Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations
- Introduction
- Part I Freedom and rational agency in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 1 The Third Antinomy
- 2 Empirical and intelligible character
- 3 Practical and transcendental freedom
- 4 Two alternative interpretations
- Part II Moral agency and moral psychology
- Part III The justification of morality and freedom
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Empirical and intelligible character
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on sources and key to abbreviations and translations
- Introduction
- Part I Freedom and rational agency in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 1 The Third Antinomy
- 2 Empirical and intelligible character
- 3 Practical and transcendental freedom
- 4 Two alternative interpretations
- Part II Moral agency and moral psychology
- Part III The justification of morality and freedom
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I readily confess that this double character of man, these two I's in the single subject, are for me, in spite of all the explanations which Kant himself and his students have given of it, particularly with respect to the resolution of the well known antinomy of freedom, the most obscure and incomprehensible in the entire critical philosophy.
After almost two hundred years, the perplexity expressed by Kant's astute critic, Hermann Andreas Pistorius, is still widely shared. How can both an empirical and an intelligible character be ascribed to a single agent? How can one and the same action be conceived both as causally determined by the antecedent state of the agent and extrinsic factors and as a “new beginning,” the product of the spontaneity of the agent?
The present chapter attempts to deal with this problem by focusing on the distinction between the two types of character as it is depicted in the Critique of Pure Reason. Contrary to many interpreters, I shall argue that Kant is there concerned to provide a transcendental framework for a unified theory of rational agency, one that includes but is not limited to moral agency. Accordingly, although I shall refer to these texts on occasion, the modifications of his theory resulting from an exclusive focus on the moral dimension of agency in the Critique of Pure Reason and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (specifically, the account of Gesinnung) will be reserved for the second part of this study.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant's Theory of Freedom , pp. 29 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990