The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review

Free access to knowledge and knowledge-sharing are among the most relevant claims of the so called 'knowledge society', whose beginnings can be find out in the Age of Enlightenment.As a matter of fact, in the thinking of Immanuel Kant these claims are explicitly assumed in a metaphysical perspective.Thus, the need of sharing knowledge, and in general the need of freedom in the communication of thinking, is not merely held as self evident or just empirically given: on the contrary, Kant asks about its transcendental meaning, and attempts to deduce this meaning a priori from the essence of human being itself.However, this task is not systematically developed, but rather exposed en passant in different passages…