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Ian Proops: Kant on Transcendental Freedom (The Fiery Test of Critique: Chs. 11–12)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2024

Allen Wood*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Abstract

Kant’s position on the problem of free will can be perplexing and frustrating: all the real questions about human agential capacities or even about issues of moral imputability are empirical questions, which have empirical answers. But there remains a metaphysical or transcendental problem about the possibility of freedom, which is forever insoluble. Ian Proops’ discussion in The Fiery Test of Critique is to be commended for displaying the rare virtue of appreciating this last point and presenting Kant’s position about it accurately. The only questionable part has to do with the standard terminology – ‘determinism’, ‘libertarianism’, ‘compatibilism’, and ‘incompatibilism’. I argue that it would be better to say, as Kant does, and Proops also does most of the time, that practical freedom, hence transcendental freedom, must be presupposed whenever we act or even judge, but how freedom is possible is both unknowable and even incomprehensible to us.

Type
Author Meets Critic
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Kantian Review

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References

Kant, Immanuel (1900 ->) Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. Ed. der Wissenschaften, Königlich Preußischen Akademie (and successors). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (and predecessors).Google Scholar
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