Critique of Pure Reason

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant effectively settles the question of the compatibility of free will and determinism. First, he explains the antimony which plagues reason; then, he discusses the fallacy that reason commits by confusing the crucial distinction established by transcendental idealism between appearances and thingsinthemselves; next, he shows how this distinction supports the claim that the causality of natural law and the causality of freedom are compatible; finally, he examines the implications of this compatibility for human actions and morality.

Kant convincingly argues both for the thesis that free will and natural law are compatible and for the antithesis, which claims only natural laws determine events. By presenting these proofs, both of which seem true, he introduces the antimony in which reason ensnares itself.

Kant approaches the proof of compatibility of free will and natural law by assuming the antithesis. If one doesn't assume a first cause, the series of natural causes will regress infinitely. One cannot make sense of a world governed by an infinite, incomplete chain of empirical causes. Therefore, for the sake of the conceivability of our world, we must posit an absolute uncaused cause. Kant defines the causality of freedom as this "absolute spontaneity of the cause" which originates a series of appearances obedient to the laws of nature.

He also proves that natural laws are the sole causes by assuming that

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explaining the crucial distinction between appearances and thingsinthemselves. Transcendental idealism asserts that everything is intuited in space and time; objects of experience are mere representations which have no independent existence outside our thought. Space and time are themselves only representations whose existence is determined by our thoughts. Objects of experience are real only by virtue of their empirical relation with our consciousness, whereas thingsinthemselves possess reality independent of our consciousness of them. In fact, we can never know things as they are in themselves because we can only apprehend appearances connected in space and time. Our intuition, which apprehends the manifold synthesized by imagination into knowledge, "is strictly only a receptivity, a capacity of being affected in a certain manner with representations" (Kant 441). Because thingsinthemselves have no relation to space and time, we are utterly incapable of knowing them. We can never know this transcendental object; we can only know the appearances to which it gives rise. This separation between the phenomenal and noumenal realms manifests itself in the twofold character of causality. Causality has an empirical charac

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