Unicità o molteplicità dell'atto libero? Alcune considerazioni a partire da Kant, Reinhold e Schelling

This paper deals with the question whether the act of choice should be understood as unique or multiple. This is a matter of determining whether freedom refers to an intelligible character that represents the basis of individual voluntary decisions and whether the latter necessarily follows from the former or belongs to the individual choices. After presenting the terms of the question in Kant, the paper considers two possible models of explanation that follow directly from Kant’s position: the first was developed by Reinhold, for whom the free act is as multiple as the decisions of one’s free will, the other was advocated by Schelling, according to whom there is only one single intelligible decision which, like a ‘life before life’, gives meaning and support to each individual acts. It will be argued that, whereas in the former case the opposition between freedom and necessity can be maintained, in the latter case a form of ontological essentialism concerning human action is required for the identification of the two concepts.