Edited by Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut, 1–27.

The reason of this appears sufficiently from the treatise it-self. “Introduction.” In Ethics and Practical Reason. This work is called the Critique of Practical Reason, not of the pure practical reason, although its parallelism with the speculative critique would seem to re-quire the latter term. The former concentrates more on the metaethical implications of those theories (and the empirical research on the subject), whereas the latter is better on the argumentation between them.Ĭullity, Garrett, and Berys Gaut. Kauppinen 2007 and Cullity and Gaut 1997 both explain the main features of the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian theories of practical reason. Wallace 1990 is an excellent overview and clarification of the debates about the motivating ability of practical reason. Wallace 2014 is helpful in explaining how practical reason differs from theoretical reason, what the different views of rationality are, and how practical reason relates to morality. If it is assumed that pure reason can contain within itself a practical ground, that is, one sufficient to determine the will, then there are practical laws. Gosepath 2002 is a good guide to the most recent literature on practical reason, and it also describes clearly the arguments against the so-called belief-desire model. concepts which cannot reasonably be denied or negated (e.g. O’Neill 1998 explains equally well the difference between the theories that evaluate actions by their ends and the ones that assess the rationality of actions more directly. In a short chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason entitled On the Typic of the Pure Practical Power of Judgment, Kant addresses a crucial problem. Some working definitions of Kant’s terminology are: Transcendental reason: The quest for a priori concepts of reason i.e. Millgram 2001 is the most accessible introduction to the alternative views about the norms governing practical reasoning. Several good overview articles on practical reason are available.

Pure practical reason