Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: On the Possibility of Freedom in a Deterministic World

Abstract

Freedom is a central question in Philosophy. It has always been asked: How do determinism and freedom cohere in a human being? How can the fact that humans exist and undertake life projects in a thoroughgoingly deterministic world be reconciled with the claim that human acts remain free and efficacious? This work explores the problem of freedom and determinism using Kant’s answer in the Third Antinomy in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and using Transcendental Idealism as epistemological framework for a possible resolution to this problem. If one could assume with Kant that what we know are not things in themselves, then freedom is possible in a determined world as a practical power of choice through the transcendental freedom of the human being.

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Keywords

Immanuel Kant, Third Antinomy, problem of freedom, transcendental idealism, transcendental freedom