Giovanni Pietro Basile and Ansgar Lyssy (eds.), System and Freedom in Kant and Fichte. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xv + 232. ISBN 0367480585 (hbk) $144.00

This collection of essays, a Festschrift in honour of Gnter Zller, brings together eleven papers engaging with Zller's work, in particular with Zller's concern with the ideas of system and freedom in Kant and Fichte.The book's eleven chapters are divided into three parts.The first part, comprising four chapters, deals with the concept of system in Kant's Critical system.The second set of chapters looks at how Kant's drive to think systematically impacted his views on anthropology, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy.Part three is devoted to Fichte's reception of Kant's understanding of system and freedom.As my description of the pieces below demonstrates, this collection is highly useful to anyone interested in the ideas of both system and freedom in the thinking of Kant and Fichte, and in their interrelations.Stephen Engstrom's piece on the identity of reason provides a foundation for the rest of the book.Its main goal is to identify the unity of practical and theoretical reason, illuminating Kant's insistence that 'there can be only one and the same reason, which must be distinguished merely in application' (G 4: 391).The essay makes two important claims: first, 'reason is first recognized in its theoretical use' (p.12) and second, 'practical knowledge includes theoretical knowledge of its object' (p.19).In order to develop these claims, Engstrom examines Kant's claim that 'the identity of the I of apperception in all consciousness is an identity of function' (A69).Such a function of unity makes possible not only the unity of different representations in a concept (through which diverse representations can be thought under one) but also 'the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition' (B105).This function is 'the highest point to which all use of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and after it, transcendental philosophy, must be attached' (B134n).It grounds the power of judgement and the ability to draw conclusions; all thinking depends upon this capacity to think many representations under one or to form concepts.Engstrom insightfully points out that the three powers, understanding, judgement, and reason 'are just moments of a single capacity to know, the understanding, distinguished by different grades of unity the latter can achieve ' (p.14).This analysis forms the basis of Engstrom's understanding of the ground of systematicity in Kant's thought.The function of unification at the ground of the capacity to think is 'that of an activity, (energeia)' (p.15), since in it many capabilities work simultaneously together.All true judgments must cohere with one another in that they must all be systematically relatable to the object in general = x and its relation to the temporal manifold.Furthermore, the unity of reason demands that we can think of this object as fully determinate in accordance with the laws of the understanding so