CFP: The St Andrews Kant Reading Party 2026: Topics in Kant and Hegel's Philosophy of Law

Call for Abstracts for the Kant and Hegel Reading Party

Postgraduate students and early-career scholars are invited to submit anonymised abstracts of no longer than 500 wordsby email to Peter Moser ([email protected]) by the 18th of May. Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format and prepared for blind review by removing all identifying details. Please include in your email your institutional affiliation and contact details. Authors will be notified by the 8th of June about the acceptance of their paper. Please indicate in your email if you would like to participate in the Reading Party regardless of whether your paper is accepted. Papers should be suitable for a presentation of 40 minutes. We welcome submissions that fall within this year’s selected theme (i.e. Kant and Hegel’s Philosophy of Law), and preference will be given to papers that bear on the questions listed below.

The Theme

In the Doctrine of Right and in other writings, Kant tries to give an account of a legal system that is valid according to the principles of pure practical reason. For Kant, the philosophy of right, as opposed to ethics, concerns the actualisation of the free will in the world. His Universal Principle of Right states that “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law.” (6:230) From this principle, Kant derives a rich system of rights, not guaranteed in a state of nature, that must be secured by entering into the civil condition. Hegel raises a number of objections to the way Kant goes about arguing for his system of rights and to Kant’s practical philosophy more generally. Most famously, Hegel’s empty formalism objection states that a formal principle cannot furnish determinate duties or obligations. As regards the sphere of right, Hegel argues that the rationality of a legal system cannot be established by applying a formal principle from the outside but must be understood as already existing within the Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, of an actual community. At the reading party this year we will consider how these different methodological approaches bear on the four following questions:

1. What makes a state morally valid and necessary?

2. On what grounds can property rights be claimed?

3. What is the philosophical basis for criminal punishment?

4. What are the foundations of international law, and what principles should govern the relation between states?

The Kant in Progress Workshop

On the day following the Reading Party (28 July), back in St Andrews we will host the "Kant in Progress" Colloquium. The “Kant in Progress” Workshop is open to all participants of the Reading Party and aims to provide an additional opportunity for paper presentations that do not necessarily fall within the theme of the Reading Party. Postgraduate students and early-career scholars are invited to submit anonymised abstracts of no longer than 500 words by email to Peter Moser ([email protected]) by the 18th of May.