Kant’s Free Thinker

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that Kant’s conception of noumenal freedom or absolute spontaneity is not confined to the practical faculty of will but also applies to our theoretical intellect. Far from being thinking mechanisms, we exercise absolute freedom of thought and intellectual autonomy in cognitive actions such as, paradigmatically, empirical judgments about the natural world. The chapter shows that Kant’s account of epistemic freedom avoids doxastic voluntarism: transcendentally free cognitive actions do not stand under the immediate control of the will. Freedom of thought is a distinctive species of transcendental freedom that differs from freedom of will in various ways: most importantly, our free understanding lacks what Kant calls “true causality” since it produces only representations of objects rather than objects corresponding to our representations. By resolving various textual puzzles and seeming conflicts between the two editions of the first Critique, the chapter demonstrates that Kant did not (contrary to what some commentators suggest) abandon his view that we possess absolute freedom of thought in the late 1780s.