This chapter explores Wittgenstein’s two references to the arts in 4.014. The first is his musical example of the unity of language and the world; the second his allusion to the fairytale The Gold-Children by Brothers Grimm. The chapter argues, first, that Wittgenstein’s early notion of logic incorporates forms that for Kant belong to transcendental aesthetic, namely, space and time. Second, it spells out how this commitment motivates Wittgenstein’s musical example and why it is crucial to draw a distinction between transcendental form and empirical structures made possible by that form. Finally, the chapter argues, pace Peter Sullivan, that the unity of language and the world is guaranteed by the metaphysical subject as their common origin. If the fairytale is read as a condensed illustration of Wittgenstein’s position, then this common origin is signified by a golden fish.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant with that of the German Idealists. The German Idealists attempt to unify Kant’s faculty psychology by uncovering a “common root” that is the source of sensibility and understanding, where the common root is a homogenous capacity that nevertheless can generate the other faculties. Insofar as these interpretations rely on telling a causal story, where one faculty causes others to arise, they return to a pre-critical position that Kant would reject; on Kant’s critical philosophy, we are precluded from extending categories like causality to our faculties for cognition, since such faculties do not appear sensibly in our experience. The chapter argues that, while Heidegger also seeks a common root, he avoids this problem by insisting that the common root is heterogenous. His common root – the imagination – is a unification of three basic capacities, rather than a single, deeper capacity that causes the others. Thus, Heidegger does not seek a foundation for metaphysics that is beyond the bounds of what Kant thinks we can know; he works with the cognitive capacities that Kant already identifies, but seeks to explain more fully the structural interrelationships between those capacities.

Hegel dedicates ‘Teleology’ in his Logic to resolve Kant’s antinomies about causality: the third antinomy of reason and the antinomy of judgement. This chapter first connects these distinct Kantian antinomies. I argue that Hegel is right that the opposition of the causal concepts involved in them is substantially the same. I also advocate that Hegel is right too in supposing that for Kant the conflicting concepts remain opposed after the ‘solution’ to the different logical conflicts in the various Critiques is reached. I argue that, in contrast, Hegel’s own resolution tries to deliver a proper unification of these concepts.

Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Western philosophy. It is one of the last monuments to the project of grand synthetic philosophical system building, where a single, unified work could aim to clarify, resolve, and ground all the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, aesthetics, and science. Poorly received on its initial publication, it soon became a powerful cultural force, inspiring not only philosophers but also artists, writers, and musicians, and attracting a large popular audience of nonscholars. Perhaps equally importantly, Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to take non-Western thought seriously, to treat it as a living tradition rather than as a mere object of study. This volume showcases the enormous variety of contemporary scholarship as well as the enduring relevance of this beautifully written text.

Carl Christian Erhard Schmid’s Lexicon for the Easier Use of the Kantian Writings defines technical terms in the Critical philosophy. The lexicon offers insight into Schmid’s understanding of the concepts relevant to free will and anticipates his later position that freedom is restricted to moral actions. The text is particularly noteworthy for its entry on autonomy. There Schmid asserts that free actions and morally good actions are synonymous.

In his 1790 Attempt at a Moral Philosophy, Schmid presents his doctrine of intelligible fatalism. He makes the Kantian claim that consciousness of the moral law entails that reason is capable of determining the will independently of sensibility, a capacity which Schmid calls moral freedom. Moral actions bear the imprint of reason’s self-activity whereas immoral actions are the result of a lack of reason’s activity. Drawing on Ulrich’s claims that there is no middle path between chance and necessity and that chance is irrational, Schmid holds that there must be some ground for reason’s failure to determine the will in the case of immoral action. Accordingly, Schmid posits intelligible obstacles which prevent reason’s efficacy in determining the will. Despite the thoroughgoing necessity of all actions as a result of intelligible forces, Schmid holds that imputation is still possible because the agent is unaware of those forces.

