James Messina

This paper explores Kant's attempt in the Physical Monadology (1756) to arrange a marriage between metaphysics and geometry (as represented, respectively, by the Leibnizian-Wolffians and the Newtonians), and it also considers why the marriage failed. It is argued that the theory of space that Kant advocates is not only not necessary for his account of physical monads, but that it is in various respects in tension with his Newtonian approach to geometry, resulting in a bad dynamic in the marriage. The paper concludes with some reflections on the evolution, in the years after the Physical Monadology, of Kant's views on space and monads.

Of late, Kant scholars have been looking to contemporary discussions of laws of nature and dispositions to better understand Kant’s account of laws and causal powers. Indeed, according to a recent interpretive trend, set in motion by pioneering work of Eric Watkins and Jim Kreines, Kant’s account of laws is a version of dispositionalism. However, there is room for controversy about which version of dispositionalism Kant embraces and, relatedly, which contemporary figures provide the best models for understanding Kant’s account. Some recent proponents of the dispositionalist reading have ascribed to Kant a version of natural kind essentialism along the lines of Brian Ellis, while more recently Kristina Engelhard has argued that Kant’s account of laws is instead a “pure dispositionalist view”—that is, a view more like Alexander Bird’s. I defend the view that Kant, in both the pre-Critical and Critical period, embraces a version of natural kind essentialism along the lines of Ellis’s. I highlight a number of parallels. I also show how an understanding of the debate between Ellis and Bird can assist us in appreciating the philosophical strengths, weaknesses, and implications of Kant’s natural kind essentialism.

Of late, Kant scholars have been looking to contemporary discussions of laws of nature and dispositions to better understand Kant’s account of laws and causal powers. Indeed, according to a recent interpretive trend, set in motion by pioneering work of Eric Watkins and Jim Kreines, Kant’s account of laws is a version of dispositionalism. However, there is room for controversy about which version of dispositionalism Kant embraces and, relatedly, which contemporary figures provide the best models for understanding Kant’s account. Some recent proponents of the dispositionalist reading have ascribed to Kant a version of natural kind essentialism along the lines of Brian Ellis, while more recently Kristina Engelhard has argued that Kant’s account of laws is instead a “pure dispositionalist view”—that is, a view more like Alexander Bird’s. I defend the view that Kant, in both the pre-Critical and Critical period, embraces a version of natural kind essentialism along the lines of Ellis’s. I highlight a number of parallels. I also show how an understanding of the debate between Ellis and Bird can assist us in appreciating the philosophical strengths, weaknesses, and implications of Kant’s natural kind essentialism.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that rejection of the ideality of space and time leads, via some additional assumptions, to Spinozism. Understanding this ambitious argument requires understanding, inter alia, what Kant means by ‘Spinozism,’ what assumptions figure in the argument, and how these assumptions are supposed to be connected to the ideality of space and time. While my interpretation differs from others on numerous points, one crucial difference lies in my account of the key assumptions. As I argue, Kant takes them to arise naturally from human reason itself. The most crucial and substantive among them concern reason’s naturally formed Ideas of, respectively, absolute space, absolute time, and God. More precisely, Kant takes these claims to be products of a natural transcendental illusion, and he holds that human reason under the spell of transcendental realism is unable to expose them as illusory and unwarranted.

abstract: According to a common narrative, Kant held a kind of relationalist view of space from the time of his earliest publication, Living Forces, until 1768, when he published Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space. The narrative holds further that considerations about incongruent counterparts prompted an abrupt volte-face—concerns about right and left hands were supposedly the decisive factor in causing a sudden shift to the metaphysical view expressed in Directions. I argue that the common narrative is wrong, offering a new account of the timeline of, and reasons behind, Kant's rejection of relationalism.

I begin by arguing that, for Kant, the pure category of substance has both a general content that is in play whenever we think of any entity as a substance as well as a more specific content that arises in conjunction with the thought of what Kant calls a positive noumenon. Drawing on this new “Dual Content” account of the pure category of substance, I offer new answers to two contested questions: What is the relation of the pure category to phenomenal substance? What, if any, epistemic gains can we achieve when we apply the pure category to noumena? Regarding the first question, I argue that while phenomenal substance does not qualify as a substance according to the Inner-Simple Conception, it does qualify as one according to the Subsistence-Power Conception. Regarding the second question, I argue that, in the case of the substantiality of positive noumena, Kant’s account allows for justified conditional beliefs involving the Inner-Simple Conception. In the case of negative noumena, it allows for justified existential beliefs involving the Subsistence-Power Conception.

I am interested in the use Kant makes of the pure intuition of space, and of properties and principles of space and spaces (i.e. figures, like spheres and lines), in the special metaphysical project of MAN. This is a large topic, so I will focus here on an aspect of it: the role of these things in his treatment of some of the laws of matter treated in the Dynamics and Mechanics Chapters. In MAN and other texts, Kant speaks of space as the “ground,” “condition,” and “basis” of various laws, including the inverse-square and inverse-cube laws of attractive and repulsive force, and the Third Law of Mechanics. Moreover, in his proofs of all the laws just mentioned, the language of “construction” figures prominently, which suggests that Kant’s proofs (somehow) rest on or involve mathematical construction in his technical sense. Such claims give rise to a number of questions. How do properties and principles of space and spaces serve to ground this particular set of laws? Which spatial properties and principles is Kant appealing to? What, if anything, does the spatial grounding of the inverse-square and inverse-cube laws of diffusion (treated in the Dynamics Chapter) have in common with that of the Third treated in the Mechanics Chapter)? What role—if any—does mathematical construction play in Kant’s proofs of these laws? Finally, how if at all, are Kant’s grounding claims consistent with his other commitments—for example, how are they consistent with his notorious denial in Prolegomena §38 that there are any laws that “lie in space” (Prol 4:321)? I offer answers to these questions.

