In his 1786 review of Johann Schultze’s Elucidations of Professor Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (1784), Pistorius criticizes Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom as it is represented in Schultze’s work. Given the expository aim of Schultze’s work and Pistorius’s claim that some of the objections he raises have already been addressed in his review of Kant’s Prolegomena, it is reasonable to presume that Pistorius generally took his criticisms of Schultze to apply equally to Kant. Pistorius observes that Kant’s solution to the Third Antinomy rests on transcendental freedom’s supposed independence from temporal conditions; however, Pistorius maintains, transcendental freedom – qua the capacity to begin a state from itself – presupposes temporal conditions insofar as these conditions are implied by the concept of beginning. Thus, the concept of transcendental freedom is supposedly internally consistent.

The 1786 review of Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Hermann Andreas Pistorius raised the objection that Kant's categorical imperative is an "empty formalism" that needs an antecedent conception of the good long before Hegel made the same charge in 1802.  Kant's explicit response to Pistorius in the Critique of Practical Reason is just to double-down on the priority of the right over the good.  However, I suggest that Kant's characterization of humanity as an end in itself as the "ground of a possible categorical imperative" in the Groundwork, on the one hand, and his account of the highest good as the complete object of morality in the second Critique, on the other, together provide a much fuller and satisfactory response to the "empty formalism" objection.