Corpo e libertà nella filosofia di Kant

Abstract

This article is aimed at shedding light on the question of the body, as it emerges from kant-ian practical reason, through a new spirit by which it is possible to look at the Kantian moral philosophy in a different way, in spite of the image that is always derived from the traditional interpretations. Starting from this aim, I have tried to provide a general ac-count concerning the studies of the interpreters – known as Kant-Renaissance – that follow similar lines from mid 1960‟s, focusing their attention especially on the Metaphysics of Morals. What comes out is an image of Kantian ethics that puts much less emphasis on the human noumenical nature and is instead more sensitive to the “material” aspect of the ethical life. From this reconsideration of Kantian ethics, agency of freedom and the con-struction of a personal identity take into account elements of the natural dimension of humanity, including what comes from body‟s needs, inclinations and desires, in a form that tends, somehow, to “naturalise” the practice of freedom much more than we would expect from just a first reading of the kantian moral philosophy. We have also, on the ba-sis of this interpretations – especially A. Wood‟s –, attempted to compare the spirit with which neuroethics tries to map what happens during the process in which “brain” makes a decision (establishing on this basis a sort of “pre-moral condition”) to either the aesthetic preliminaries of Metaphysics – in which Kant analyzes four moral predispositions to the exercise of freedom – or the three dispositions to the good contained in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. This comparison is an attempt to show how a strong normative theory of morality inspired by Kant, because of the unexpected compatibility with the spirit of neuroethics, could be capable, even today, of constituting a basis for that dimen-sion of moral agency which can not be reduced to a mapping of the human brain.