Realizing Reason in Feeling: Smithian Sympathy as the Schema of the Kantian Moral Law

Smith’s influence on Kant’s philosophy was once viewed as marginal, but it is now well-established that central aspects of Kant’s moral and political philosophy were significantly influenced by his exposure to Smith. While Smith’s influence on Kant is now widely accepted, there is much less agreement about how we should think about the relationship between Smith and Kant. In what follows, I develop a framework for thinking about Kant’s interest in Smith, which focuses on the idea that Smith's conception of sympathy provided Kant with the key for reconciling his intellectualist picture of practical reason with the role that sentiment and feeling obviously plays in human moral psychology – that is, the key for "schematizing" the moral law on the level of feeling and imagination.