Kant's Compatibilism

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant has simultaneously embraced a thoroughgoing causal determinism and proclaimed the freedom of the human will. Examining Kant's compatibilist resolution of that apparent inconsistency, Hud Hudson identifies in Kant's work a philosophically respectable view of the metaphysics of determinism and human freedom.

Hudson first examines Kant's pre-critical writings on compatibilism and reviews the particulars of the Third Antinomy from the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant explicitly addresses the issue of compatibilism. After analyzing readings of Kant's compatibilistic resolution by Allen Wood, Jonathan Bennett, Lewis White Beck, Robert Butts, Ralf Meerbote, and Henry Allison, Hudson proposes his own interpretation. Hudson ascribes to Kant a token-token identity thesis regarding natural events and transcendentally free human actions as well as a type-type irreducibility thesis regarding the distinct sorts of descriptions with which we characterize natural events and transcendentally free human actions. The explicitly compatibilist resolution of Hudson's account neither endangers the epistemological scope of Kant's causal determinism nor requires an impoverished sense of freedom of the will. In the light of current debates regarding free will and philosophy of mind, Hudson concludes that Kant's compatibilism can be aligned with the views of certain contemporary philosophers.

Hud Hudson is Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University.