant’s thought are covered with a more or less equivalent or proportional extension.

This is true, for example, for the first major thematic axis addressed in the book, which revolves around questions of a rather historical-contextual nature, which serve to appreciate and interpret the Kantian legacy. Thus, for example, we first come across with the work of Dulce María Granja, which reviews different aspects of Kant’s life, under the general premise that Kant is a philosopher whose biography can be much more exciting than is usually believed. Likewise, Granja emphasizes that, by getting to know Kant’s biography, several misunderstandings, prejudices and even misrepresentations about Kant’s thought can be corrected. Thus, the generalized view that attributes to Kant a sullen and unfriendly character and extrapolates that into a general reading of his philosophy is harshly criticized by her. In contrast, testimonies that go in a completely opposite direction are discussed by her. Further, Granja reviews aspects of Kant’s Prussia that are rarely considered even by specialists and that help enormously to understand particular aspects of the proposals of the sage of Königsberg. Next, we find in this section a paper by Manuel Sánchez Rodríguez, which discusses in detail three of the major influences on Kant’s thought (Rousseau, Hume and Leibniz), of which Kant himself can be considered as a legitimate heir, but at the same time as an original and unique continuator. In a similar vein, María Jesús Vázquez Lobeiras delves into the different coordinates in the Kant of the pre-critical period, who is precisely searching, so to speak, for his own voice as a philosopher. According to Vázquez Lobeiras, what Kant has as an intellectual disposition in this period is a conciliatory attitude that could be labeled as “irenism”, which seeks for the common grounds that different theoretical fronts could share –an attitude, moreover, that will accompany him until the formulation of his “transcendental idealism”, as a kind of peculiar conjugation, as it is often said, between empiricism and rationalism. Finally, Pedro Jesús Teruel discusses Kant’s passionate interest in natural science, which, among other things, led the philosopher to propose, as is well-known, a hypothesis about the origin of the solar system that would later be validated through Laplace. Kant’s various incursions into fields such as physics, biology, astronomy, and what in somewhat anachronistic terms we could call the neurosciences show him, according to Teruel, as a thinker of genuine universal interests, who can serve as a model for the dialogue between philosophical knowledge and that of the natural sciences, or, in general, between knowledge of a transcendental nature and knowledge of an empirical or naturalistic kind in relation to different realities, e.g., the mind.  

