Chloé de Canson

Recent work in philosophy of science has suggested that scientific paradigms in the wake of revolutions can be conceived as relativized a priori frameworks. In this paper, I put these accounts in dialog with two accounts of broadly “cultural” accounts of the relativized a priori in the history of philosophy: Ernst Cassirer's account of symbolic forms, on which, I show, the general “categories” stay the same but their expressions change, and Michel Foucault's account of the historical a priori, which is more thoroughly relativized than Cassirer's. I conclude that Foucault can offer helpful resources for philosophy of science insofar as the historical a priori admits of internal tensions that account for the possibility of a transition to a new a priori, and Foucault makes a similar, but more fully developed, appeal to social power than contemporary philosophy of science does in order to make sense of the changes between frameworks. Cassirer, on the other hand, helpfully puts emphasis on the cognitive activity of the subject, I rather than on the constitutive a priori principles themselves.

In the Groundwork and all three Critiques, Kant expresses the hope of eventually unifying theoretical and practical reason in one system, with a principle common to both. But he never clarifies what this principle is, leaving scholars to advance different possibilities. I advance a new response to this problem: I claim that Kant begins to refer to what he calls the ‘autonomy of ideas of reason’ in his final decade, enabling a new approach to finally bridging the theoretical and the practical. This concept of autonomy, however, is no longer equivalent to the moral autonomy attributed to the self-legislating will, nor does it refer to the spontaneity of theoretical reason. Instead, it corresponds to the autonomy ascribed to reflective judgment in representing both theoretical and practical ideas of reason. Thus, this conception furnishes a principle, the principle of purposiveness, which I propose as the unifying principle Kant had been seeking.

An influential strand in philosophy of science claims that scientific paradigms can be understood as relativized a priori frameworks. Here, Kant’s constitutive a priori principles are no longer held to establish conditions of possibility for knowledge which are unchanging and universally true, but are restricted only to a given scientific domain. Yet it is unclear how exactly a relativized a priori can be construed as both stable and dynamical, establishing foundations for current scientific claims while simultaneously making intelligible the transition to a subsequent framework. In this article, I show that important resources for this problem have been overlooked in Kant’s theory of reflective judgement in the third Critique. I argue that Kant accorded the task of formulating new scientific laws to reflective judgement, which is charged with forming new ‘universals’ that guide the experience of nature. I show that this is the very task attributed to the relativized a priori: the constitution of a given conceptual framework, not of the conditions for object-reference as such. I conclude that Kant’s considered conception of science encompasses the operations of both reflective and determining judgement. Relativizations of the a priori should follow Kant’s lead.