About Us

The Kantian Political Thought Standing Group (KSG) is an international network of academics working on Kantian or Kant-related themes in moral and political philosophy. The network was formed relatively recently through a series of workshops and conferences devoted to topics in Kant’s practical philosophy (for details, see the Past Events section of this website), and the KSG aims to maintain and further expand this network.

A distinctive feature of the KSG is a focus on the Kantian priority of practical over theoretical philosophy; this however is not to be understood as encouraging the study of Kantian moral and political philosophy at the expense of epistemology and metaphysics. On the contrary, practical philosophy is first broadly understood not only to include, for instance, Kantian anthropology and the philosophy of religion, but also the philosophy of history; secondly, the KSG encourages the examination of all theoretical issues relevant for the clarification, presentation and discussion of currently urgent normative and political issues, particularly, but not only, issues in epistemology and metaphysics.

Several topics of interest for the current members of the network, such as the issue of normativity, justification and application, relationship between metaphysics and practical philosophy and between epistemology and political philosophy, are becoming central questions for current debates within Kantian studies and moral and political philosophy more generally. The KSG aims to explore further these issues and to encourage the introduction and discussion of new topics and debates.

How to join the Standing Group

If you would like to join the Standing Group on Kantian Political Thought, you will need to create a My ECPR account at http://www.ecpr.eu/. This only takes a few minutes, and you do not need to be from an ECPR member institution to do so. Then, click on the following link, an

https://ecpr.eu/StandingGroups/StandingGroupHome.aspx?ID=16

If you are from an ECPR member institution your membership to the SG is automatically accepted. If you are from a non-member institution we will need to manually accept your application to join, so your membership status will be ‘pending’ until this has been done.