On Kant’s Janus-Faced Transcendental and Empirical Conception of the Human Being

Abstract

There has been increased attention to the empirical and naturalistic dimensions of Kant’s philosophy in recent decades, across both his theoretical and practical philosophy. Anik Waldow’s impressively wide-ranging and carefully argued book, Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature (Waldow 2020), clearly demonstrates the fruits of this reoriented focus, not only in the case of Kant, but also in all the embodied agency-oriented conceptions of experience that she brings to light across the early modern period in the thought of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant. Here, I focus on Waldow’s analysis of the a priori and empirical dimensions of Kant’s conception of the human agent. In particular, I set that analysis within the wider context of Kant’s multi-levelled and presuppositional conception of the sciences, both theoretical and practical, and consider some of the difficult questions that arise concerning Kant’s transcendental idealist conception of our freedom within nature.