Abstract

This dissertation stems from a conviction that a revised language for discussing the category of freedom would be of use to the philosophy of religion. Scholars of religion from a variety of methodological perspectives are faced with the task of analyzing the meaning of knowledge and belief claims about divine action and human response in interpreting religious experiences such as conversion, prayer and ritual. In the work of Immanuel Kant I find a model of the human will that can bear the weight of religious and non-religious language about freedom. ;This dissertation offers an analysis and reinterpretation of Kant's conception of freedom and a constructive proposal for a contemporary model of the will. The first part analyzes two of the philosophical difficulties involved in Kant's conception of freedom. Chapter 1 examines the question of transcendental freedom and its relation to practical freedom in the Critique of Pure Reason in light of the recent work of Henry Allison. Chapters 2 and 3 argue that reading transcendental freedom as divine aseity sheds light on some of Kant's puzzling texts. I then bring Kant's understanding of analogy, as articulated in the Prolegomena, to bear on my interpretation of transcendental freedom as divine aseity. One of the advantages of this position is that it avoids invoking an aggressively metaphysical reading of Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal "realms." Chapter 4 is devoted to an examination of this distinction as the second difficulty of Kant's conception of freedom. I argue that Kant presents the categories of the phenomenal and noumenal as methodological, linguistic tools for both creating and naming "spaces" about which we claim no knowledge. Chapter 5 compares Kant's understanding of freedom to the theological anthropology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. I argue that Schleiermacher's notion of piety and his doctrine of God can be interpreted through the lens of Kant's view of freedom. This enables me to recommend, in the Conclusion, a constructive yet critical notion of the will that could be meaningful at once to philosophical and theological conceptions of human action.