Libertà del volere e motivazione: il contributo di Geiger e Husserl

In this article I argue that phenomenology offers a significant contribution to the problem of free will posed by Kant’s third antinomy. Drawing on texts by Edmund Husserl and Moritz Geiger, I show that: (1) the thesis and the antithesis in Kant’s antinomy are grounded in two fundamentally different attitudes toward the world; (2) in order to understand how freedom is possible despite our belonging in the nexus of nature we need to recognize the dimension of motivational causality, which cannot be reduced to deterministic natural causality; (3) we need to distinguish our practical assent (fiat!) to a proposed course of action from the strength of impulses or inclinations operating in our psyche. I conclude that the phenomenological approach lends credibil ity to a non-naturalistic theory of action and to an appealing form of causal pluralism.