Index
CONTENTS
Of the Idea of a Critique of Practical Reason.
FIRST PART — ELEMENTS OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON.
BOOK I. The Analytic of Pure Practical Reason.
CHAPTER I. Of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason.
VII. FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF THE PURE PRACTICAL REASON.
Practical Material Principles of Determination taken as the Foundation of Morality, are:
I. Of the Deduction of the Fundamental Principles of Pure
CHAPTER II. Of the Concept of an Object of Pure Practical Reason.
Table of the Categories of Freedom relatively to the Notions of Good
Of the Typic of the Pure Practical Judgement.
CHAPTER III. Of the Motives of Pure Practical Reason.
Critical Examination of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason.
BOOK II. Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason.
CHAPTER I. Of a Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason Generally.
CHAPTER II. Of the Dialectic of Pure Reason in defining the Conception of the "Summum Bonum".
I. The Antinomy of Practical Reason.
II. Critical Solution of the Antinomy of Practical Reason.
III. Of the Primacy of Pure Practical Reason in its Union with the Speculative Reason.
IV. The Immortality of the Soul as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason.
V. The Existence of God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason.
VI. Of the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason Generally.
VIII. Of Belief from a Requirement of Pure Reason.
IX. Of the Wise Adaptation of Man's Cognitive Faculties to his Practical Destination.
SECOND PART. -- METHODOLOGY OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON.
Methodology of Pure 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 require the latter term. The reason of this appears sufficiently from the treatise itself. Its business is to show that there is pure practical reason, and for this purpose it criticizes the entire practical faculty of reason. If it succeeds in this, it has no need to criticize the pure faculty itself in order to see whether reason in making such a claim does not presumptuously overstep itself (as is the case with the speculative reason). For if, as pure reason, it is actually practical, it proves its own reality and that of its concepts by fact, and all disputation against the possibility of its being real is futile.
With this faculty, transcendental freedom is also established; freedom, namely, in that absolute sense in which speculative reason required it in its use of the concept of causality in order to escape the antinomy into which it inevitably falls, when in the chain of cause and effect it tries to think the unconditioned. Speculative reason could only exhibit this concept (of freedom) problematically as not impossible to thought, without assuring it any objective reality, and merely lest the supposed impossibility of what it must at least allow to be thinkable should endanger its very being and plunge it into an abyss of scepticism.
Inasmuch as the reality of the concept of freedom is proved by an apodeictic law of practical reason, it is the keystone of the whole system of pure reason, even the speculative, and all other concepts (those of God and immortality) which, as being mere ideas, remain in it unsupported, now attach themselves to this concept, and by it obtain consistence and objective reality; that is to say, their possibility is proved by the fact that freedom actually exists, for this idea is revealed by the moral law.
