Eric Watkins

This chapter considers Kant’s complex reasons for his complex views on transcendental freedom. Specifically, it considers his arguments for maintaining that although we cannot cognize our transcendental freedom, there are theoretical grounds that tempt us to assert its existence anyway. Kant’s argument for our epistemic humility regarding freedom is not based on freedom being an instance of something unconditioned, as one might suspect, but rather on considerations specific to transcendental freedom. At the same time, along with our awareness of our own internal activities, it is the fact that freedom is something unconditioned and thus capable of stopping an explanatory causal regress that can tempt us into thinking that we can cognize our freedom.

This chapter focuses on another aspect of the development of Kant’s thought in the pre-Critical period: the influence of Christian August Crusius. While Crusius’s emphasis on a libertarian notion of freedom and his restriction to the principle of sufficient reason are relatively well known, it is here argued that scholars have overlooked the fundamental importance of Crusius’s distinction between essence and existence and that Kant’s reaction to it constitutes both a fundamental break with the Leibnizians and a crucial enduring fixture of his own thought, extending through to his Critical period.

This chapter investigates how historical developments within the natural sciences—specifically, the emergence of mathematical physics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of evolutionary biology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—shaped European thought about evil. The chapter also considers how the problem of evil takes on different forms and elicits different responses as a result. The first section describes how laws of nature became fundamental to science in the early modern period and then shows how that development influenced conceptions of both moral and natural evil. The second section turns to evolutionary biology and describes the evolutionary problem of evil in its terms. The third section considers Charles Darwin’s position on the problem before examining broadly Darwinian theodicies in the fourth section.

This chapter describes how Kant’s views on causality, which contrast starkly with both his empiricist and his rationalist predecessors, are developed in most abstract form in the principles and arguments of the _Critique of Pure Reason_’s Second and Third Analogies of Experience. It then shows that a model of causality involving substances and causal powers rather than events is entailed by these causal principles, and how it can be illustrated with examples of physical forces as expressed in the _Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science_. In light of this rather generic account of causality, the chapter then describes the essential features of Kant’s account of efficient causality in particular, especially as it is discussed in the _Critique of the Power of Judgment_, where Kant contrasts mechanistic, efficient causality with the kind of teleology that is found in organisms.

_The most widely read anthology_ for the study of modern philosophy, this volume provides key works of philosophers and other leading thinkers of the period, chosen to enhance the reader’s understanding of modern philosophy and its relationship to the natural sciences of the time. The third edition incorporates important contributions of women and minority thinkers into the canon of the modern period, while retaining all of the material of the previous edition. Included are works by Princess Elisabeth, Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle, Lady Anne Conway, Anton Wilhelm Amo, Lady Damaris Masham, Lady Mary Shepherd, and Emilie Marquise Du Châtelet.