In the second broad section of the book we find different discussions related to Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Here we encounter interesting and bold editorial and interpretative decisions to address, for example, what are the fundamental contents of the Critique of Pure Reason. Let me explain: instead of, for example, opening with explanatory discussions on the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic –something that one would ordinarily expect–, what we find in the first instance is rather an erudite presentation by Álvaro Peláez Cedrés on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. Although, in terms of an exposition, it might not be the most orthodox introduction to Kant’s theoretical philosophy, it is, nevertheless, a bold and original interpretative move, especially perhaps under the assumption that there are already several compendiums and traditional introductory works to Kant that follow the other aforementioned path. In his contribution, Peláez Cedrés argues that, in recent decades, especially since Jaako Hintikka’s work, there has been a rehabilitation in the philosophy of mathematics of the notion of “intuition” that serves to generate, as opposed to what was previously criticized by Frege’s logicism, a constructive arithmetical and geometrical method for the formation of concepts. Likewise, Peláez Cedrés discusses the process of schematization of mathematical concepts and, more broadly, various aspects of Kant’s knowledge in this field, opening up an interesting and generally underexplored research front. Next, we find two papers by Gonzalo Serrano and Mario Caimi on the transcendental deduction of the categories, especially with emphasis on the deduction of the second edition of the KrV. Since this is commonly considered as a nuclear section –if not the most important– of the whole first Critique, it is extremely useful to have two detailed reconstructions of this essential text, which, by the way, far from repeating themselves, complement each other in a very adequate and natural way. After that, there is an acute contribution by Claudia Jauregui, who explains in detail the different senses of the notion of the “I” that can be found in Kant’s philosophy –basically, from the transcendental, empirical, and noumenal point of view (especially, as she underlines, it is from a practical sense where the latter has relevance). Jauregui patiently and carefully reconstructs the Kantian arguments as well as the polemical contexts of discussion that give rise to them (Descartes, Hume, Mendelssohn, rationalist psychology, etcetera), and concludes with interesting considerations on how the ideas in this regard presented in the first Critique are enriched and complemented by later reflections of the Kantian Nachlass (particularly, the so-called Leningrad reflection), which already link a conception of identity with the insertion of oneself as a subject of action in the phenomenical world as well as with the continuity of one’s own experience of the body. In Jauregui’s opinion, this widens and enriches considerably the perspective initially presented in the KrV. This work is followed by two equally remarkable contributions: that of Luis Eduardo Hoyos on the role of skepticism in Kant, and that of Julia Muñoz on Kant’s “Transcendental Dialectic”. These papers also exhibit an interesting affinity: On the one hand, Hoyos discusses the skeptical challenges Kant faced thanks to Descartes and Hume, as well as the original appropriation he makes of the ancient skeptical method for the construction of antinomies and the answer that, in each particular case, can be given to each of them. On the other hand, Julia Muñoz’s discussion is longer and explains to the reader, with an undeniable capacity for synthesis, what is at stake in the different sections concerning the paralogisms, the antinomies, and the ideal of pure reason. Muñoz’s merit lies, in my opinion, not only in exposing with great clarity the basic structure of these conflicts, but also in referring to different readings in the specialized bibliography that have been made on them with their respective strengths and weaknesses, which in a way invites the reader to go deeper into the particular academic discussions. Finally, the section closes with two suggestive contributions by two well-known German specialists: Eckart Forster and Thomas Sören Hoffmann, who address respectively the theoretical horizons to which the Kantian Opus Postumum gives rise, and the different levels or “contexts” of knowledge of which it is possible to speak in Kant according to different points of view or discussion.

