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17 results in Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'

  • 8 - The primacy of practical reason and the idea of a practical postulate

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 168-196

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the content of Immanuel Kant's three postulates, namely, existence of God, own transcendental freedom and immortality, and explains his arguments in their favour. It begins by commenting on Kant's argument, 'On the Primacy of Practical Reason', with a special emphasis on the logical structure of that argument. Kant argument is difficult to follow, and even more difficult to assess, among other things because it is framed in terms of the respective 'interests' of two cognitive faculties. That a practically necessary belief can be rational without evidence is taken to be equivalent to the claim that pure practical reason has primacy over pure speculative reason. The chapter looks at the idea of a postulate of pure practical reason and at the epistemological status Kant assigns to it. It concludes that the main idea behind Kant's argument does not depend on Kant's own, demanding conception of morality.

  • 4 - Reversal or retreat? Kant's deductions of freedom and morality

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 73-89

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the sentence in the Critique of Practical Reason in which Immanuel Kant explicitly discusses the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and its relation to the new book. In a surprising reversal towards the end of the deduction section of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tells one that the 'vainly sought deduction of the moral principle' is replaced by another deduction, namely the deduction of freedom. Kant never quite identifies freedom and the fact of reason, which is the awareness of the authority of the moral law. He returns to the role of morality as the ratio cognoscendi of freedom and accords the support freedom receives from these quarters the status of a deduction. In a striking note from the Duisburg papers, Kant explicitly turns to the task of a 'critique of practical reason'.

  • Preface

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp vii-vii

  • Summary

    The idea for this project grew out of a conversation between Jens Timmermann, Steve Engstrom and Andrews Reath at a conference on Kant's moral philosophy hosted by Peking University in May 2004. We believe that Andy suggested that there was a need for a volume of new essays on the Critique of Practical Reason, and Jens suggested that we assemble a group that would read through the Critique together before embarking on the essays. This volume is thus part of a larger project that included a working group that met several times. Jens Timmermann kindly agreed to host meetings of the group at the University of St Andrews, and we met there twice – in July 2006 to read the Critique together and in late August–early September 2007 to discuss preliminary versions of the papers. Pauline Kleingeld invited us to meet at Leiden University, and we convened there a third time in June 2008 to discuss penultimate versions of the papers. We received financial support from several institutions along the way. We should like to thank Cambridge University Press, the University of St Andrews, the Paton Fund, the Scots Philosophical Club, the University of California at Riverside, the Philosophy Department of Leiden University and the Leiden University Fund. We should also like to thank Lucy Richmond (St Andrews) for compiling the index.

  • 3 - Moral consciousness and the ‘fact of reason’

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 55-72

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the meaning and the importance of the 'fact of reason' in the second Critique of Practical Reason. When he introduces the 'fact of reason', he refers to an alleged consciousness of the fundamental law of pure practical reason, which he also calls consciousness of the moral law. The chapter situates the occurrence of the terminology of a Factum der Vernunft in its argumentative context and provides an interpretation. By the end of the eighteenth century, then, 'factum' could mean either 'deed' or 'fact'. The proper way of reading the expression 'fact of reason' does not yet tells one how successful Kant's use of it is in his argument. Virtually all authors who discuss the fact of reason do so in terms of morality. They introduce the 'consciousness' that Kant calls a fact of reason as the 'consciousness of the moral law' or 'moral consciousness'.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    The Critique of Practical Reason is Kant's second foundational work in moral theory after the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Its stated aim is ‘merely to show that there is pure practical reason’ (CpV 5:3). That is, it attempts to show that reason by itself yields an objective principle of conduct that applies independently of individuals' preferences and empirically given aims – a principle that Kant identifies with the fundamental principle of morality – and thus to show that practical reasoning is not limited to instrumental and prudential reasoning as the empiricist tradition holds. To accomplish this aim, Kant tries to document the origin of the fundamental principle that underwrites common moral thought in reason (in ‘pure practical reason’) and to establish its overriding authority.

    A ‘critique’ is a critical examination of a cognitive faculty that sets out its powers and limits, and in particular establishes the legitimacy of any a priori concepts and principles that structure the relevant domain of cognitive activity. Kant's views about the need for and proper focus of a critique of practical reason changed over time. When he published the Groundwork in 1785, he intended it to take the place of a critique of pure practical reason. He writes that although ‘there is really no other foundation for a metaphysics of morals than a critique of pure practical reason, just as that of metaphysics is the critique of pure speculative reason’, the need for the former is less urgent.

