There is a very common, though also very silly, picture of Kant according to which as empirical beings we are not free at all, and we are free only as noumenal jellyfish floating about in an intelligible sea above the heavens, outside any context in which our supposedly "free" choices could have any conceivable human meaning or significance. Part of the problem here is that Kant faces up honestly to the fact that how freedom is possible is a deep philosophical problem to which there is no solution we can rationally comprehend.

Freedom is an unprovable but unavoidable presupposition, not an article of faith.

Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.

Reason necessarily expresses itself through emotions and emotions are healthy only insofar as they are expressions of reason.

Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history.

One rational standard of action is how well it promotes the end it seeks. Another standard is whether it aims at ends which are good. Both of these, but especially the former, depend on judgments of fact.

In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.