ABSTRACT
Kant's deduction of freedom is central to the project of his critical philosophy, but despite this it has been inadequately understood. This is evidenced, in part, by the received view of these texts, which ascribes to them incompatible arguments. This Introduction sketches the argument and some of its background, suggesting a few of the difficulties standing in the way of its being properly grasped. Kant offers us everything one normally expects of the propounder of a new moral theory; in particular, he argues from various truths of our ordinary conception of morality, truths about moral agency and the good, to a fundamental moral principle, explains the relationship between that principle and our practical lives more generally, and begins to develop the substantive (a priori) implications of the theory for how we are, and are not, to conduct ourselves.
