The Starry Heavens and the Great Gulf

Two things filled Immanuel Kant with awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Paul Guyer reads the most famous sentence Kant ever wrote as a blueprint for his whole project, a science that cannot be wrong about nature, a morality that no circumstance can excuse, and one strange doctrine asked to hold up both at once. Then Kant himself points at the crack in the system: a great gulf, he says, fixed between the world we know and the freedom we need. Guyer walks out to the edge of it, asks what it actually is, and finds the reason Kant needed to write his strangest book.