Eric Watkins

It is often claimed (most recently by Michael Friedman) that Kant intended to justify Newton’s most fundamental claims expressed in the Principia, such as his laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. In this article, I argue that the differences between Newton’s laws of motion and Kant’s laws of mechanics are not superficial or merely apparent. Rather, they reflect fundamental differences in their respective projects. This point can be seen especially clearly by considering the nature of the various projects undertaken in Germany prior to Kant that discuss the laws of motion. Wolff and his followers qua metaphysicians were especially interested in providing nonempirical justifications of their laws of motion as well as an intelligible account of the fundamental properties of bodies in terms of substance, accident, and force. Maupertuis and Euler, despite often being seen as Newtonians, both drew on traditions other than Newton’s. Physics textbooks (by figures such as Erxleben, Karsten, ‘s Gravesande, and Musschenbroek) vary considerably in their aims, but in none of these cases is Newton’s main argument of the Principia presented. In light of the fact that these projects are distinct in significant ways from Newton’s project, the differences between Newton’s laws of motion and Kant’s laws of mechanics are most likely not merely apparent but reflect the fact that Kant, too, was pursuing a project fundamentally distinct from Newton’s.

This paper considers Kant’s conception of force and causality in his early pre-Critical writings, arguing that this conception is best understood by way of contrast with his immediate predecessors, such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier, Martin Knutzen, and Christian August Crusius, and in terms of the scientific context of natural philosophy at the time. Accordingly, in the True estimation Kant conceives of force in terms of activity rather than in terms of specific effects, such as motion. Kant’s explicit arguments in the Nova dilucidatio for physical influx are directed primarily against the conception of grounds and existence held by Wolff, Baumgarten, and Meier, and only secondarily against Leibniz. Finally, Kant’s reconciliation of the infinite divisibility of space and the unity of monads in the Physical monadology is designed to respond to objections that could be raised naturally by Wolff and Baumgarten.Author Keywords: Kant; Pre-Critical; Force, Causality; Wolff; Leibniz.

The main topic of the following dissertation is Kant's Third Analogy of Experience, which asserts that one must posit a bond of mutual interaction in order to judge that two substances exist simultaneously. Part One considers the Third Analogy proper and reconstructs two plausible arguments for its main claim. Contrary to the view of most commentators , Kant is entitled to a strong causal notion of mutual interaction. Part Two considers the historical debate between proponents of Pre-established Harmony, Occasionalism, and Physical Influx and how the Third Analogy can be seen as Kant's most developed version of Physical Influx. Thus, we see that Kant's concern with causality is not exhausted by his reply to Hume in the Second Analogy of Experience. For Kant is clearly concerned to attack the rationalist tradition by criticizing Leibniz's and Wolff's Pre-established Harmony, on the one hand, and the Cartesians' and Malebranche's Occasionalism, on the other hand. Part Three considers the argumentative structure of Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft and how the Third Analogy relates to this work. Contrary to what one might expect, the MAdN does not proceed by first presupposing a Principle from the first Critique and then substituting in the concept of matter. Rather, its substantial results are obtained through an extended transcendental argument showing how we can have experience of objects of outer sense . Further, we see how the abstract notion of mutual interaction involved in the Third Analogy becomes more specific in the MAdN since two of the most important features of its central notion of matter, namely the capacities of filling a space and of communicating motion, require attractive and repulsive forces and action and reaction, both instances of mutual interaction. These three lines of argument establish that the Third Analogy of Experience both constitutes a crucial part of Kant's position and presents a philosophically plausible view

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 127-128 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant: A Biography Manfred Kuehn. Kant: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxii + 544. Cloth, $34.95. Kuehn's biography of Kant is an extraordinary scholarly and literary accomplishment. In nine masterful chapters (along with a prologue), Kuehn draws on an incredibly comprehensive and varied repository of historical evidence in painting a detailed, yet also widely accessible picture of the successive stages of Kant's life and of how his major and minor writings emerge from them, a picture that is both more accurate and more informative than what could ever be pieced together from existing biographies, even those written in German or at a time much closer to Kant's own.What is distinctive about Kuehn's methodology--and part, but only part, of what makes his work superior to other Kant biographies--is the way in which he focuses on Kant's intellectual context. For Kuehn, to understand Kant requires understanding him not just in the global context of modern European philosophy or even German philosophy, but also in his local context of Prussia and Königsberg. Accordingly, in the first chapter Kuehn does not merely list the biographical details of Kant's family and the name of the school he attended, but rather explains what it would have meant for Kant's father to be a member of a guild in eighteenth-century Prussia, what values that guild incorporated, what consequences his parents' Pietism would have for him, and what the intellectual and social life of the Collegium Fridericianum was like. Kuehn's proper emphasis on figures and events in Königsberg runs throughout the book. Thus in the second chapter, Kuehn describes the various faculty members Kant would have encountered as a student, what philosophical [End Page 127] views they held, how Kant's own activities as a student deviated from those of the "typical" student, what religious movements became influential at what time in the university, and what political consequences they would have had on a student's intellectual life. In the third chapter (devoted to 1755-64), Kuehn reveals how Kant, forming a wide circle of friends that would include Hamann, Herder, Hippel, and the family of Count Keyserlingk, "became a person of elegance during this period, someone who shone at social events with his intelligence and wit" (115). In chapter 4 (1764-69), Kuehn describes how Kant developed a close friendship with Green that would radically change his life. In fact, Kuehn claims that it was at the age of forty and due to the influence of Green that Kant underwent a conversion or rebirth by coming to understand the centrality of character and the role that maxims play in it. Moreover, in describing the radical changes of position initiated in his inaugural dissertation and completed in the three Critiques, Kuehn connects biography and philosophy by positing that Kant saw these works as providing "his newfound character with a philosophical justification and defense" (187).While one might think that chapter 5, which covers the 1770s, would have to be very short, given Kant's sparse publications during this period, Kuehn describes at length the rich set of interactions that Kant had with Mendelssohn, Herz, Lambert, Kraus, Herder, and Hamann, exchanges that would be crucial in the final articulation of his mature view. Kuehn devotes chapters 6 and 7 to the period during which Kant published his mature theoretical and practical works, most notably the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and it is here that Kuehn's contextualism has perhaps its greatest philosophical payoff. For the close attention Kuehn has paid to Kant's interactions with his immediate contemporaries reveals that he did not understand Hume's position as we might today, namely as advocating global skepticism about knowledge of the external world. Rather, Kant saw Hume's skepticism as being local and methodological in combating rationalism and dogmatism. As a result, Kant saw Hume mainly as an ally, not an adversary. Kuehn...

