Kant′s Account of Reason.doc

Kants Account of Reason First published Fri Sep 12, 2008; substantive revision Tue May 12, 2009 Two of the most prominent questions in Kants critical philosophy concern reason. The first, central to his theoretical philosophy, is the unprovable pretensions of reason in earlier “rationalist” philosophers, especially Leibniz and Descartes. The second, central to his practical philosophy, is the subservient role accorded to reason by the British empiricists—above all Hume, who declared, “Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.” (Treatise, 3.1.1.11; see also the entry on Rationalism vs. Empiricism.) Thus the titles of two key works: the monumental Critique of Pure Reason, and the Critique of Practical Reason that is middle point of his great trio of moral writings (between the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals). It is clear that practical reason is the foundation of Kants moral philosophy. It is less clear what role reason plays in his theoretical philosophy. Kant insists that “metaphysics is utterly impossible, or at best a disorderly and bungling endeavour” if we do not separate “ideas of reason” from “concepts of the understanding” (Prolegomena §41, 4:329). But while he emphasises the solidity of the empirical knowledge gained via the latter, reason often appears to be merely a source of error and illusion. (This is especially so with regard to the most-read sections of the first Critique—the Aesthetic, Analytic and Dialectic.) But if this were so, the status of philosophical reasoning itself would stand in grave doubt. In addition, we might note that Kant rarely discusses reason as such. This leaves a difficult interpretative task: just what is Kants general and positive account of reason? This entry has the following structure. The first section sets out the role that reason plays in Kants account of knowledge and metaphysics in the first Critique—someth