Then follows the third section of the work, which revolves around practical philosophy and which is inaugurated by a paper on self-consciousness, self-knowledge and moral conscience by Eduardo Molina. In some sense, his work tacitly dialogues with that of Claudia Jauregui: Molina takes up the discussion on the difficulties and perplexities of self-knowledge in Kant according to its different strata –with the ever-present thesis of the impossibility of the self-objectification of the self, especially in view of the paralogisms–, but reconstructs certain notes that, even from a theoretical point of view, allow the subject to conceive itself as a “finite rational” one, something which has notable practical consequences and clearly inserts the subject itself in the moral sphere. Molina closes his discussion with interesting reflections that allow us to establish links or analogies between self-knowledge in a theoretical sense and the self-knowledge that we can gain of ourselves from the experience of the dictates of our own moral conscience. Next, we come across a well-rounded exposition of Kant's practical philosophy by Faviola Rivera. Although she focuses on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason for her discussion, she does not hesitate to affirm that Kant’s practical philosophy is to be complemented by other historically neglected writings, such as Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and the Doctrine of Virtue. In a very outstanding effort of synthesis between the Groundwork and the second Critique, Rivera succeeds in presenting with remarkable clarity fundamental topics such as the good will, the Kantian theory of moral motivation, the distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives, the different formulations of the former as well as their respective interconnection, and the superiority of practical reason over theoretical reason. Rivera follows the thread of Kantian arguments to reconstruct the refutation of self-love as a moral foundation as well as to present a very pertinent reconstruction on the notion of the highest good or summum bonum at the end of the second Critique. Her discussion closes with a contrast between the so-called “deduction of the categorical imperative” in the Groundwork and the doctrine of the Faktum in the second Critique, leaving it to the reader to form himself a judgment as to whether these Kantian developments are compatible or not with each other. This discussion is followed by a paper of Marcia Baron, which, in a similar tone to what has been underlined above, is once again a risky but at the same time suggestive bet, since, although thematically it would correspond to cover all that would be the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of Morals, what we find is a specialized paper that, in effect, touches that part of Kant’s thought but from the viewpoint of a rather specific topic: the relationship between love and respect in interpersonal relationships according to Kant. Her discussion is, in my opinion, complex and it is impossible to replicate it in this space: suffice it to say that where Kant points to a certain symmetry between these feelings or moral affections, Baron tends to see asymmetries, and where Kant postulates asymmetries or divergences, she finds coincidences or similarities. It is, in this sense, a work that questions the way Kant thought originally about these moral feelings, and thinks with Kant against Kant or beyond Kant. For that reason, this contribution is perhaps more useful to the specialist who is already versed in Kantian ethics than to the one who is just beginning to get acquainted with it. After that we find a paper by the editor of the volume, Gustavo Leyva, who offers a very detailed reconstruction of the entire Doctrine of Right of the Metaphysics of Morals, reviewing in detail its particular divisions and subdivisions but concentrating mainly, in my opinion, on the question of the nature of right for Kant in general, as well as on the basic structure of private and public law. Although there are of course allusions to other texts of a political-legal nature in Kant, what is certain is that in Leyva’s reconstruction the Doctrine of Right is considered as the work par excellence in this field, being in his opinion the most mature of its kind. Leyva not only makes a punctual review of the architecture of Kant’s political-legal thought, but also sometimes ventures systematic arguments on unquestionably central topics, as is the case of migration, highlighting Kant’s contributions in this area but also the fact that we now face more challenges in this regard than Kant and his contemporaries did. Leyva’s contribution is followed by important texts that complement the review and discussion of this this facet of Kant’s thought, whose authors are Nuria Sánchez Madrid, Ileana P. Beade, and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann respectively. In summary, for reasons of space, I would emphasize the following goals pursued by these three well-developed and well-argued contributions. First, in the case of Sánchez Madrid, I take it as her goal to review carefully the originality of Kant’s proposal in his attempt to transfer the local contractualist exercise to the international arena with a view to the formation of a federation or league of nations that seeks to safeguard peace, pointing out, however, certain biases in Kant’s proposal –some Eurocentric prejudices are in Sánchez Madrid’s opinion still noticeable in the Kantian  texts– but recognizing at the same time the strong anticolonialism in the proposal of the thinker from Königsberg, his sharpness identifying the tendency of the different states to adopt a certain type of moral responsibility in the face of events occurring within the world concert, and the fact that, in general terms, Kant is right in relation to how international relations should be thought of from a rational standpoint. Second, in the case of the contribution by Beade, her purpose is to my mind to examine the various cultural but above all political-social implications of the Enlightenment project or Aufklärung, sharply underlining, in the particular kantian understanding of it, the imperative need for dialogue and the rehabilitation of the public use of reason under the maxims of the sensus communis. And third, in the case of Lutz-Bachmann, his goal is to remind us that the philosophy of history points out a dimension of Kant’s thought that we have perhaps ignored –partly due to the influence of powerful accounts such as Hegel's or Marx's– but which is essential to understand how various thematic axes in Kant cannot be comprehended without adopting a diachronic and historical perspective and also without taking into account the distinctive notion of a “vocation” (Bestimmung) human kind has as a collectivity. Also noteworthy in Lutz Bachmann's exercise is the effort to place Kant in dialogue with notable figures of twentieth-century thought such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Rorty in their respective understandings of historicity.