: This paper argues that Kant's model of causality cannot consist in one temporally determinate event causing another, as Hume had thought, since such a model is inconsistent with mutual interaction, to which Kant is committed in the Third Analogy. Rather causality occurs when one substance actively exercises its causal powers according to the unchanging grounds that constitute its nature so as to determine a change of state of another substance. Because this model invokes unchanging grounds, one can understand how Kant could have thought that causal laws could be justified. Further, because this model, along with the broader ontology it presupposes, is radically different from Hume's, Kant's Second Analogy cannot be understood as a refutation of Hume's position on Hume's own terms; instead, Kant must be proposing an alternative view that competes against Hume's thoroughgoing empiricist account.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Argumentative Structure of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations Of Natural ScienceEric Watkinsone of kant’s most fundamental aims is to justify Newtonian science. However, providing a detailed explanation of even the main structure of his argument (not to mention the specific arguments that fill out this structure) is not a trivial enterprise. While it is clear that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), and his unpublished (and incomplete) Opus postumum should in some way constitute the core of this justification, it is less clear how each of these works does so in detail. In this paper I shall first argue that the standard view of the relationship between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (hereafter simply Metaphysical Foundations) is mistaken. I shall then present my own interpretation of how the Metaphysical Foundations contributes to the justification of Newtonian science. Finally, I shall conclude by considering an important interpretation of the argument of the Metaphysical Foundations developed by Michael Friedman. However, it is first necessary to present briefly Kant’s conception of science (in particular what conditions a body of knowledge must satisfy for Kant in order to be considered science proper) as well as Kant’s own understanding of the relevant differences between his projects in the first Critique, the Metaphysical Foundations, and the Opus postumum.Kant’s conception of science is rather strict if measured by contemporary standards. For in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations Kant establishes three substantive conditions that a body of knowledge must satisfy in order to be considered science proper.1 (1) It must not consist in empirical principles, [End Page 567] but rather must be obtained solely from pure, a priori principles;2 (2) It must be apodictically certain;3 (3)4 It must be a systematically ordered whole (which means that its various propositions must be related as, for example, antecedents and consequents).5 After stating these conditions, Kant then argues that all natural science proper requires a pure part upon which its apodictic certainty is based. In other words, satisfaction of the first condition immediately implies satisfaction of the second condition as well.6 Accordingly, these three conditions (and the first one in particular) imply that natural science proper requires (or rather presupposes) a justification by something distinct from it that Kant calls a metaphysics of nature.7 But what exactly does a metaphysics of nature encompass? Kant distinguishes two different parts of the metaphysics of nature: a transcendental part and a special part. A metaphysics of nature [End Page 568] is transcendental insofar as it concerns “the laws that make the concept of nature in general possible, even without relation to any determinate object of experience, and [insofar as it is] thus indeterminate with respect to the nature of this or that thing in the sensible world,” whereas a metaphysics of nature is special to the extent that “it is concerned with a special nature of this or that kind of thing of which an empirical concept is given, but so that except for what lies in this concept no other empirical principle is used for knowledge thereof.”8 In short, a transcendental metaphysics, revealing how experience in general is possible, is not supposed to presuppose an empirical concept, whereas a special metaphysics does make such an assumption insofar as it is concerned with the special natures of things.How do the three works cited above relate to Kant’s distinction between a transcendental and a special metaphysics of nature? In the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations Kant clearly indicates that he intends the Metaphysical Foundations to constitute the special metaphysics of nature. Although he does not explicitly refer to the first Critique in the preface, it is also relatively clear that he sees it (or at least the ‘System of Pure Reason’ that Kant foresees as following upon it and as incorporating its fundamental results)9 as constituting [End Page 569] the transcendental part of a metaphysics of nature.10 The Principles of Pure Understanding (‘Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes’) in the Transcendental Analytic argue for what could naturally be described as “laws...

Though Kant is best known for his strictly philosophical works in the 1780s, many of his early publications in particular were devoted to what we would call 'natural science'. Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens made a significant advance in cosmology, and he was also instrumental in establishing the newly emerging discipline of physical geography, lecturing on it for almost his entire career. In this volume Eric Watkins brings together new English translations of Kant's first publication, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, the entirety of Physical Geography, a series of shorter essays, along with many of Kant's most important publications in natural science. The volume is rich in material for the student and the scholar, with extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, editorial introductions and a glossary of key terms.