Abstract

THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN FREEDOM is one of the central and recurring issues of philosophy. Kant considered it to be at the heart of his own philosophy, the "keystone," as he called it, of the whole architecture of his system of pure reason, both of practical reason as well as of speculative reason. However, the notorious difficulties of interpreting Kant's philosophy in general, and his doctrine of freedom in particular, have made most of Kant's accomplishments in this area relatively inaccessible to contemporary philosophers. In this paper I will discuss the problem of human freedom from a Kantian perspective and will make use of some of what I consider to be Kant's most significant analyses and arguments. It is not my intention to try to preserve, illuminate, or render consistent everything which Kant said about freedom; such an endeavor would probably be in vain. I do, however, want to pay him the respect of believing that there is much that is worth preserving in what he says about freedom, and that is, with a modest amount of reconstruction, quite relevant to the way many of us think about the problem of freedom today.