After the above, we move on to a fourth section within the Guía Comares that concentrates on areas such as aesthetics, anthropology, geography, and religion. With regard to aesthetics, we first come across with two notable works that are equally complementary, one by Jacinto Rivera de Rosales and the other by Pablo Oyarzún. While the former reconstructs a very precise architectonic map of what would be the structure of the Critique of the Power of Judgment –a very useful and practical material, certainly, for a directed “navigation” throughout the work, including also the section on reflective teleological judgment–, the latter concentrates specifically on the theme of the arts in Kant and its different anthropological presuppositions –e.g., the figure of the genius– and its theoretical grounds. Contrary to a common prejudice, Oyarzún manages to show that Kant’s reflections on the arts are much more profound and informed than is usually believed. A provocative and suggestive aspect of this contribution are Oyarzún’s discussions and conjectures, from a Kantian point of view, of aesthetic experiences such as the terrible, the horrific, the sinister, the humorous and the abject, among others. This work is followed by that of Reinhardt Brandt who, as editor of the Vorlesungen on anthropology in the Akademie Ausgabe, has in my opinion a remarkable knowledge of everything related to this aspect of Kant’s philosophy In particular, Brandt guides the reader through the different layers of Kant’s reflection on anthropology in different periods and works, but he focuses above all on explaining the general purpose of the Anthropology in a pragmatic sense and on characterizing the essentials of certain topics explored there, such as the role of Weltkenntnis and the aforementioned notion of the human vocation or Bestimmung. Towards the final part of his exposition, Brandt alludes to the difficult and intricate problem of Kant’s characterization of women, races, and certain national ethnicities, but, certainly, if I may say so, he remains at a rather descriptive level and one misses a more critical and emphatic judgment on his part on what Kant said about these topics. Afterwards we find a paper by Vicente Durán Casas on the area of physical geography in Kant, which I consider to be a very novel contribution, because regardless of the fact that it is a “territory”, if I may deliberately say so, little known even among specialists, it is rare to come across such an adequate exposition of it, especially in a volume of the nature of the Comares Guide –by way of contrast, one can consult the Cambridge Companions dedicated to Kant and there one will find no mention of physical geography at all. According to Durán Casas’ thesis, time and space go for Kant inexorably hand in hand, so that in order to understand the human being and his development it is necessary to situate him spatially and therefore geographically. Taking up a proposal by Robert Louden but going much deeper into it, Durán Casas points out four reasons that should motivate those interested in Kantian thought to explore the area of physical geography: first, that Kant’s work is full of geographical metaphors; second, that Kant’s intuitions on the subject can help us to resolve different questions of categorization and hierarchization inherent to geographical knowledge; third, that we can appreciate what Kant, as a pedagogue, was seeking to inculcate by reviewing all this series of contents; and fourth, that physical geography reminds us that the earth and the human being cannot be understood without each other. This section closes with an interesting contribution by Bernd Dörfingler on the role of the philosophy of religion in Kant, particularly from the point of view of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and concentrates mainly on what is discussed in the third and fourth books of that work. Dörfingler reconstructs the relationship between particular religions and rational religion, the latter being a goal to which statutory creeds should aim in order to transcend fanaticism, superstition and sectarianism. In doing so, Dörfingler points out that a fundamental hermeneutical key to the interpretation of sacred texts from a Kantian point of view is their concordance with what is mandated by practical reason.

