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The place of evidence regarding joint commitment and plural action is mostly reserved for documents and explicit linguistic expressions. This paper considers the problem of evidence in cases of engaged (jointly committed) social acts where there is no explicit expression or binding document, yet can still be ascribed to a plural subject. The argument rests on the double meaning of the term factum as fact (factum brutum) and deed (factum practica), as well as contemporary debates about the topic of fact of reason in Kant. The text seeks to show that in certain cases, the execution of an act or the obligation produced by it can be considered evidence of a plural subject. Thus, these facts deserve a special position in relation to scientific evidence.

Carl Arnold Wilmans received his degree of doctor in philosophy in Halle in 1797 for a bold thesis. He claimed a latent similarity between Kant’s enlightened philosophy of religion and the pure mysticism of some so-called separatists — and sent his work to Kant. The fact that and how the latter re­acted to it, makes the matter all the more interesting. Could Kant have been a secret mystic? The following study attempts to give a differ­entiated presentation of Kant’s intellectual relationship with mysticism, which was not as unambiguous as it may seem, by first elaborating the historical background as well as the philo­sophical and theological contexts of Wilmans’ dissertation. Furthermore, the focus of my study is directed towards Kant’s essay On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy. I show that the central Kantian theorem of the fact of reason con­verges with his doctrine of respect to the moral law as intelligible feeling. This rapprochement allows the latter to play an argumentative role that, by serving as ratio cognoscendi of freedom, is also of epistemic value. Kant’s practical philosophy turns out to be based on a quasi-phenomenological intuitionism of finite reason in which aesthetic elements are of such importance that Wilmans’ assertion of its latent similarity to pure mysticism may be justified.

The first objective of this paper is to present an interpretation of Groundwork III which aims to establish two main points: first, that Kant offers there a theoretically-grounded deduction (in Kantian sense) of freedom/morality-as-autonomy; second, that Kant also offers a separate deduction of the categorical imperative. Thus, contrary to what several commentators have claimed, Groundwork III contains a theoretically-grounded double deduction. The second objective of the paper is to examine and criticize in detail one crucial step in these deductions, namely, Kant’s inference from the speculative spontaneity of reason to the noumenal existence of the subject as a free will. I show that Kant himself came to reject this inference in the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and argue that this explains Kant’s rejection, in the Critique of Practical Reason, of the deduction of the moral law he previously offered. Thus, contrary to the “reconciliationist” reading, there is indeed a great reversal in the latter work.

Four different notions of freedom can be distinguished in Kant's philosophy: logical freedom, practical freedom, transcendental freedom and freedom of choice ("Willkiir"). The most important of these is transcendental freedom. Kant's arguments for its existence depend on the claim that, necessarily, the categorical imperative is the highest principle of reason. My paper examines how this claim can be made plausible.