If the problem of free will is to see how freedom fits into the order of nature, then Kant's basic view about the free will problem is that it is insoluble.

Adam Smith was aware of the way that economic interests could have a distorting and destructive effect both on the market and on politics.

When people think that moral problems can be solved by some simple strategy of calculation, that sets them up for ghastly overreaching. They think they can turn everything into a "science" the way mechanics was turned into a science in the seventeeth century. They want to turn everything over to technocrats and social engineers. They become shortsighted or simplistic about their ends, and they disastrously overestimate their ability to acquire the information they need to make the needed calculations.

I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do, and independent of any procedures we might use in making such decisions.

Until I was a junior in high school, I was a "boy scientist" type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.

Kant's aim was to develop a religion within the boundaries of mere reason (that is, reason unaided by special empirical revelation) and then to ask about existing ecclesiastical faith (especially about Christianity, and the Lutheran Christianity of his time and place) how this revealed faith must be interpreted if it is to be reconciled with reason, and even seen as a wider (though morally optional) extension of a religion of reason.