Chapter 3 both deepens and problematises the legal understanding of literature by attending to the making and perception of typefaces, particularly the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface in which Kant’s 1785 essay was set. Close reading a 2001 House of Lords decision, Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Marks & Spencer Plc, allows us to see that literary copyright and published edition copyright, though pertaining to the respective labours of authors and publishers, nonetheless share an ‘originalist’ aesthetics of the book that affirms the myth of proprietary authorship. To dislodge copyright’s originalist aesthetics, I revisit and compare Fichte’s and Kant’s accounts of the printed book in late eighteenth-century Germany, which, in their own ways, anticipate and undermine the contemporary legal perspective. Unlike Fichte, Kant recognised the visual materiality of the book, including the perceptibility of its typeface and typesetting, which pointed to an historical domain of embodied interactions. Guided by Kant, I attend to two aspects of the material history of the Breikopf Fraktur typeface: the history of its production and the history of its perception. This material history of the typeface, which reveals the deep interactions between human actors and print technologies, acts as a counter-image to copyright’s originalist aesthetics.

Chapter 4 charts a biography of Kant’s printed authorial name, ‘I. Kant’, so as to disclose its ethical function in late eighteenth-century Germany. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Roger Chartier’s studies of the materialities of authorship, I consider uses of the authorial name at the rhetorical level of Kant’s 1785 essay alongside its textual and typographical displacements, both within and outside the May 1785 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, and during and beyond the author’s lifetime. In so tracing the anthumous and posthumous movements of ‘I. Kant’, I clarify the authorial name’s role in implementing an ethical author-function that Kant understood to be responsive to the demands of enlightenment practice. I contend that Kant not only recognised the importance of printed authorial names to the enactment of authorial responsibility but further so deployed his own authorial name as to hold himself and others accountable for the print publications that contributed to the public discourse in his time. I argue that this ethically and socially concerned author-function in the German Enlightenment discloses the limits of copyright’s proprietary understanding of authorship and its material constitution.

This book begins by foregrounding that the material form of Kant’s 1785 essay could be analysed to critique the myth of proprietary authorship that presently prevails across copyright regimes. After reviewing four faces of Kant in authorship and copyright studies, I advance a medial rethinking of Kant by drawing on the intersecting traditions of book history, media theory and literary studies. In particular, Gérard Genette’s poetics informs my paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay to uncover the historical and medial-material conditions of literary production.

Chapter 2 juxtaposes the myth of proprietary authorship embodied in the legal idiom of ‘work’, ‘author’ and ‘originality’ with the realities of print production in late eighteenth-century Germany. I problematise the conventional view of the literary work as an intellectual creation of a personal author through a paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay that reconstructs its underpinning historical processes and conditions. This analysis includes not only the epitextual background of the German Enlightenment and the role therein played by periodicals such as the Berlinische Monatsschrift, but also the peritextual features of catchwords, signature marks and front matter that appeared within and alongside Kant’s text. I argue that these paratexts lead us back to the print machinery of the German Enlightenment: a socio-technological assemblage of human actors interacting with technologies, which Kant and others sought to steer so as to address the problem of print saturation. The existence of such a machinery, one that preceded the authorial figure, perturbs copyright law’s attachment to original authorship. Insufficient to deal with the complexities of the book’s emergence, the terms and doctrines of copyright law tend to suppress the deep historicity of literary production.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the contexts of mass digitisation and the Kantian copyright debate in which Kant’s 1785 essay is to be reread. First, I consider the Google Books project as an emblematic case for our urgent need to rethink authorship, copyright and their profound co-evolution with media technologies. Then, I review the recent debate surrounding the utilitarian-proprietary approach to copyright and its limits as suggested by three readers of Kant’s 1785 essay. After that, I propose an alternative media-theoretical way of looking at a printed book, one that focuses on the paratexts of Kant’s 1785 essay to illuminate the medial dimension of literary production and the limits of proprietary authorship. My contention is that although the three Kantian copyright scholars have demonstrated the power of Kant’s essay and its concept of the book as communicative act to reshape our understanding of authorship and copyright, they have also underestimated the material dimension of the text that affords the production of its meaning. A more adequate understanding of Kant’s text and how it could illuminate the present digital transformation of authorship and copyright would require that we attend closely to its medial-materialities.

This book concludes by analysing a contemporary digital text, Wikipedia’s article on authorship, based on the prior insights into literary production gleaned from Kant’s 1785 essay. I clarify the fundamental challenge issued by Wikipedia’s multitudinous authorship to copyright’s proprietary model by turning to some of its digital paratexts. The dispute tags, hyperlinks, footnotes and revision history of Wikipedia’s article on authorship are read as indices of the digital machinery that constituted it and keeps it open to revision. I further discuss the ethical dimension of Wikipedia’s production by situating the digital encyclopaedia alongside, and against, some of its print predecessors in Roman antiquity and the European Enlightenment. This analysis of Wikipedia closes with an invitation for the writing of a media history of the encyclopaedia, one that could account for its ethics and communicative function in the digital present.

This chapter fully develops the concept of moral imagination through a discussion of Bayer CropScience. A historic review of the concept of moral imagination is explored and with particular reference to Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and John Dewey, leading to the more recent work of Martha Nussbaum. A technology of how to apply moral imagination is developed drawing extensively on Adam Smith’s figure of an “impartial spectator” and Immanuel Kant’s approach to practical reasoning as evident in the recent work of Mark Johnson. We consider the scope and applicability of moral imagination in practice through the work of Amartya Sen.

