August Ludwig Christian Heydenreich’s On Freedom and Determinism and their Compatibility (1793) presents the central tensions between determinism and indeterminism prior to the Critical philosophy and outlines how the latter is able to resolve these tensions. He notes that for all that Kant’s conception of free will was able to accomplish, there is still considerable disagreement on how this conception is to be understood, particularly between Carl Christian Erhard Schmid and Karl Leonhard Reinhold. The originality of Heydenreich’s position consists in his assertion that the moral power of choice cannot belong to the sphere of nature or to the supersensible world. If it belonged to the former, then its actions would necessarily be determined in accordance with the law of causality. If it belonged to the latter, then its actions would necessarily be determined by the moral law and culpability for immoral actions would be abolished. Instead, the moral power of choice must be situated between the two realms and constitute the boundary and bridge between them.

Salomon Maimon argues in “The Moral Skeptic” (1800) that Kant’s conception of freedom as the capacity of the power of choice to be determined by reason independently of sensible determinations is an empty concept, or, as Maimon puts it, a “term without a concept.” He holds that a determinate capacity is inconceivable without laws through which its efficacy is invariably determined. Although we might conceive of laws of nature as the determining ground of immoral action and the moral law as the determining ground of moral action, there is no law to determine which of these two opposed grounds is to become the determining ground of action in a given case. Thus, the actual determination of the power of choice would be left to chance, which is absurd since chance indicates the lack of a determining ground. Maimon’s critique is embedded in a broader treatment of the difference between the moral skeptic and the moral dogmatist in view of the Critical philosophy.

In his “On the Freedom of the Will” (1789), Johann Heinrich Abicht rejects the proposition that freedom immediately reveals itself to us through consciousness or some special feeling. Were that the case, Abicht maintains, then freedom would be knowable, which is impossible given that it is transcendental and inaccessible to our understanding. Nevertheless, on Abicht’s view, consciousness still plays a role in demonstrating that our will is free. He grants that we are conscious of certain internal volitional appearances, e.g. approval, decision, inclination, desire, etc. In order to demonstrate the concept of freedom, which Abicht understands as the capacity to be the self-contained ground of volition, we must prove that the ultimate grounds of these appearances are internal to the I and therefore not subject to external determination.

Karl Heinrich Heydenreich contends in “On Moral Freedom” (1791) that the human being is originally endowed with consciousness of freedom. Moreover, Heydenreich explicitly denies that our consciousness of freedom is a consequence of consciousness of the moral law and instead maintains that the moral law provides only indirect support for our innate consciousness of freedom. Similar to Snell’s contention that our freedom is revealed to us through the feeling of our own self, at one point Heydenreich refers to our feeling of freedom. According to Heydenreich, the task of philosophy is to secure this feeling of freedom from the skepticism of speculative reason.

In his 1786 review of Johann Schultze’s Elucidations of Professor Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (1784), Pistorius criticizes Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom as it is represented in Schultze’s work. Given the expository aim of Schultze’s work and Pistorius’s claim that some of the objections he raises have already been addressed in his review of Kant’s Prolegomena, it is reasonable to presume that Pistorius generally took his criticisms of Schultze to apply equally to Kant. Pistorius observes that Kant’s solution to the Third Antinomy rests on transcendental freedom’s supposed independence from temporal conditions; however, Pistorius maintains, transcendental freedom – qua the capacity to begin a state from itself – presupposes temporal conditions insofar as these conditions are implied by the concept of beginning. Thus, the concept of transcendental freedom is supposedly internally consistent.

In “On Intelligible Fatalism in the Critical Philosophy” (1794), Johann Christoph Schwab levels several accusations against C.C.E. Schmid’s doctrine of intelligible fatalism. First, whereas the Leibnizian-Wolffian determinist can hope to overcome the forces opposed to freedom insofar as these are natural and alterable, the intelligible fatalist cannot hold any such hope because the intelligible forces opposed to freedom are immutable. Second, insofar as Schmid acknowledges a sensible matter given to the rational being, he seems committed to two kinds of obstacles to reason’s self-activity: sensible and intelligible obstacles. This supposedly makes Schmid’s view inferior to the Leibnizian-Wolffian account, which posits only one sort of obstacle to freedom. Lastly, Schwab claims that intelligible fatalism abolishes the concepts of blame and imputation. Thus, concludes Schwab, the Leibnizian-Wolffian conception of free will is superior to that of intelligible fatalism.

