Kant’s Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis

In his new book, Kant’s Conception of Freedom, Henry Allison provides a comprehensive study of Kant’s views on freedom. Though Allison’s interpretation of Kant on these issues is well-known and influential, the new book provides a distinctive angle by virtue of its developmental approach. Starting with Kant’s work in the 1750s and taking the reader through the late works of the 1790s, the ten chronologically ordered chapters of this book show how the problem of freedom threads through Kant’s work, emerges as a specific problem by the beginning of the critical period and becomes one of the central, unifying concerns around which the critical project develops. Together with Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Freedom (1990), the book constitutes an authoritative take on Kant’s view of freedom. In this review, we first set out the argument of the book, proceeding chapter by chapter. We limit ourselves to select details and the occasional observation; we also identify the interpretive claims that strike us as significant departures from, or notable developments of, Allison’s earlier work. We then take a closer look at Allison’s treatment of a specific issue: why, and in what sense, Kant comes to reject the compatibilist position he held in the 1750s. The narrative of the development of Kant’s conception of freedom, as Allison introduces it in his Preface, is organized around two ‘tracks’: a metaphysical track and a moral track, along which Kant’s understanding of freedom develops – and which themselves stand in an evolving relation to each other (pp. ix–x). In the first four chapters, which begin with a discussion of the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) and end with a look at Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), readers are introduced to the metaphysical and moral concerns that drive Kant’s early philosophical efforts and that gradually converge to form a well-defined problem about the nature of freedom. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the metaphysical track. Kant’s early – and, as it turns out, lifelong – acceptance of the principio rationis determinantis (PRD), the Kantian version of the principle of sufficient reason, is singled out as an important, lasting constraint on Kant’s thinking about freedom (p. 13). The most immediate and consequential effect of Kant’s acceptance of the PRD is that it leads Kant to reject Crusius’ libertarian view of freedom and endorse instead a Leibnizian/Wolffian compatibilism (pp. 26–30).1 But as Allison notes, there is, from the very beginning, some tension between this commitment to compatibilism and other aspects of Kant’s early metaphysical worldview. In particular, Kant’s endorsement of physical influx, which can be traced back to 1755, is hard to reconcile with his compatibilism (pp. xii, 54–5, 82). Though Allison’s discussion of this point is somewhat cursory, the idea appears to be that someone who adopts physical influx construes the body as standing in real relations, whether