Racionalidade prática e sensibilidade em Kant

Abstract

This article intends to investigate the relationship between practical reason and sensibility in Kant’s moral philosophy. The analysis of the sentiment of respect in the third chapter of the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason is its main purpose. In this famous text, sensibility, which has been disqualified in the first chapter as the possible foundation of the moral law, receives a new moral signification with the feeling of respect, identified as the unique mobile of practical reason. But in order to understand the exact signification of this sentiment of respect and of its function as mobile, one has to study the evolution of Kant’s philosophy on the question of the sensible dimension of morality in the pre-critical period and to take into account the subsequent reflections of the Doctrine of virtue upon the so-called «aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s receptivity to duty». The interpretation of respect as moral sentiment is not only important for the comprehension of practical philosophy as a systematic whole. It is also a crucial notion for the understanding of sentiment as a fundamental faculty of the mind, and for the interpretation of the nature of sensibility in Kant’s transcendental philosophy.