In his 1794 volume Contributions to the Correction of Previous Misunderstandings of Philosophers, Karl Leonhard Reinhold outlines his theory of free will, which emphasizes the agent’s capacity to choose in conformity with and in opposition to the moral law. Reinhold’s account can largely be seen as a response to Schmid’s conception. Thus, Reinhold considers the Schmidian notion that freedom consists in the self-activity of reason and that reason’s failure to effectively determine the will is due to intelligible obstacles. According to Reinhold, such a conception of free will abolishes moral imputation since merit or blame would be reducible to the absence or presence of those obstacles. Furthermore, Reinhold emphasizes the necessary independence of the will from both the faculty of desire, which supplies the matter of volition, and reason, which supplies the form by means of a formal normative standard, the moral law. As independent from these two faculties, the will is free to choose for or against the moral law. Reinhold maintains that only then can the normative necessity of that law be absolute.

In his “Some Remarks on the Concept of the Freedom of the Will, posed by I. Kant in the Introduction to the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right” (1797), K.L. Reinhold is incredulous that Kant could restrict free will to moral action after having previously emphasized the applicability of freedom to immoral action for the sake of moral imputation. Reinhold takes issue with Kant’s distinction between the will and the power of choice. According to Reinhold, the distinction is incoherent insofar as Kant defines freedom of the power of choice as the ability of pure reason to be practical, which seems to pertain to the legislative will rather than the executive power of choice. Reinhold interprets Kant’s conception of this freedom as precluding immoral action and claims that this would abolish the moral law’s normativity. Furthermore, Reinhold treats Kant’s denial that freedom of the power of choice can be defined as the capacity to choose for or against the moral law and Kant’s apparent declaration that the possibility of deviating from the moral law is an incapacity. If the possibility of deviating from the moral law were an incapacity, then, Reinhold maintains, the moral law would be impossible.

In On the Grounds and Laws of Free Actions (1795), F.C. Forberg responds at length to Leonhard Creuzer’s skeptical concerns with Kant’s account of free will. Forberg observes that theoretical reason demands that the activity of free will be conceived of as determined by a sufficient ground in accordance with a law. By contrast, practical reason demands that we presuppose that freedom pertain to both moral and immoral action. Whereas Creuzer is skeptical that these demands can be reconciled, Forberg argues that their compatibility is secured by the Critical philosophy. Forberg maintains that the principle of sufficient reason threatens freedom only if the relation between ground and what is grounded is temporal. However, if the principles which ground actions are intelligible and therefore atemporally related to actions, then the ground itself can be conceived of as within the subject’s control. Moreover, whereas laws of nature command natural powers on the condition of a temporally preceding cause, unconditional laws of intelligible powers are not bound by this condition. Thus, there is no demonstrable contradiction in positing that an intelligible power could be subject to an unconditional law and nevertheless possess freedom to act in conformity with or contrary to that law.

In his Skeptical Reflections on Freedom of the Will with Respect to the Most Recent Theories of the Same (1793), Leonhard Creuzer avows his skepticism with respect to freedom of the will. His skepticism applies equally to our moral psychology and to proper philosophical treatments of free will. According to Creuzer, philosophy has fared no better than common sense in adjudicating the dispute on free will. He discusses the purported inadequacy of pre-Critical treatments of free will by thinkers such as Crusius, Leibniz, and Spinoza, and maintains that the Critical philosophy has not succeeded in resolving this perennial dilemma but has merely determined the problem more precisely.

In his Eleutheriology or On Freedom and Necessity (1788), Ulrich is concerned with the prospect of the concept of transcendental freedom carving out conceptual space between necessity and chance. He notes the ingenuity of Kant’s restriction of natural necessity to appearances and his attempt to locate freedom in a sphere independent of temporal conditions. However, the denial of natural necessity to things in themselves does not entail that the intelligible character is not necessarily determined in a way independent of temporal conditions. Ulrich presses this issue with respect to those instances in which pure reason does not effectively determine the will, i.e. with respect to immoral action. He asserts that there either is a ground sufficient for the exercise or omission of reason’s efficacy, or not. If there is such a ground, then reason is necessarily determined and Kant is ultimately a determinist even with respect to the intelligible character. If there is not, then whether we act morally or immorally is the result of chance, which is irrational.

In “On the Two Kinds of I, and the Concept of Freedom in Kant’s Ethics” (1792), Johann Christoph Schwab treats Schmid’s claim that the sensible self is grounded in a supersensible I, which parallels Kant’s distinction between the empirical and intelligible character. Schwab echoes Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s charge that such a supersensible posit is guilty of an illicit extension of the categories beyond the sphere of possible experience. Moreover, Schwab maintains, even if this supersensible posit is granted, nothing could be predicated of it and yet Schmid makes several claims about it, e.g. it is the ground of all our actions, it is the ground of space and time, it is unalterable, etc. Schwab concludes the essay by taking issue with Schmid’s claim that on the Leibnizian-Wolffian view, the determining grounds of action are entirely beyond the agent’s control. In response to this charge, Schwab appeals to the Leibnizian-Wolffian conception of spontaneity and claims that the determining grounds of free action are contained within the agent itself.