Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge

On Kant's Philosophy of Material Nature

Jeffrey Edwards

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520218475
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520922808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

A new understanding of Kant's theory of a priori knowledge and his natural philosophy emerges from Jeffrey Edwards's mature and penetrating study. In the Third Analogy of Experience, Kant argues for the existence of a dynamical plenum in space. This argument against empty space demonstrates that the dynamical plenum furnishes an a priori necessary condition for our experience and knowledge of an objective world. Such an a priori existence proof, however, transgresses the limits Kant otherwise places on transcendental arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason because it establishes a material transcendental condition of possible experience. This finding motivates Edwards to examine the broader context of Kant's views about matter, substance, causal influence, and physical aether in connection with the developmental history of his theory of transcendental idealism. Against the backdrop of early modern metaphysics and contemporaneous physical theory, Edwards explicates the origins of the Third Analogy in Kant's early work on the metaphysics of nature. The argument against empty space presented in the Third Analogy reveals a central aspect of Kant's transcendental theory of experience that Edwards explains lucidly. By clarifying the epistemological standpoint at issue in the Third Analogy, he shows that the fundamental revisions to which Kant subjects his theory of knowledge in the Opus postumum not only originate in his precritical metaphysics of nature but are developments of an argument central to the Critique of Pure Reason itself. Edwards's work is important to scholars working in the history of philosophy and the history and philosophy of science, as well as to Kant specialists.
A new understanding of Kant's theory of a priori knowledge and his natural philosophy emerges from Jeffrey Edwards's mature and penetrating study. In the Third Analogy of Experience, Kant argues for the existence of a dynamical plenum in space. This argum

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Sources and Translations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION The Problem of Material Transcendental Conditions in Kant’s Theory of A Priori Knowledge
• PART I Dynamical Community, Influences, and Matter Everywhere
• CHAPTER I The Transcendental Principle of Community and Its Proof
• CHAPTER 2 Problems in the Third Analogy
• CHAPTER 3 Influence, Matter, and Force in the Transcendental Analytic and the Metaphysical Foundations of Mechanics
• PART II The Historical Background to Kant’s Critical Theory of Dynamical Community
• CHAPTER 4 Substance and Substantial Force in Leibniz and Wolf
• CHAPTER 5 Dynamical Community, Physical Influence, and Universal Harmony in the Development of Kant’s Metaphysics
• PART III Dynamical Aether in Kant’s Philosophy of Nature
• CHAPTER 6 Corpuscular and Dynamical Theories of Matter in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Natural Philosophy
• CHAPTER 7 The Theory of Physical Aether in Kant’s Philosophy of Nature
• PART IV The Theory of Dynamical Community and the idea of a Transcendental Dynamics
• CHAPTER 8 The Third Analogy and the Opus Postumum
• CHAPTER 9 Kant’s Transcendental Theory: Heterodox Considerations on Its History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index