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 the 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:

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 (along with space) provides a framework for appearances, and the appearances in it are governed by causality and necessary natural laws. Appearances are in some sense appearances of things-in-themselves; but, as distinct from their appearances, things-in-themselves 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. For Kant, it is not the absence of natural necessity (see the comment on “blind chance” on pp. 121-2). He has less to say about what it is; the most he says along those lines in this selection appears in his discussion of conscience on p. 125.