O carácter sintético da racionalidade prática em Kant

Abstract

This dissertation examines the impact of the problem of causality on Kant’s moral philosophy, more specifically the influence of Hume on Kant's view of free will. As is well known, Kant considers that Hume was responsible for awaking him from his “dogmatic slumber” (Prolegomena, A 13). In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume seeks to examine the cognitive structure of human mind, stressing the existence of two fundamental kinds of knowledge: “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas”. While the latter consist of necessary truths, “matters of fact” correspond to contingent truths. The domain of the empirical exceeds what is merely given by our senses, involving a series of inferences that depend on the cause-effect relationship. Hume argues that we cannot know only by means of our intellectual capacities what effect an event will bring without an empirical basis. Causality thus amounts only to a habit, which has no logical foundation. And if this connection does not have legitimacy, the universal and necessary validity of the judgments that sustain science is not possible. This is the first problem raised by Hume, to which Kant devotes much of his Critique of Pure Reason. A second problem has to do with the question of freedom, particularly the dilemma posed by determinism, which consists in the apparent impossibility to know whether or not our actions are a consequence of free choices. Kant seeks to answer this second problem in his moral philosophy, notably in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. I claim that the concept of “transcendental” is in Kant the key not only for answering the theoretical problem of causality but also to tackle the practical problem of freedom. From the theoretical perspective, Kant legitimates causality by appealing to the existence of what he calls “synthetic a priori judgments” with the cause and effect relationship appearing as a category of the “pure concepts of understanding”. But causality is not the only operator that has a transcendental source. Freedom, according to Kant, possesses the same foundation. What is distinctive about Kant’s moral examination is precisely a critical analysis of reason. His moral project is part of an all-embracing critical project where theoretical and practical knowledge are intertwined.