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Reasoning Takes Time: On Allison and the Timelessness of the Intelligible Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Fabian Freyenhagen
Fabian Freyenhagen
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Extract

Consider the following objection of Bennett to Kant:

The least swallowable part of Kant's whole theory of freedom is the claim that the causality of freedom is not in time. This follows from Kant's doctrine that time is an appearance, and anyway the theory of freedom needs it: it is because the noumenal cause of an event is not in time, and thus is not itself an event, that it escapes the causality of nature. Kant is unembarrassed: ‘Inasmuch as it is noumenon, nothing happens in it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determination in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances … No action begins in this active being itself; but we may yet quite correctly say that the active being of itself begins its effects in the sensible world’ [KrV, A541=B569]. That is indefensible. Something in which ‘nothing happens’ cannot be ‘active’ or ‘begin’ a train of events. (Bennett 1974: 226)

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 67 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2008

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