Phi 109-02 F12

Reading guide for Thurs. 11/1: Kant, sel. from Critique of Practical Reason (Pereboom, sel. 10, pp. 120-129)
 

Kant was born less than 20 years after Hume, so you can think of them as rough contemporaries. Kant was also strongly influenced by Hume, and much of what is most central to his thinking can be seen as a response to various views held by Hume.

Kant’s main works are a series of three “critiques.” The first two are focused on knowledge and morality, respectively, and both have discussions of the idea of free will. Pereboom includes selections from both of them; however, as with Hume, I’ve assigned only the second of Pereboom’s two selections. It comes from a comment (which Kant labels a “critical elucidation”) at the end of one of main parts of the second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason (the qualification “practical” refers to a concern with action rather than belief).

There are no clear subdivisions in this selection, but you might think of it as divided into the following segments:

(i) an introductory discussion leading up to a statement of the basic problem (in the middle of p. 122),

(ii) a rejection of typical compatibilist solutions to the problem (pp. 122-123),

(iii) Kant’s solution (beginning at the top of p. 124),

(iv) a discussion of a difficulty he faces (pp. 126-128), and

(v) a suggestion of a way around this difficulty (in the last three paragraphs, pp. 128-129).

Kant’s way of reconciling causal necessity with freedom rests on his distinction between a world of phenomena or appearances, and a world of noumena or things-in-themselves. Time provides the framework for appearances, which are governed by causality and necessary natural laws. Appearances are in some sense appearances “of” things-in-themselves; but, as things-in-themselves, the latter are not in time and not subject to causal laws. Kant’s alternative to natural causality—what he speaks of as the “causality of the will” (p. 120) or “free causality” (p. 126)—is somehow superadded to natural causality since it is not the absence of natural necessity (see the comment on “blind chance” on pp. 121-2). His fullest positive discussion of the idea appears in his discussion of conscience on p. 125.