  • 7 - The Antinomy of Practical Reason: reason, the unconditioned and the highest good

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 145-167

  • Summary

    This chapter briefly presents the basic structure of the Antinomy of Pure Reason, paying special attention to the role that reason plays in generating this antinomy. In the Antinomy of Pure Reason of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that if one accepts what he calls Transcendental Realism, the view that appearances and things in themselves are identical, then reason can come into conflict with itself, because it can prove contradictory propositions with respect to certain features of the world. The chapter reconstructs the Antinomy of Practical Reason with the help of several basic structural similarities that it bears to the theoretical antinomy. It addresses several basic questions that arise with respect to the Antinomy of Practical Reason's central concept of the highest good, and uses insights gained from the comparison of the theoretical and practical antinomies to develop detailed answers.

  • 6 - Two conceptions of compatibilism in the Critical Elucidation

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 119-144

  • Summary

    The 'Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason' develops two distinctive conceptions of how freedom of choice and causal determinism may be reconciled. These two conceptions of freedom of choice correspond to a distinction between what Kant calls 'psychological' and what he calls 'transcendental freedom'. The Critical Elucidation presents the argument of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason as a kind of practical syllogism that highlights the distinctive contribution of pure practical reason and the complementary relation of the standpoints belonging to theoretical and pure practical reason. The pure practical concepts of morality involve principles of action that are independent of causal antecedents because they are based on the general principle of autonomy. Kant's fusion of incompatibilism and compatibilism needs to explain how one and the same action can be both caused by antecedent events and nevertheless be an action for which one can be held responsible.

  • 9 - The meaning of the Critique of Practical Reason for moral beings: the Doctrine of Method of Pure Practical Reason

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 197-215

  • Summary

    The Doctrine of Method of Pure Practical Reason shows how carefully Immanuel Kant avoids being constrained by the pattern of the first Critique of Practical Reason. It has the important function of connecting the philosophical inquiry to its outcome in the life of moral subjects. Kant had given no special emphasis to this transition before the Critique. Kant announces that, in order to give proof of 'receptivity' to morality, he make use of 'observations anyone can make'. This experimental approach starts from an even lower level than one might expect, because it refers to 'conversation in mixed companies'. The function of the Doctrine of the Method, then, proves to belong to the very core of the project of the Critique, and provides an important key to the correct understanding of the work.

  • 2 - Formal principles and the form of a law

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 31-54

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the features of practical laws and fundamental practical principles that centre on the notion of 'form'. It examines what Kant means by a 'formal principle' that explains why formal principles are uniquely suited to apply with normative necessity. The formal principle of some rational activity would be the guiding internal or constitutive norm that a subject must follow in order to engage in that activity. The form of a law would be the defining features that a principle must have in order to qualify as a practical law. A formal principle involves some abstraction from content: the form is what remains when one sets aside those features that differentiate one instance of an activity from any other. The chapter gives readings of the arguments for Kant's Theorems I and III and Problem I.

  • 1 - The origin and aim of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 11-30

  • Summary

    Immanuel Kant seeks to establish in the Critique of Practical Reason 'that there is pure practical reason'. The aim of the Critique of Practical Reason is inverse compared with the aim of the Critique of Pure Reason: Whereas the first Critique is supposed to show that one cannot apply pure reason constitutively in a speculative sense, the second Critique is supposed to substantiate the view that objections against the practical constitutive application of pure reason put forward by the empiricists and sceptics are vacuous. In the preface to the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant comments on a few objections that have been raised against his critical philosophy in general, as well as against his foundation of moral philosophy in particular, since 1781. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant distinguishes between the 'critique of pure speculative reason' and the 'Critique of Pure Practical Reason'.

  • 5 - The Triebfeder of pure practical reason

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 90-118

  • Summary

    After determining the concept of the object of pure practical reason in Chapter II of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant takes up the motivational issue in Chapter III, which deals with what he terms the Triebfeder of pure practical reason. In his chapter on the springs of pure practical reason, Kant undertakes to explicate, in the light of the Factum of reason, how pure reason is practical in the case of the human being, and more generally in that of a finite subject having a share in this Factum. Kant's account has merely described how the moral law can infringe the inclinations. This chapter considers the effect the moral law has on feeling through its bearing on the propensities of self-love and self-conceit. Kant says that when the moral law strikes down self-conceit, the direct effect on feeling is the negative, or displeasing, sentiment of humiliation.