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Stephen Engstrom The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2009 Pp. xiii+260, hbk, £36.95/€45.00/$49.95 ISBN: 978-0-674-03287-3

If you believe that there are moral truths and are working within the metaethical tradition shaped by the early twentieth-century demand to place ethics on a proper theoretical basis, then the first thing you have to do is to show how such truths are accessible to us. Stephen Engstrom invites us to take the longer view; he seeks to broaden the terms of reference of this debate by connecting it to a much older ‘cognitivist tradition in practical philosophy’ that goes back to Plato and to Aristotle and views morality as a type of practical knowledge, not just in the sense that its claims are truthevaluable, but also in the sense that it can lead to practical ‘wisdom’ (vii). The aim of the book is to ‘recover this traditional understanding of morality’s relation to reason’ (xi). This process of ‘recovery’ consists in a systematic defence of Kant’s ethics but also, I think just as importantly, an unapologetically Kantian treatment of the puzzle of ‘practical knowledge’ bequeathed by Anscombe to those who grapple with Intention. As a reading of Kant, The Form of Practical Knowledge belongs with interpretations that take as their starting point the idea that ‘practical reason is a capacity for knowledge of the good’ (xi). The task then is to show that, to the extent that it is reason, practical reason is subject to a single set of rules and, to the extent that it is practical, that it is action-guiding. Engstrom’s clarity of purpose in prosecuting this task allows him to cover enormous ground, offering in the process new insights and original solutions to old problems in Kant interpretation. As a contribution to meta-ethics and action theory, the book presents a bold central thesis, that morality is a type of practical knowledge and as such not only amenable to standards of rationality but also inherently favourable to the universalizability condition stipulated by the categorical imperative. book reviews