ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant’s most basic move in seeking to explain the grounds and limits of human reason is his claim that practical uses of reason are more fundamental than theoretical uses of reason. When Kant turns to the problem of the grounding of reason, he often makes a limited but insistent claim on behalf of toleration. He asserts repeatedly that “the public use of reason should always be free”. The author tries to uncover some of the roots for the toleration of public uses of reason not only to show why Kant argues for an apparent “inversion” of traditional liberal priorities, but also to suggest that the traditional precedence accorded private uses of reason in much liberal thinking is less central to liberalism than is often assumed. The author also tries to show that Kant offers the appropriate complement to a discursive grounding of reason in his reasoned grounding of practices of discourse.
