Abstract
Kant closely associates his transcendental principles of the understanding with certain specific principles of Newtonian physics ¡ª which latter he calls metaphysical principles of pure natural science. Prominent among these are (i) the principle of the conservation of mass or quantity of matter (“in all changes of the material world the quantity of matter remains unchanged” [B 17; compare 4,541]); (ii) the law of inertia (“every change of matter has an external cause” [4,543; compare 5,181]); and (iii) the principle of the equality of action and reaction (“in all communication of motion action and reaction must always be equal” [B17; compare 4,544]).1 In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science Kant develops a detailed presentation of what he calls pure natural science closely following the table of categories (and therefore transcendental principles) articulated in the first Critique (compare B109-110, including the footnote thereto). In particular, in the third chapter or Mechanics of the Metaphysical Foundations Kant presents the above three laws of Newtonian physics as instances or more specific realizations of the transcendental principles of substantiality, causality, and community: each results from starting with the corresponding transcendental principle from the first Critique and substituting in, as it were, the empirical concept of matter or body articulated in the Metaphysical Foundations.
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Notes
All references to the Critique of Pure Reason are given by pagination of the first (A) and/or second (B) editions respectively. References to other Kantian works are given by volume and page number of the Akademie edition of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, de Gruyter, 1902-). All translations from Kant’s writings are my own.
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 23.
Ibid., p. 120.
D. Henrich, “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” The Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969): 640–659; quoted from the reprinting of R. Walker, ed., Kant on Pure Reason (Oxford: University Press, 1982), p. 75.
See G. Buchdahl, “The Kantian `Dynamic of Reason’ with Special Reference to the Place of Causality in Kant’s System,” in L. Beck, ed., Kant Studies Today (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1969); Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969); and “The Conception of Lawlikeness in Kant’s Philosophy of Science” in L. Beck, ed., Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974).
See Strawson, op. cit., p. 137.
For Lovejoy’s original non sequitur charge see A. Lovejoy, “On Kant’s Reply to Hume,” Archiv far Geschichte der Philosophie (1906): 380–407; reprinted in M. Gram, ed., Kant: Disputed Questions (Chicago: University Press, 1967). Buchdahl’s treatment of the non sequitur objection in particular and of the Sec-46 MICHAEL FRIEDMAN and Analogy in general is vigorously defended in the recent influential study by Henry Allison, Kant ‘s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1983).
I develop these criticisms of Buchdahl’s reading in more detail in my “Causal Laws and the Foundations of Natural Science,” in P. Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: University Press, 1992), from which the next six paragraphs are largely taken (I am indebted to P. Guyer and to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint).
I attempt to provide a detailed defense of this idea in my Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992).
I defend this interpretation of the Transition project of the Opus postumum in ibid., Chapter V. For the idea of a “gap” in the critical philosophy see E. Förster, “Is There `a Gap’ in Kant’s Critical System?” Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (1987): 535–555.
M. Schlick, “Die philosophische Bedeutung des Relativitätsprinzips,” Zeitschrift f¨¹r Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 159 (1915): 129–175; quoted from the translation by P. Heath, “The Philosophical Significance of the Principle of Relativity,” in H. Mulder and B. van de Velde-Schlick, eds., Moritz Schlick. Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), Vol. I, p. 153.
H. Reichenbach, Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori (Berlin: Springer, 1920); quoted from the translation by M. Reichenbach, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 93–94.
R. Carnap, “Über die Aufgabe der Physik,” Kantstudien 28 (1923), pp. 90, 97.
R. Carnap, Logische Syntax der Sprache (Vienna: Springer, 1934); translated by A. Smeaton (New York: Routledge, 1937). I discuss Carnap’s Logical Syntax program in the context of the positivists’ attempt to articulate a conception of the relativized a priori in my “Logical Truth and Analyticity in Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language,” in W. Aspray and P. Kitcher, eds., History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University Press, 1988); “The Reevaluation of Logical Positivism,” The Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 505–519; and “Philosophy and the Exact Sciences: Logical Positivism as a Case Study,” in J. Earman, ed., Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
Carnap explicitly articulates the distinction between internal and external questions, together with the exclusively pragmatic conception of the latter, in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” Revue internationale de philosophie (1950): 20–40.
For details see the articles cited in Note 14 above.
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Friedman, M. (1994). Kant and the Twentieth Century. In: Parrini, P. (eds) Kant and Contemporary Epistemology. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0834-8_2
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