The Solution

Abstract

Abstract The previous chapter demonstrated that Kant begins to have a problem from the 1760s onwards in relating human freedom and divine creative action. This chapter sets out the solution that Kant moves towards in the late 1770s, and sets out extensively in the 1780s: we can be said to be free to the extent that we regard ourselves as intelligible beings, capable of noumenal first causation. ‘Noumenal first causation’ involves being ultimately responsible for the series of (determined) spatio-temporal empirical events that appear in the phenomenal realm, in such a way that we are able to do otherwise. Kant’s solution belongs in the context of the strand of his mature philosophy known as ‘transcendental idealism’. Drawing on primary texts and an extensive secondary literature, the chapter aligns itself with a metaphysical interpretation of transcendental idealism (Ameriks, Adams, Hogan), paying particular attention to the categories of pure and phenomenal substance (Wuerth).