In his “On the Freedom of the Will” (1789), Johann Heinrich Abicht rejects the proposition that freedom immediately reveals itself to us through consciousness or some special feeling. Were that the case, Abicht maintains, then freedom would be knowable, which is impossible given that it is transcendental and inaccessible to our understanding. Nevertheless, on Abicht’s view, consciousness still plays a role in demonstrating that our will is free. He grants that we are conscious of certain internal volitional appearances, e.g. approval, decision, inclination, desire, etc. In order to demonstrate the concept of freedom, which Abicht understands as the capacity to be the self-contained ground of volition, we must prove that the ultimate grounds of these appearances are internal to the I and therefore not subject to external determination.

In his 1786 review of Johann Schultze’s Elucidations of Professor Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (1784), Pistorius criticizes Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom as it is represented in Schultze’s work. Given the expository aim of Schultze’s work and Pistorius’s claim that some of the objections he raises have already been addressed in his review of Kant’s Prolegomena, it is reasonable to presume that Pistorius generally took his criticisms of Schultze to apply equally to Kant. Pistorius observes that Kant’s solution to the Third Antinomy rests on transcendental freedom’s supposed independence from temporal conditions; however, Pistorius maintains, transcendental freedom – qua the capacity to begin a state from itself – presupposes temporal conditions insofar as these conditions are implied by the concept of beginning. Thus, the concept of transcendental freedom is supposedly internally consistent.

In “On Intelligible Fatalism in the Critical Philosophy” (1794), Johann Christoph Schwab levels several accusations against C.C.E. Schmid’s doctrine of intelligible fatalism. First, whereas the Leibnizian-Wolffian determinist can hope to overcome the forces opposed to freedom insofar as these are natural and alterable, the intelligible fatalist cannot hold any such hope because the intelligible forces opposed to freedom are immutable. Second, insofar as Schmid acknowledges a sensible matter given to the rational being, he seems committed to two kinds of obstacles to reason’s self-activity: sensible and intelligible obstacles. This supposedly makes Schmid’s view inferior to the Leibnizian-Wolffian account, which posits only one sort of obstacle to freedom. Lastly, Schwab claims that intelligible fatalism abolishes the concepts of blame and imputation. Thus, concludes Schwab, the Leibnizian-Wolffian conception of free will is superior to that of intelligible fatalism.

In “On the Two Kinds of I, and the Concept of Freedom in Kant’s Ethics” (1792), Johann Christoph Schwab treats Schmid’s claim that the sensible self is grounded in a supersensible I, which parallels Kant’s distinction between the empirical and intelligible character. Schwab echoes Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s charge that such a supersensible posit is guilty of an illicit extension of the categories beyond the sphere of possible experience. Moreover, Schwab maintains, even if this supersensible posit is granted, nothing could be predicated of it and yet Schmid makes several claims about it, e.g. it is the ground of all our actions, it is the ground of space and time, it is unalterable, etc. Schwab concludes the essay by taking issue with Schmid’s claim that on the Leibnizian-Wolffian view, the determining grounds of action are entirely beyond the agent’s control. In response to this charge, Schwab appeals to the Leibnizian-Wolffian conception of spontaneity and claims that the determining grounds of free action are contained within the agent itself.

Almost every reader’s first encounter with Kant comes through either the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals or the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, but while the former work occupies a central and revered place in the philosophical canon, the Prolegomena is often viewed much more ambivalently.

The chapter examines how Kant casts his critical philosophy in the Prolegomena, and in particular how the accusations of being a Berkeleyian force him to refine his views about what exactly the mind-dependence of appearances involves. After looking at what exactly Kant means by ‘a priori intuition,’ the essay explores three main ways to make sense of his transcendental idealism – roughly, an epistemic account, a phenomenalist or ‘mentalist’ view and a relationalist interpretation – and argues that the last of these provides the most fruitful approach to the arguments in the Prolegomena, including the examples involving incongruent counterparts. On this view, the Prolegomena stands as an important stage in Kant’s development precisely in its repudiation of Berkeleyian phenomenalism, and while it is only in the B-edition of the first Critique that transcendental idealism is fully presented, the Prolegomena marks a clear advance over the A-edition.