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.

The central project of the Critique of Pure Reason is to answer two sets of questions: What can we know and how can we know it? and What can't we know and why can't we know it? The essays in this collection are intended to help students read the Critique of Pure Reason with a greater understanding of its central themes and arguments, and with some awareness of important lines of criticism of those themes and arguments. Visit our website for sample chapters!

An innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom analyzes the role it plays in his moral philosophy and psychology and considers critical literature on the subject.

A major new study of Kant's ethics.

This monograph is a new interpretation of Kant’s àtemporal conception of the causality of the freedom of the will. The interpretation is based on an analysis of Kant’s primary conception of an action, viz., as a causal consequence of the will. The analysis in turn is based on H. P. Grice’s causal theory of perception and on P. F. Strawson’s modification of the theory. The monograph rejects the customary assumption that Kant’s maxim of an action is a causal determination of the action. It assumes instead that the maxim is definitive of the action, and since its main thesis is that an action for Kant is to be primarily understood as an effect of the will, it concludes that the maxim of an action can only be its logical determination. Kant’s àtemporal conception of the causality of free will is confronted not only by contemporary philosophical conceptions of causality, but by Kant’s own complementary theory of causality, in the Second Analogy of Experience. According to this latter conception, causality is a natural relation among physical and psychological objects, and is therefore a temporal relation among them. Faced with this conflict, Kant scholars like Allen W. Wood either reject Kant’s àtemporal conception of causality or like Henry E. Allison accept it, but only in an anodyne form. Both camps, however, make the aforementioned assumption that Kant’s maxim of an action is a causal determination of the action. The monograph, rejecting the assumption, belongs to neither camp.

Traces the development of Kant's views on free will from earlier writings through the three Critiques and beyond.

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime.