Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Recent scholarship, though undermining the critical/pre-critical distinction in various parts of Kant's philosophy, presupposes an anachronistic division of his system into epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. What needs to be treated independently as a distinct topic is the general question of Kant's conception of philosophy as such. ;This thesis aims to fill the gap: to write the history, not of some part of Kant's system, but of the idea of the whole. The study examines the origins and development of his view of the nature of philosophy as a "theory of autonomy". It covers the formative period , the first draft of a theory of autonomy as an account of morality , the second draft as a conception of reason , and the third draft involving the duality of theoretical and moral reason . ;The thesis re-maps stretches along Kant's route to transcendental idealism by plotting several junctures which have hitherto not received the attention they deserve. The foundations of ethics play as important a role in the rise of German Idealism as later the foundations of mathematics do for analytic philosophy. Chapter I marks Kant's distinction between willing and knowing, his break with Wolff's perfectionism, and the invention of the modern self freed from hierarchy and teleology. Chapter II reveals Kant's debt to Hutcheson for the question: how is a Categorical Imperative possible? Chapter III shows how Kant appropriates Rousseau's contract model to justify morality. Chapter IV covers the generalization of this breakthrough to cognition and the formation of an autonomous transcendental subject as the ground of both the Categories and the Categorical Imperative. Chapter V presents Kant's attempt to unify theoretical and moral autonomy within his account of reason. Chapter VI concludes with transcendental idealism as a dualistic view of reason