The Logic of Illusion

For two thousand years, philosophy trusted pure reason to deliver the highest things: God, the soul, freedom, the shape of the world. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, called that trust an illusion, and Paul Guyer thinks the very word Kant chose for it, dialectic, is an accusation with a specific target. Then comes the harder case. Kant's own science leaves no gaps in nature; every event follows by law from the one before. His ethics needs a person who could have done otherwise. Guyer follows Kant's strange, audacious way out, and it startles even him. What would the universe have to do if you had chosen differently?