Kant and the practical freedom in the Critique of Pure Reason

Kant structured his philosophy as to be possible for one to affirm we are beings that are part of the sensitive world and, as such, have all of our behaviors naturally explained. However, he also supported that we are beings with a rational capacity for representing how the world ought to be, and this rational capacity allows us to have all our decisions accessed in a way that is free from how the world actually is. In this paper we examine Kant's view in certain texts of the first Critique where he differentiates transcendental freedom (or freedom as spontaneity) from practical freedom, understood as free-will, one that can determine itself by representation of reason. Based on these texts and on some of Allison's commentaries (1982), we will see that freedom, in a practical sense, is differentiated from freedom in a cosmological sense, being on one hand compatible with the determinism of the natural causes that operates with the explanation of phenomena (and the human will is a kind of sensitive arbitrium); On the other hand, Kant's conception maintains or subsumes a common notion of human freedom as deliberation and accountable decision - in a sense that it would not be pathologically determined by sensitive immediate motives. "The issue round transcendental freedom concerns uniquely to speculative knowledge, and we can put it aside when dealing with the practical [issue]" (CPR B 831-832).