Volkswagen (VW) was founded in Germany in 1937 under the Nazi regime by the labor unions with the help of Ferdinand Porsche, the inventor of the Beetle (the people’s car). Tasked with making a car that was affordable for all consumers, VW’s flagship car, the compact and iconic Beetle, first rolled off the manufacturing floor in 1945, and by 1949, half of all passenger cars produced in West Germany were built by VW. By 2014, VW was one of the biggest firms in the world. It had factories in thirty-one countries, employing almost 600,000 people worldwide. In 2014, it sold 10.2 million vehicles, with a total profit of over 11 billion euros.

This chapter focuses on the figures of Antonio Genovesi, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith. It begins by exploring the similarities and differences in their biographies and historical-intellectual contexts. Next, it examines the influence of Genovesi’s and Smith’s philosophies on Kant. Lastly, it provides a critical and selective review of the secondary literature regarding these authors’ perspectives on the morality of commercial life.

What Fichte found most inspiring in Kant’s critical philosophy was its Copernican focus on the transcendental conditions of conscious thought, its doctrine of the autonomy of reason, and, most especially, its fundamental commitment to freedom of the will. Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies of right are especially close in form and content. Both works treat the philosophy of right as a separate subject that is independent of ethical philosophy, and both ground their theories in a fundamental right of freedom from interference. We see, right at the outset, the importance of freedom in modern moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. We begin, however, with Fichte’s ethics. Fichte’s ethics of autonomy or, as he usually prefers to say, “self-sufficiency” or “independence,” departs from Kant’s in several important ways. The most important structurally is that whereas autonomy is at the heart of grounding what Kant takes to be the fundamentally formal character of the moral law. Fichte holds, against “all of the authors who have treated ethics merely formally,” that self-sufficiency or independence is a “material” kind of freedom. Fichte’s ethics sets autonomous self-determination as a fundamental moral end, and is ultimately consequentialist.

The other philosopher writing in Kant’s wake who figures prominently in the origins of “continental” philosophy is Hegel. Although many of the seeds of Hegel’s thought were planted by Fichte, Hegel’s works ultimately had far greater direct impact. Hegel was not, however, an ethical or moral philosopher like Fichte. T. H. Irwin plausibly claims, indeed, that Hegel actually denies that moral philosophy is “a distinct discipline.” But Hegel had a massive influence on the history of ethics even so, including on “modern moral philosophy.” Partly this was as a critic, not just of moral philosophy, but also of the modern conception of morality itself. Hegel argues that what he and other moderns call “morality” (Moralität) is a formal abstraction that is incapable of “truth” or “reality.” Moral philosophers who focus on oughts and obligation mistake, in his view, an abstract moment of practical thought for something realizable; they fasten on a desiccated abstraction rather than the “living good” that is embodied in actual modern (liberal) customs and institutions, what Hegel calls “ethical life.” Hegel’s critique of morality begins a tradition that runs through Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and through Anscombe and Bernard Williams in the twentieth.

This chapter proposes that thought experiments are a cognitive apparatus and situates this view among contemporary accounts of thought experiment. I set forward the project of the book, which is to (1) propose a new account of thought experiments as a method and (2) trace the historical foundations of the term and concept of “thought experiment” from Kant through Ørsted to Kierkegaard. I define “cognition” [Erkenntnis] for Kant as a synthesis of concepts with intuitions and propose that Kierkegaard, like Kant and Ørsted, views thought experiments as useful for achieving cognitions. I introduce the term Tanke-experiment in Kierkegaard and suggest why it has been little emphasized by Kierkegaard scholars and remains widely unacknowledged in contemporary descriptions of the history of thought experiment.

In his 1797 essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Love of Humanity”, Immanuel Kant argues that, when only a confident lie might save a friend, one must, if asked, reply truthfully and thus betray his hiding place to the person who wants to kill him. This is the first monograph that explores Kant’s essay in detail. Jens Timmermann examines the historical background of the piece (Kant was provoked by Benjamin Constant and his translator, Carl Friedrich Cramer), the history of the example (which is also discussed by, amongst others, Augustine, Johann David Michaelis and Johann Gottlieb Fichte), the peculiarities of Constant’s version of the case and Kant’s core argument against Constant: that lying, or a right to lie, would undermine contractual rights and spell disaster for human society.

Kant varies Constant’s example to the effect that a lie, not a truthful reply, will by accident help the murderer to find and kill his victim. He argues that the liar can be held legally accountable for violating the formal duty of truthfulness in that case, whereas a lie that does no harm is not punishable as such. This chapter explains the theory of imputation of actions and their consequences that underpins these judgements, along with the notion of moral luck (coincidence, accident) and the distinction between ‘harm’ and ‘wrong’.

It is impossible to understand Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie” without a sense of how Kant’s theory of truth and truthfulness developed over time; and it is impossible to trace the development of Kant’s thought without a clear sense of the conceptual framework that he took as his starting point. This chapter examines the early modern debate with its distinction between morally objectionable lies (mendacia) and morally innocent falsified assertions (falsiloquia) and then presents Kant’s thoughts on the topic in his lectures and in his major writings on moral philosophy. He endorses the distinction between unobjectionable and objectionable falsehoods in the early lectures; in his later publications, he rejects it.

The final chapter addresses the question of what Kant should have said in reply to Constant’s challenge. The objections of his readers and interpreters should be taken seriously as expressions of ordinary moral consciousness; and it is true that moral restrictions can leave us feel helpless in the face of evil. But these considerations would not have been sufficient to change Kant’s mind. So, should his rigorous opposition to untruthfulness count against his moral philosophy? It is argued that Kant’s absolutism is less problematic than it seems, partly because most – if not all – realistic reconstructions of Constant’s case leave us with more promising practical options than lying, partly because Kant’s moral theory contains certain resources that mitigate his absolutism, for example, his conception of the Highest Good. The question of whether his ethical prohibition of lying as a violation of a duty to self is justified is left unanswered.