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Jörg Noller and John Walsh (eds), Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022 Pp. xlvii + 315 ISBN 9781108482462 (hbk) £74.99
This fascinating collection translates into English, mostly for the first time, a range of German works on freedom dating from 1786 to 1800. They illuminate Kant’s early reception as well as his philosophical development during the period. The volume is also of much interest for those working on German idealism, highlighting the importance of Reinhold for Fichte and Schelling and setting all three within a broader discussion that also includes lesser known figures. Two central and complex topics are the role of self-consciousness in the epistemology of freedom, and the relationship between the will and pure practical reason. These are distinctively post-Kantian debates, presupposing developments such as transcendental apperception while usually departing from the letter of Kant’s works.
When it comes to some basic metaphysical questions, however, we find many thinkers in broad agreement with Kant. The texts by Fichte, A. L. C. Heydenreich, K. H. Heydenreich, Jakob, Reinhold, and Schelling all endorse agent-causal libertarian freedom: an ability to do otherwise that is not fully determined by causes and laws. At the same time, they regard determinism among appearances as real and no ‘illusion’, including in the crucial case of human agents insofar as they appear (p. 260; cf. A535–7/B563–5). In accepting both transcendental freedom and the empirical reality of determinism, all six can be seen as transcendental idealists in a broad sense, even if Fichte and Schelling seek to place idealism on quite different foundations from Kant’s (pp. 209–10, 260). The aforementioned controversy over how will and practical reason relate also allows for varying conceptions of libertarian freedom. Reinhold, for example, maintains that even what Kant called der reine Wille is radically independent from pure practical reason (pp. 98–9; cf. CPrR, 5: 31; 5: 55; MM, 6: 213). This is not Kant’s view, though he does seek to avoid the threat motivating Reinhold’s position, namely that practical reason might itself undermine freedom by efficient-causally determining the will (CPrR, 5: 28–9; 5: 86; 5: 98; cf. pp. 242–5).
The major positive alternative to libertarianism defended here is broadly Leibnizian or Wolffian compatibilism, found in...