Daniel Warren

Kant regards matter as not only extended but impenetrable. However, Kant distinguishes two senses of impenetrability: mechanical and chemical. Kant accepts the former as necessarily belonging to matter, but he denies, or at least sees no reason to accept, the latter. The kind of chemical penetration that Kant is concerned with occurs when no part of the one component matter exists unmixed with the other matter. Here, the two component matters come to fill the whole of the very same space. Kant distinguishes two kinds of process that can lead to such penetration: cases of “literal” dissolution of one matter (a solute) through being broken up by the other (the solvent), in which the former is divided into parts ad infinitum; and cases where the one matter simply progressively permeates the other. Kant considers problems associated with the former that he does not regard as at issue in the latter.

Kant contrasts dynamical and mechanistic approaches to physics, and rejects the latter. This paper attempts to connect this rejection to Kant’s views about a fundamental shift in the conception of matter’s basic properties, and in the explanatory projects in which they figure. It argues that for Kant, the mechanistic conception of impenetrability involves an attempt to characterize matter through its inner properties. In this way, Kant’s rejection of the mechanistic conception is tied to considerations from the first Critique, namely, the critical doctrine that we cannot know things as they are in themselves.

In interpretations of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" section of the first Critique, there is a widespread tendency to present Kant as establishing that the representation of space is a condition for individuating or distinguishing objects, and to claim that it is on this basis that Kant establishes the apriority of this representation. The aim of this paper is to criticize this way of interpreting the "Aesthetic," and to defend an alternative interpretation. On this alternative, questions about the formation of the representation of space figure more centrally, and the anti-Leibnizian character of Kant 's argument can be properly appreciated