Kantotle, or Kant naturalised the Aristotelian way. Free for lunch?

by JLS
for the GC

The idea of "Kantotelian Eleutherism" is to present Kantotle
(i.e. Grice) as Kant naturalised in the Aristotelian way, and I'm collecting
notes on that. R. Hanna who has written on Kant, focuses on what he calls the
'biological' notion of 'free' in his online

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/paper_hanna_kant's_biological_theory_of_f
reedom_march11.pdf

from which one derives much insight. There seems to be something fascinatingly
paradoxical about Kant's 'arbitrium brutum', this 'choice' not being 'free' but there you have. I think Hanna makes some good points about the complexities of what Aristotle, Kant, and Grice (along with a few others!) regard as this level of 'psychological' freedom which is not yet 'fully rational'.

Hanna starts by quoting Kant on 'arbitrium brutum' -- the choice of animals

Kant:

"Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice
(Willkür) from necessitation by impulses of sensibility. For a power of
choice is sensible insofar as it is pathologically affected (through
moving-causes of sensibility); it is called an animal power of choice (arbitrium
brutum) if it can be pathologically necessitated. The human power of choice
is indeed an arbitrium sensitivum, yet not brutum, but liberum, because
sensibility does not render its action necessary, but in the human being there
is a faculty of determining oneself from oneself, independently of
necessitation by sensible impulses."

Most scholars are familiar with the 'practical' freedom that is invoked by
Kant:

"Practical freedom in this positive sense, or autonomy, is how a
transcendentally free person can choose or do things by means of her subjective
experience or consciousness of recognizing the Categorical Imperative or moral
law as a desire-overriding, strictly universal, a priori, categorically
normative, non-instrumental practical reason that has both motivating and
justifying force."

Vide Grice, "Freedom and morality in Kant's foundations" (Grice papers).
Also his seminar on "Freedom". And notes on freedom in his 1986 "Actions and
Events".

"In contrast to these theories, as I have mentioned," Hanna writes, "I
want to develop and defend Kant’s Biological Theory of Freedom"".

A point that is very Aristotelian (and thus Kantotelian) is that of
CONTINUITY. No breaks in the 'sense' specifications of 'free' (from the freely
moving body, to the 'arbitrium brutum' to the freedom NOT to abide by a
maxim):

"This makes Kant a defender of Liberal Naturalism (endnote 10), which says
that the irreducible but also non-dualistic mental properties of minded
animals are as basic in nature as biological properties, and metaphysically
CONTINUOUS with them. In other words, rational mindedness grows naturally in
the physical world."

Or what we mean when we say that Kantotle just naturalises Kant in
the Aristotelian way.

"Kant’s theory of transcendental freedom is based on his notion of “
spontaneity. For him, x is spontaneous iff x is a conscious mental event that
expresses some acts or operations of a creature, and x is: i.
causal-dynamically necessarily unprecedented, and this in the two-part sense that (ia) conscious mental events of those specific sorts have never actually happened
before, and (ib) the settled empirical facts about the past together with the
general causal mechanical laws of nature do NOT provide nomologically
sufficient conditions for the existence or specific character those conscious
mental events, plus, (ii) underdetermined by external sensory informational
inputs, and also by prior desires, even though it may have been triggered
by those very inputs or motivated by those very desires, and (iii)
creative in the sense of being recursively constructive, or able to generate
infinitely complex outputs from finite resources, but also (iv) self-guiding."

It all starts with "COSMOLOGICALLY "FREE"" (Grice's first stage, versus
psychologically free (second stage) and 'rationally free' (third stage)).

Kant writes:

"By freedom in the cosmological sense … I understand the faculty of
beginning a state from itself (von selbst), the causality of which does not in turn stand under another cause determining it in time in accordance with the law of nature."

"[A]ccording to Kant, biological life is metaphysically CONTINUOUS with
the essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring, rational human mind."

"Rational human animals are not deterministic (or indeterministic) natural
automata or machines, and they therefore are inherently non-mechanical,
non-Turing-computable living organisms of a suitably complex kind."
(Connection with Grice, "Personal identity" (Mind 1941)). Indeed, in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant explicitly asserts that rational personhood
(Persönlichkeit) itself is just freedom and independence from the mechanism of
nature regarded as a capacity of a being subject to special laws (pure
practical laws given by its own reason)."

And so on. Hanna has a couple of articles and at least a book on that. His account
diverges from the more standard line by Allison.