“Finally, I believe that my attempt to separate the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason from the Kant of the Critique of Practical Reason has a real basis in history. For bourgeois thought and civilization succeeded in founding the sciences of nature; whereas bourgeois culture has been incapable of generating scientific knowledge of society and morality.
Of course, the natural sciences have been conditioned by the bourgeois historical context in which they have developed—a process which raises many intricate problems of its own. But unless we are to accept dialectical materialism and its fantasies of a ‘proletarian’ biology or physics, we must nevertheless acknowledge the validity of the sciences of nature produced by bourgeois civilization since the Renaissance. But bourgeois discourses in the social sciences command no such validity: we obviously reject them. It is this discrepancy between the two fields that is objectively reflected in the division within Kant’s philosophy between his epistemology and his ethics, his critique of pure and of practical reason.”

from Lucio Colletti, Interview in New Left Review

What if there was no distinction, and Kritik der praktischen Vernunft is just a province of Kritik der reinen Vernunft?
This should be read in conjunction with Edmund Wilson, Consilience, and more that anyone else, “the great design” to which (Nobel Laureate) Roger Sperry was talking about in his lecture here.
Morality can then become a province of scientific enquiry. Again Asimov Psychohistory.

Categories: Episteme