In this sense, the aim of the book is to vindicate Kant’s insistence that his philosophy represents nothing more or less than reason’s implicit self-understanding coming to explicit and systematic self-consciousness. 1 This entry has the following structure. In a world of limits, reason reveals human freedom. Reason enables us to act on principles that we can share with other rational beings. The result is a form of “rational constitutivism” – one which contrasts both with the forms of “reasons fundamentalism” that are currently fashionable and the forms of “agency-first constitutivism” that have dominated much of Kantian metaethics. Against the empiricist account of motivation and morality, Kant argues that reason has a vital power. In doing so, it argues for an account of the fundamental norms that apply to rational beings that treats as fundamental neither substantive reasons or values nor merely structural rationality, but instead a robust conception of reason as a power or capacity - namely, the capacity for theoretical and practical understanding.

At the same time, Kant's Reason also reads Kant as presenting us with a compelling picture of the role that reason (as a capacity or power) should play in a systematic approach to foundational philosophical questions. In particular, through it, we see why the activities of both theoretical and practical reason are governed by a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, while also seeing why reason is essentially autonomous. This model allows us to do justice to the deep commonalities between theoretical and practical rationality, without reducing either to the other. First, it argues that Kant presents a powerful model for understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason as two manifestations of a unified capacity for theoretical and practical understanding (or “comprehension”). Kant's Reason develops a novel interpretation of Kant’s conception of reason and its philosophical significance, focusing on two claims. This is an 1889 edition which includes many of Kants most important works such as the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of.

Kant reason