Abstract

The chapter of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason entitled “Table of the categories of liberty, in relation to the concepts of good and evil”, to which this year the Bonn conference “Kant und die ‘Kategorien der Freiheit’” was devoted, today still arouses many questions: is the table of the categories of liberty sufficient to cover the whole practical domain, including that of the empirically conditioned? And if this is the case, what is the meaning of the genitive “of liberty”, and to which Kantian concept of liberty do the categories owe their name? Are they concepts of autonomous volition, referable exclusively to good and evil as Gut and Böse or also to Wohl and Weh? And since “practical concepts a priori … soon become knowledge” (KpV A 116), in what does practical knowledge consist, and what is its relationship with the practical conscience of the subject, with Gewissen? In the present panorama of German research on Kant, Heiner F. Klemme, Jochen Bojanowski, Dieter Sturma, José M. Torralba, Christian Krijnen, Stephen Zimmermann and Hans F. Fulda endeavour to give an answer to such issues and make an important contribution to present-day research on Kantian problems of practical judgment and the meanings of liberty and of the logical functions of the categories