Kant on Laws

Eric Watkins’s Kant on Laws collects together revised versions of his essays written over the last twenty-five years concerning Kant’s views on laws. In the book, not only does Watkins lay out insightful interpretations of the diversity of laws in Kant’s philosophy—both describing Kant’s accounts of laws of nature, teleology, regulativity, and morality and unraveling knotty issues surrounding them—but he furthermore espouses a concise, generic conception of laws that encompasses the various manifestations. Kant and Laws thus contributes both to the currently popular title topic of Kant’s views on laws as well as to sundry other domains of Kant studies. Yet, in spite of the book’s long genesis and impressive breadth, its various concerns are by and large held together by a core conceptual apparatus: the generic concept of law and the faculty of reason’s quest for the unconditioned. Kant on Laws is a worthy follow-up to Watkins’s previous sole-authored...