Recent work on freedom in Kant

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bob Stern, Jeremy Dunham, Martin Sticker and Mark Sinclair for helpful feedback on drafts of this review.

Notes

1 See, for instance, V: 31. 25–31.

2 For further discussion of this issue, see Hadisi’s, “Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity Cambridge” review of this collection.

3 It does lead to some duplication, however. For instance, over the three collections, the following philosophers write two chapters: Allen Wood, Paul Guyer, Karl Ameriks, Barbara Herman, Eric Watkins, Pauline Kleingeld, and Marcus Willaschek.

4 Thomason, Kant on Persons and Agency, makes a similar point about this volume: “the collection features no work by junior scholars. The reasons for this are understandable, yet given how many emerging Kantians are working on persons and agency, the volume may have benefited from having new voices in the conversation.”

5 Marshall (Kant on Persons and Agency Cambridge, 329) makes a similar point in his review of this collection: “However, that interpretation makes it hard to see why Kant would (in both the Groundwork and the second Critique) claim that FUL is the fundamental law of practical reason. Such a fundamental law would seem meant for more than correcting common mistakes in agents who already understood their general duties”.

6 To be fair, Kant says that they admit of “no exception to the advantage of inclination”, but it is not clear what that could mean in this case. After all, Kant doesn’t think that perfect duties admit of exception at all: “It does not even matter how morally worthy they are because strict duties set the limits within which other duties produce valid obligations. There are several such strict laws: not to murder, not to torture, not to lie etc. They admit of being unrestricted because, as omissions, they cannot conflict with each other. We may well be tempted to dismiss such unrelenting standards, but there can be no question that the philosopher Immanuel Kant was deeply committed to the idea” (Timmermann, “Autonomy, Progress and Virtue”, 382).

7 See Hegel’s discussion of Kantian morality in the Phenomenology (§616–19; 374–76).

8 Formosa’s, The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Philosophy, praise in his review seems spot on: “This volume has a comprehensiveness and coherence to it that is not always present in edited collections. […] Part of this coherence is no doubt due to the book's resulting from a series of workshops in which the authors first discussed Kant's texts and then preliminary versions of their papers. But it is also surely due to the excellent work of Bacin and Sensen. The book covers all the obvious and important precursors, and some less obvious ones, in a careful and systematic way”.