Kant on Freedom of the Will

Kant recognized the prima facie conflict between the idea that the world is causally determined and the idea that we are free agents, but he employed his novel epistemological theory in order to resolve the conflict. Kant's solution is flawed, I think, because his epistemology is flawed, but his recognition that the fact that we appear to ourselves to be free does constitute indisputable evidence that we are free is a key insight in the history of the development of the debate about free will. I'll discuss his solution here, which will necessitate diving into his strange vocabulary of technical terms. Kant was an obsessive system builder, and the interrelations between terms in his system is complicated and messy, but I'll do my best to untangle the mess enough so that his version of free will is explicable.

The "Critique of Pure Reason" in 10 words or less

Kant’s slogan “[t]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” is the core idea of the Critique. By unpacking this ten word phrase we can outline all the key ideas necessary to understanding his whole critical project. The slogan indicates what components Kant thinks are necessary in order to have a cognition that leads to knowledge while setting limits on the scope of what we can claim to know. It also serves as a summary of Kant’s critique of both the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions and provides the foundation for his own philosophy of Transcendental Idealism.