2024.08.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Jens Timmermann, Kant’s Will at the Crossroad: An Essay on the Failings of Practical Reason, Oxford University Press, 2022, 192pp., $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192896032.
Reviewed by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside
Jens Timmermann’s essay aims to give us Kant’s account of ‘practical failure’, that is, of what happens when an agent ‘deviates from the demands of reason’ (2). In doing so, Timmermann develops a distinctive treatment of the principal ideas in Kant’s moral psychology and conception of rational agency. One guiding thread is to ‘re-assert’ (153), in opposition to a recent and influential interpretive trend, that Kant’s moral conception does indeed operate with several stark dualisms—between duty and happiness, between moral and non-moral motivation, between pure practical reason and the empirically conditioned use of practical reason. On Timmermann’s reading, Kant held that the human being is moved by two heterogeneous kinds of incentives (moral interests and the interest in happiness) that operate in radically different ways…
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