Moral skepticism and the critique of practical reason

David Zapero

pp. 243-260

in: The Palgrave Kant handbook, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

It was not until after Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason that he considered the possibility of extending his transcendental inquiry to moral philosophy. In fact, the first important review of the Critique, written anonymously by Christian Garve for the Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeigen, played a decisive role in this respect. In the course of responding to Garve, Kant came to realize that moral philosophy could be dealt with in the framework that he had until then only applied to theoretical philosophy.1 Since the moral law – Kant argues – must be a synthetic a priori principle, the task of moral philosophy is analogous to the task of theoretical philosophy: its central question is also how a synthetic a priori principle is possible. Indeed, when Kant went on to write the Groundwork shortly thereafter, he emphasized that parallel by dealing with the “how possible” question in a way that was clearly supposed to be analogous to the way he deals with it in the first Critique (G 4:453–55).

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Garve Christian