This book offers translations of early critical reactions to Kant's account of free will. Spanning the years 1784-1800, the translations make available, for the first time in English, works by little-known thinkers including Pistorius, Ulrich, Heydenreich, Creuzer and others, as well as familiar figures including Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling. Together they are a testimony to the intense debates surrounding the reception of Kant's account of free will in the 1780s and 1790s, and throw into relief the controversies concerning the coherence of Kant's concept of transcendental freedom, the possibility of reconciling freedom with determinism, the relation between free will and moral imputation, and other arguments central to Kant's view. The volume also includes a helpful introduction, a glossary of key terms and biographical details of the critics, and will provide a valuable foundation for further research on free will in post-Kantian philosophy.

Traces the development of Kant's views on free will from earlier writings through the three Critiques and beyond.

In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant’s thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant’s political philosophy. Ripstein shows that Kant’s thought is organized around two central claims: first, that legal institutions are not simply responses to human limitations or circumstances; indeed the requirements of justice can be articulated without recourse to views about human inclinations and vulnerabilities. Second, Kant argues for a distinctive moral principle, which restricts the legitimate use of force to the creation of a system of equal freedom. Ripstein’s description of the unity and philosophical plausibility of this dimension of Kant’s thought will be a revelation to political and legal scholars. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant’s ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant’s views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today. Ripstein defends the idea of equal freedom by examining several substantive areas of law—private rights, constitutional law, police powers, and punishment—and by demonstrating the compelling advantages of the Kantian framework over competing approaches.

Kant's early critics maintained that his theory of freedom faces a dilemma: either it reduces the will's activity to strict necessity by making it subject to the causality of the moral law, or it reduces the will's activity to blind chance by liberating it from rules of any kind. This Element offers a new interpretation of Kant's theory against the backdrop of this controversy. It argues that Kant was a consistent proponent of the claim that the moral law is the causal law of a free will, and that the supposed ability of free will to choose indifferently between options is an empty concept. Freedom, for Kant, is a power to initiate action from oneself, and the only way to exercise this power is through the law of one's own will, the moral law. Immoral action is not thereby rendered impossible, but it also does not express a genuine ability.

Kant’s Ethics: The Good, Freedom, and the Will is a systematic examination of Kant’s ethics that recognizes the central importance of the good in relation to duty as forming a unified whole, in accordance with Kant’s intent. The Enlightenment, by undermining the religious foundations of morality, prompted Kant to offer a new foundation for ethics based not on religion but on reason. The first chapter provides the context of Kant’s ethics and explains the criteria by which to select views that are authoritative among Kant’s variety of statements. With these criteria for interpretation in hand, the book attempts a systematic account of Kant’s ethics as he developed it over a period of more than 40 years. Kant’s Ethics includes an analysis of the tripartite nature of the will in its dynamic unity and the relation of the will to the good. An appendix, “Kant at Auschwitz,” briefly considers a serious problem for Kant’s political philosophy that follows from his insistence on obeying civil authority.

A collection of essays on the foundational themes of freedom and spontaneity in Immanuel Kant's philosophy.

This 1788 work, based on belief in the immortality of the soul, established Kant as a vindicator of the truth of Christianity. It offers the most complete statement of his theory of free will.