Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal

My goal in this talk is to demonstrate that Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal is no mere rhetorical flourish that adds an interesting political dimension to his philosophical system, but is rather one of the central themes of his whole philosophy. The appeal to a cosmopolitan political outlook arises most strikingly in two of Kant’s later writings on politics and law. However I want to suggest that there is a deeper systematic basis to this concern with the cosmopolitan point of view within the critical philosophy. Kant outlines in his First Critique the Weltbegriff (the world concept) that underlies his understanding of philosophy. For Kant there is implicit in philosophy an understanding of the world that leads the inquirer ultimately in a practical (or moral) direction.