The basic link between Kant’s metaphysics of free will and his theory of practical agency is his theory of teleology, i. e., his theory of ends or purposes. In the first part of his essay “Freedom, Teleology, and Rational Causation,” Robert Hanna show how Kant’s theory of natural teleology, or the directedness of organismic life—biological intentionality—in the two Introductions and second half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment is fundamentally related to his theory of transcendental freedom, and argues that his theory of transcendental freedom entails neither Compatibilism nor Incompatibilism, and constitutes a third alternative, which he calls “Post Compatibilism.” In the second part of the essay, Hanna shows how Kant’s theory of rational teleology, or the directedness of human desire—practical intentionality—is fundamentally related to his stheory of practical freedom or autonomy, and argues that it entails a special form of internalism about practical reasons that shares much with Hume’s theory of practical reasoning, although it also goes well beyond Hume’s theory in several crucial ways. By seeing how the biological intentionality of transcendental freedom is essentially connected with the practical intentionality of human desire right up to the level of autonomy, we can then see how, according to Kant, autonomous persons can have full causal efficacy in a physical world. This interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom, which Hanna calls “the Embodied Agency Theory,” has good textual support and also significant philosophical advantages over the two standard interpretations, the Timeless Agency (Two World) Theory and the Regulative Idea (Two Standpoint) Theory.
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