Kant was engaged in a lifelong struggle to achieve what he calls in the 1756 Physical Monadology (PM) a “marriage” of metaphysics and geometry (1:475). On one hand, this involved showing that metaphysics and geometry are complementary, despite the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between these disciplines and between their respective advocates, the Leibnizian-Wolffians and the Newtonians. On the other hand, this involved defining the terms of their union, which meant among other things, articulating their respective roles in grounding Newtonian natural science. In this paper, consider how Kant’s project of marrying metaphysics and geometry evolves from the pre-Critical to the Critical period and how key discussions in the Prolegomena are related to the lifelong marriage project.

This edited collection, which grows out of a 2013 British Society for the History of Philosophy conference on the topic of "the actual and the possible" at which early versions of some of the nine essays were presented, explores various episodes in the history of modern metaphysics of modality. It is broad and self-consciously eclectic in its coverage of figures and issues. There are chapters dealing with Spinoza, Wolff, Leibniz and Kant, Kant, Hegel, Russell, Meinong and Łukasiewicz, Heidegger, and Quine. Some of the chapters are synoptic, providing a big picture account of...

kant famously claims that space is merely a feature of the mind—something subjective—rather than a mind-independent feature of reality in itself.1 In accepting the subjectivity thesis, Kant rejects the transcendental realist assumption that he thinks has traditionally, albeit tacitly, been made in debates about the nature of space. According to this assumption, space has to do with things in themselves. For the Newtonians, as Kant understands their position, space is a substance-like thing in itself; for the Leibnizians, space consists in relations among things in themselves.2 Kant breaks sharply with these traditional accounts.However, it would be a mistake to think that Kant's commitment to the...

Prolegomena §38 is intended to elucidate the claim that the understanding legislates a priori laws to nature. Kant cites various laws of geometry as examples and discusses a derivation of the inverse-square law from such laws. I address 4 key interpretive questions about this cryptic text that have not yet received satisfying answers: How exactly are Kant's examples of laws supposed to elucidate the Legislation Thesis? What is Kant's view of the epistemic status of the inverse-square law and, relatedly, of the legitimacy of the geometric derivation of that law? Whose account of laws, the understanding, and space is Kant critiquing in the passage? What positive account of the relationship between laws, the understanding, and space is Kant offering in the passage? My answer to depends crucially on my answers to –. As I interpret Kant, he holds that a wide range of a priori laws—including geometric laws, the inverse-square law, and the universal laws discussed in the Analytic of Principles—are ‘grounded’ in categorial syntheses rather than the intrinsic nature of the space given to us in pure intuition.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant famously characterizes space as a unity, understood as an essentially singular whole. He further develops his account of the unity of space in the B-Deduction, where he relates the unity of space to the original synthetic unity of apperception, and draws an infamous distinction between form of intuition and formal intuition. Kant ’s cryptic remarks in this part of the Critique have given rise to two widespread and diametrically opposed readings, which I call the Synthesis and Brute Given Readings. I argue for an entirely new reading, which I call the Part-Whole Reading, in part by considering the development of Kant ’s views on the unity of space from his earliest works up through crucial reflections written during the silent decade

Kant claims that we cannot cognize the mutual interaction of substances without their being in space; he also claims that we cannot cognize a ‘spatial community’ among substances without their being in mutual interaction. I situate these theses in their historical context and consider Kant’s reasons for accepting them. I argue that they rest on commitments regarding the metaphysical grounding of, first, the possibility of mutual interaction among substances-as-appearances and, second, the actuality of specific distance-relations among such substances. By illuminating these commitments, I shed light on Kant’s metaphysics of space and its relation to Newton and Leibniz’s views.

Leibniz's well-known thesis that the actual world is just one among many possible worlds relies on the claim that some possibles are incompossible , meaning that they cannot belong to the same world. Notwithstanding its central role in Leibniz's philosophy, commentators have disagreed about how to understand the compossibility relation. We examine several influential interpretations and demonstrate their shortcomings. We then sketch a new reading, the cosmological interpretation, and argue that it accommodates two key conditions that any successful interpretation must satisfy.

In the first edition of Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mendelssohn, Jacobi claims that Kant’s account of space is “wholly in the spirit of Spinoza”. In the first part of the paper, I argue that Jacobi is correct: Spinoza and Kant have surprisingly similar views regarding the unity of space and the metaphysics of spatial properties and laws. Perhaps even more surprisingly, they both are committed to a form of parallelism. In the second part of the paper, I draw on the results of the first part to explain Kant’s oft-repeated claim that if space were transcendentally real, Spinozism would follow, along with Kant’s reasons for thinking transcendental idealism avoids this nefarious result. In the final part of the paper, I sketch a Spinozistic interpretation of Kant’s account of the relation between the empirical world of bodies and (what one might call) the transcendental world consisting of the transcendental subject’s representations of the empirical world and its parts.

The importance of Gottlob Ernst Schulze's Aenesidemus 1 for the history of German Idealism has been widely recognized. Much as Hume had awoken Kant, Aenesidemus jolted the young Fichte out of his slumbering adherence to Reinhold's formulation of Kant's philosophy, leading him to re-evaluate the claims, methods, and foundations of the Critical philosophy. In his "Review of the Aenesidemus" 2 Fichte set out the results of this re-evaluation, which included his doctrine of intellectual intuition with remarkable and uncharacteristic clarity. 3 According to a widely accepted story about the genesis of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre, the early Fichte was largely sympathetic to ..