As far as thematic axes are concerned, the Guía Comares closes with a section dedicated to the reception of Kant’s work. There we have a detailed contribution by Rogelio Rovira on the initial reception of Kant by his contemporaries and immediate successors, and we find interesting characterizations of those who, on the one hand, sought to study and comprehend Kant’s philosophy understood as doctrine, and many others who, on the other hand, starting from certain Kantian positions or affinities, sought to critically review the philosopher’s original proposal trying to go beyond it. Here, it is worth mentioning figures such as Herder, Hammann, Jacobi, and Reinhold, among others, who, with a certain inspiration or admiration for Kant’s philosophy, sought to go beyond his letter. Rovira rightly points out that several polemics that even today surround the work of the philosopher of Königsberg have a direct or remote origin in those first readings and initial discussions, so that the contemporary specialist in Kant would do well to gain a familiarity with such figures. Next, we find a sharp text by Efrain Lazos on Kant’s reception in the field of analytic philosophy. Lazos points out how problematic it is to characterize, in general, this strand of philosophy, and how much it paradoxically has in common with many figures of the philosophical tradition, particularly with Kant. After doing this, Lazos underlines –taking up a proposal by Robert Hanna– that the development of analytical philosophy can be reconstructed following the thread of the discussion on Kant’s notion of analyticity, passing from the acceptance to the rejection of it. After reviewing certain stations on the discussions of analyticity (the logicism of Frege and Russell, the linguistic analysis of the Vienna Circle and of ordinary language at Oxford, Quine's criticisms, and the so-called new metaphysics), and, in some broad sense, after an own theoretical effort of vindicating it in certain general lines, Lazos leaves the panorama open to think that, although a stretch of analytic philosophy has been critical of Kant, this should not necessarily continue to be so, as Rae Langton and, indirectly, David Lewis have helped to demonstrate. Subsequently, we find a detailed study by Pedro Stepanenko who points out the validity of Kant on the field of theoretical philosophy, and, specifically, on the field of philosophy of mind –although he is quick to remind us that, to some extent, to speak of philosophy of mind in Kant requires broadening our framework of understanding. In Stepanenko’s view, there are four thematic areas in the field of philosophy of mind where focusing on the dialogue with Kant pays great dividends: representational content, unity and objectivity of experience, cognitive synthesis and functionalism, and conceptions of the self. In my opinion, his analysis shows that figures such as Sellars, McDowell, Brandom and Rödl, among others, not only recover Kant, but fruitfully dialogue with him for the development of their proposals, which validates his thesis about the actuality of Kant in this field. Finally, Jesús Conill makes a punctual characterization of the thematic axes that surrounded the reception of Kant in areas such as 20th century neo-Kantianism and phenomenology, to then go on to review various aspects of how Kant was read in Spain –and here, it must be said that it one misses that the same discussion had been carried out with regard to Latin America–, and then finally to discuss the suggestive and original readings made by what are possibly the two most important political philosophers of the 20th century and part of the 21st century: John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, thus proving the value and validity of Kant also in a markedly practical field.

But this is not the end of the Comares Guide as such, for there are a couple of additional sections that in my opinion should be mentioned. First, a section that is a kind of chronological table that highlights in parallel important events in world history along with important events in Kant’s life and the chronological publication of his main works. Secondly, a section listing the various Kantian works and alluding to all the translations of them that have been made into Spanish. And, thirdly, a section where a selection is made of different works of secondary literature that may be of benefit to readers who seek to delve deeper into the specialized academic discussion on the different particular areas of Kant’s thought. In this regard, it is worth mentioning that, in addition to listing central and important literature in languages such as German, English and French, reference is also made to the important and outstanding contributions that have been made to the Kantian research from the different Spanish-speaking latitudes (including Latin America), thus mitigating the fact that there is no section dedicated as such to the reception of Kant in the Latin American context.

By way of conclusion, I would like to say the following. In general terms, the Guía Comares de Immanuel Kant seems to me a very well-done work that has the merit of harmoniously combining two different things: on the one hand, a broad review of the different topics and aspects of Kant’s thought, and, on the other hand, the approach of authors who have different points of view and come from different backgrounds, which greatly enriches the discussion. Another great virtue I find is the following: most of the authors have a register in their discourse that is valuable for many audiences: first, for readers who are just beginning to read Kant, second, for those who already know him better and who want to have coordinates of the different debates surrounding the various thematic axes of his philosophy, and third, for specialists, because one as an interpreter always gains important insights insofar one becomes acquainted with the methodical choices other scholars have made in the exposition and reconstruction of arguments, thereby endorsing and proposing very particular readings in the end of the day. In this sense, it can be said without a doubt that Gustavo Leyva has done a brilliant editorial job, and that the book reviewed here is to be highly recommended.

Eduardo Charpenel

echarpenel@gmail.com