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32What Mathematics and Metaphysics of Corporeal Nature Offer to Each Other: Kant on the Foundations of Natural ScienceKantian Review 28 (3): 397-412. 2023.Kant famously distinguishes between the methods of mathematics and of metaphysics, holding that metaphysicians err when they avail themselves of the mathematical method. Nonetheless, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, he insists that mathematics and metaphysics must jointly ground ‘proper natural science’. This article examines the distinctive contributions and unity of mathematics and metaphysics to the foundations of the science of body. I argue that the two are distinct insof…Read more
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49Kant on the Mathematical Deficiency of PsychologyHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 12 (2): 485-509. 2022.Kant’s denial that psychology is a properly so-called natural science, owing to the lack of application of mathematics to inner sense, has garnered a great deal of attention from scholars. Although the interpretations of this claim are diverse, commentators by and large fail to ground their views on an account of Kant’s conception of applied mathematics. In this article, I develop such an account, according to which the application of mathematics to a natural science requires both a mathematical…Read more
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24A science for gods, a science for humans: Kant on teleological speculations in natural historyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 94 (C): 47-55. 2022.
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77Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science: A Critical Guide (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2022.In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant accounts for the possibility of an acting-at-a-distance gravitational force, demonstrates the infinite divisibility of matter, and derives analogues to Newtonian laws of motion. The work is his major statement in philosophy of science, and was especially influential in German-speaking countries in the nineteenth century. However, this complex text has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. The chapters of this Critical Guide cla…Read more
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77The Science of the Soul and the Unyielding Architectonic: Kant Versus Wolff on the Foundations of PsychologyIn Saulo de Freitas Araujo, Thiago Constâncio Ribeiro Pereira & Thomas Sturm (eds.), The Force of an Idea: New Essays on Christian Wolff's Psychology, Springer. 2021.Thorough comparison of Immanuel Kant’s and Christian Wolff’s divergent appraisals of the science of psychology reveals various ways in which Kant fundamentally altered the Wolffian philosophical apparatus that he inherited. Wolff conceived of a thoroughgoing interplay between empirical and rational psychology, of combining different sorts of cognition in psychology, and of a mathematical science of the soul, or psychometrics. Kant however rejected each of these particular theses and deemed psych…Read more
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51Chemical Dissolution and Kant’s Critical Theory of NatureKant Studien 109 (4): 537-556. 2018.Kant conceives of chemical dissolutions as involving the infinite division and subsequent blending of solvent and solute. In the resulting continuous solution, every subvolume contains a uniform proportion of each reactant. Erich Adickes argues that this account stands in tension with other aspects of Kant’s Critical philosophy and his views on infinity. I argue that although careful analysis of Kant’s conception of dissolution addresses Adickes’ objections, the infinite division inherent to the…Read more
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71Kant on Empirical Psychology and ExperimentationIn Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 2707-2714. 2018.
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170Margaret Cavendish on the Order and Infinitude of NatureHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 35 (3): 219-239. 2018.In this paper, I develop a new interpretation of the order of nature, its function, and its implications in Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. According to the infinite balance account, the order of nature consists in a balance among the infinite varieties of nature. That is, for Cavendish, nature contains an infinity of different types of matter: infinite species, shapes, and motions. The potential tumult implicated by such a variety, however, is tempered by the counterbalancing of the different …Read more
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1Oliver Thorndike, Kant's Transition Project and Late Philosophy: Connecting the Opus postumum and Metaphysics of Morals (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2018. 2018.
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70From General to Special Metaphysics of NatureIn Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Kant Handbook, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 493-511. 2017.In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant presents the “pure part” of natural science – that is, the a priori principles holding of matter. This special metaphysics of matter is, Kant claims, grounded on the general metaphysics of nature described in the System of Principles of his first Critique. This chapter develops a comprehensive account of Kant’s framework for natural science that touches on interpretive issues that arise in the transition from general to special metaphysics…Read more
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74What is Chemistry, for Kant?Kant Yearbook 9 (1): 85-112. 2017.Kant’s preoccupation with architectonics is a characteristic and noteworthy aspect of his thought. Various features of Kant’s argumentation and philosophical system are founded on the precise definitions of the various subdomains of human knowledge and the derivative borders among them. One science conspicuously absent from Kant’s routine discussions of the organization of knowledge is chemistry. Whereas sciences such as physics, psychology, and anthropology are all explicitly located in the arc…Read more
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594Continuity of change in Kant’s dynamicsSynthese 196 (4): 1595-1622. 2019.Since his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft was first published in 1786, controversy has surrounded Immanuel Kant’s conception of matter. In particular, the justification for both his dynamical theory of matter and the related dismissal of mechanical philosophy are obscure. In this paper, I address these longstanding issues and establish that Kant’s dynamism rests upon Leibnizian, metaphysical commitments held by Kant from his early pre-Critical texts on natural philosophy to his…Read more
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127Rehabilitating the Regulative Use of Reason: Kant on Empirical and Chemical LawsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 54 (C): 1-10. 2015.In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant asserts that laws of nature “carry with them an expression of necessity”. There is, however, widespread interpretive disagreement regarding the nature and source of the necessity of empirical laws of natural sciences in Kant's system. It is especially unclear how chemistry—a science without a clear, straightforward connection to the a priori principles of the understanding—could contain such genuine, empirical laws. Existing accounts of the necessity of ca…Read more
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83Chemistry in Kant’s Opus PostumumHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 6 (1): 64-95. 2016.In his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (MAN), Kant claims that chemistry is an improper, though rational science. The chemistry to which Kant confers this status is the phlogistic chemistry of, for instance, Georg Stahl. In his Opus Postumum (OP), however, Kant espouses a broadly Lavoiserian conception of chemistry. In particular, Kant endorses Antoine Lavoisier's elements, oxygen theory of combustion, and role for the caloric. As Lavoisier's lasting contribution to chemistry, …Read more
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97Kant on Chemistry and the Application of Mathematics in Natural ScienceKantian Review 19 (3): 393-418. 2014.In his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, Kant claims that chemistry is a science, but not a proper science (like physics), because it does not adequately allow for the application of mathematics to its objects. This paper argues that the application of mathematics to a proper science is best thought of as depending upon a coordination between mathematically constructible concepts and those of the science. In physics, the proper science that exhausts the a priori knowledge of obj…Read more
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