Kant’s philosophy, it is often thought, leads to an untenable picture of the self. He argues that we cannot have knowledge of the type of entity we are, but seems to contradict that conclusion by claiming we are free and morally responsible. Commentators accuse him of blindly prioritizing his ethical views, not recognizing that his metaphysical views prohibit the very picture of the self his moral theory necessitates. Sympathetic interpreters of Kant’s view of the self focus on either his theoretical or ethical view, despite Kant’s insistence that the two are interdependent.

I argue that Kant offers us a deeply consistent, unified, and plausible view of the self. For Kant, an individual necessarily thinks and acts as though he or she—and any other human being—is a substantial, complete entity with an identity that remains the same over time. As this work shows, the significance of the self, for Kant, is practical, not theoretical.

A theory aims to gain knowledge of the self and examine what type of object it is and how it is constituted. Perhaps we are spiritual, immaterial souls, or alternatively, entities ultimately reducible to the brain or body. I establish that Kant thinks that such views are doomed to be either tautological or contradictory. This is because they answer the wrong question.

The right question is not how the self is constituted, but what we are committed to. Kant thinks the answer is clear: we must hold ourselves and others responsible, and we must believe that we are free and that our actions and choices matter. My interpretation reveals that Kant’s true aim is to demonstrate how we can make good on these commitments without fear of being contradicted by theory. Theorizing about the self, according to Kant, is idle. But recognizing so makes room for one to act in accordance with one’s commitments, both moral and explanatory. Furthermore, I prove that Kant thinks we must act under the idea of the self not just to hold ourselves and others responsible but to view the world as the causally unified place we do.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that judgment, our faculty for thinking particulars under universals, is governed by what he calls the “principle of purposiveness.” This principle states that we must look at the world as if it were made for our faculty of cognition. The purpose of this principle is not merely that we increase the systematicity of our knowledge, but that we achieve our highest end as rational agents. For Kant, this is the realization of a world in which happiness perfectly accords with morality. Ultimately, all of our activity—including our theoretical scientific pursuits—is directed toward this end. Poor judgment is not a matter of representing something that fails to correspond with the way the world is independent of our point of view. Rather, poor judgment consists in our engaging in the world in such a way that we fail to notice its relevance to any of the ends a human being could justifiably pursue for the sake of our ultimate end. To improve our judgment, we must learn to free ourselves from our particular, and often private, ends in order to see the full significance of objects. This principle of purposiveness is best illustrated by our judgments of taste, which we cannot justify on the basis of articulable rules. Careful analysis of these judgments shows how we must rely on a fundamental capacity to determine what is significant to other points of view, what Kant calls the “common sense.” The normativity of this faculty comes from our shared commitment to the highest end of reason, which compels us to consider how other people see the world. It finds its fulfillment not in our thinking something true about an object but in our taking pleasure in an object that is universally shareable. This experience is made possible not through the perfection of our faculty of cognition, but, as Kant says, “the way of thinking needed to make a purposive use of it.” This “broad-mindedness,” so apparent in our evaluations of beauty in art and nature, is equally necessary for sound theoretical and practical judgment.

Hegel is often interpreted as undertaking two independent projects. Hegel is praised for his insight into the connection between the theory, artwork, religion, and concrete way of life of various cultures. However, Hegel is condemned for constructing an “Absolute” system of knowing that selectively focuses on his own culture’s theory, ethical attitudes, and way of life. Hegel is often interpreted as understanding his Absolute as the pinnacle of human knowledge that reconciles all normative and theoretical conflicts within past cultural worldviews and ways of life. This bi-furcation is especially pronounced in scholarship on Hegel’s Lecture on Aesthetics. Many scholars suggest we ignore Hegel’s discussions of the Absolute and attend only to his discussion of particular artistic works and movements. In this dissertation, I first provide an alternative reading of Hegel’s Absolute. For Hegel, any articulation of the Absolute is also an act of reconciliation (versöhnung). Reconciliation aspires to redeem theoretical and normative conflict by re-framing natural laws and ethical principles as synchronized with the concrete reality of particular peoples, social institutions, and empirical observations. In this way, reconciliation grounds individuals in universal principles that orient them towards harmony within themselves, with each other, and with nature. For Hegel, any conception of the Absolute is justified through its presentation of universal principles that can systematically unify a community’s observations of nature and history into a comprehensive theory, and properly normatively orient that community within that understanding of history and the cosmos. Using this hermeneutic, I will also illustrate how we can read Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics as a unified work. On the one hand, Hegel's local cultural insights arise from his understanding of art as a way of expressing the Absolute that produces a proper reconciliation for the historical moment in question. On the other hand, Hegel traces the causes of his own culture’s forms of conflict and alienation as gradually developing throughout the history of art. Thus, Hegel’s theory of the Absolute is integral to his local cultural insights, and the history of those cultures is essential to understanding the purpose of his presentation of the Absolute.

Although separated by a century and a half, the relationship between Immanuel Kant and Maurice Merleau-Ponty has more recently come into sharper focus. It is now common to read Kant and Merleau-Ponty as offering two competing characterizations of perceptual experience. In the present work, however, I argue that pitting Kant against Merleau-Ponty in this way leads us to overlook the important and philosophically illuminating continuity between their views of perception. In particular, I show that Kant and Merleau-Ponty share a key commitment: both regard aesthetic experience, including both the production and appreciation of a work of art, as an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of perceptual experience more generally. It is, in particular, reflection on the role of what Kant calls the `productive imagination' and its creative and projective activities that both philosophers think sheds light on our more mundane perceptions. This work is, in part, an effort to clarify the development of this aesthetically inflected theory of perception from Kant's philosophy, through Neo-Kantians like Ernst Cassirer and Pierre Lachièze-Rey, and into Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. However, once we expose the development of this line of thought between Kant and Merleau-Ponty, we shall find we have reason to revise the standard interpretation of the relationship between these two figures. As I argue in the first part of this work, rather than thinking of Kant as an anti-phenomenological `intellectualist', we find he is, as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty took him to be, a forefather of the phenomenological movement of the 20th century. So too, as I argue in the second part of this work, instead of reading Merleau-Ponty as anti-Kantian, we should recognize that he self-consciously appropriated aspects of Kant's philosophy of perception and is, to this extent, a Neo-Kantian. Ultimately, what this revised understanding of Kant's and Merleau-Ponty's theories of perception offers us is a unified, subtle, and promising theory of perceptual experience that places the productive imagination and aesthetic experience at its very heart.