Enlightenment

First published Fri Aug 20, 2010; substantive revision Tue Aug 29, 2017
The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity
of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-
called “philosophes”(e.g., Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu).
The philosophes constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated
on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment exemplified by the project of
the Encyclopedia (see below 1.5). However, there are noteworthy centers of
Enlightenment outside of France as well. There is a renowned Scottish
Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume,
Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung, key figures of which
include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant),
and there are also other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers
scattered throughout Europe and America in the eighteenth century.
What makes for the unity of such tremendously diverse thinkers under the label of
“Enlightenment”? For the purposes of this entry, the Enlightenment is conceived
broadly. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes
his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par
excellence”, because of the tremendous intellectual and scientific progress of the
age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy (in the broad
sense of the time, which includes the natural and social sciences) would
dramatically improve human life. Guided by D’Alembert’s characterization of his
century, the Enlightenment is conceived here as having its primary origin in the
scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The rise of the new science
progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the
cosmos, but also the set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide
philosophical inquiry in the earlier times. The dramatic success of the new science
in explaining the natural world promotes philosophy from a handmaiden of
theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with
the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms
both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. Taking as the core
of the Enlightenment the aspiration for intellectual progress, and the belief in the
power of such progress to improve human society and individual lives, this entry
includes descriptions of relevant aspects of the thought of earlier thinkers, such as
Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, Leibniz, and Spinoza, thinkers whose
contributions are indispensable to understanding the eighteenth century as “the
century of philosophy par excellence”.
The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals,
especially the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by
the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave
of social unrest in France in the eighteenth century. The social unrest comes to a
head in the violent political upheaval which sweeps away the traditionally and
hierarchically structured ancien régime (the monarchy, the privileges of the
nobility, the political power of the Catholic Church). The French revolutionaries
meant to establish in place of the ancien régime a new reason-based order
instituting the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. Though the
Enlightenment, as a diverse intellectual and social movement, has no definite end,
the devolution of the French Revolution into the Terror in the 1790s,
corresponding, as it roughly does, with the end of the eighteenth century and the
rise of opposed movements, such as Romanticism, can serve as a convenient
marker of the end of the Enlightenment, conceived as an historical period.
For Enlightenment thinkers themselves, however, the Enlightenment is not an
historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development,
unbound to time or place. Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his famous
contribution to debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the
Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), as humankind’s release from its self-
incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding
without the guidance of another.” Expressing convictions shared among
Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies
enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and
rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how
to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal
spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual
powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an
authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with
suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition,
superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete
with the authority of one’s own reason and experience. Enlightenment philosophy
tends to stand in tension with established religion, insofar as the release from self-
incurred immaturity in this age, daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s
intellectual powers, generally requires opposing the role of established religion in
directing thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it
that – is that the process of enlightenment, of becoming progressively self-directed
in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads
ultimately to a better, more fulfilled human existence.
This entry describes the main tendencies of Enlightenment thought in the
following main sections: (1) The True: Science, Epistemology, and Metaphysics in
the Enlightenment; (2) The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in
the Enlightenment; (3) The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment.

 1. The True: Science, Epistemology and Metaphysics in the Enlightenment

o 1.1 Rationalism and the Enlightenment
o 1.2 Empiricism and the Enlightenment
o 1.3 Skepticism in the Enlightenment
o 1.4 Science of Man and Subjectivism in the Enlightenment
o 1.5 Emerging Sciences and the Encyclopedia
 2. The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the
Enlightenment
 o 2.1 Political Theory
o 2.2 Ethical Theory
o 2.3 Religion and the Enlightenment
 3. The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment
o 3.1 French Classicism and German Rationalism
o 3.2 Empiricism and Subjectivism
o 3.3 Late Enlightenment Aesthetics
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. The True: Science, Epistemology and

Metaphysics in the Enlightenment
In this era dedicated to human progress, the advancement of the natural sciences is
regarded as the main exemplification of, and fuel for, such progress. Isaac
Newton’s epochal accomplishment in his Principia Mathematica (1687), which,
very briefly described, consists in the comprehension of a diversity of physical
phenomena – in particular the motions of heavenly bodies, together with the
motions of sublunary bodies – in few relatively simple, universally applicable,
mathematical laws, was a great stimulus to the intellectual activity of the
eighteenth century and served as a model and inspiration for the researches of a
number of Enlightenment thinkers. Newton’s system strongly encourages the
Enlightenment conception of nature as an orderly domain governed by strict
mathematical-dynamical laws and the conception of ourselves as capable of
knowing those laws and of plumbing the secrets of nature through the exercise of
our unaided faculties. – The conception of nature, and of how we know it, changes
significantly with the rise of modern science. It belongs centrally to the agenda of
Enlightenment philosophy to contribute to the new knowledge of nature, and to
provide a metaphysical framework within which to place and interpret this new
knowledge.

1.1 Rationalism and the Enlightenment

René Descartes’ rationalist system of philosophy is one of the pillars on which
Enlightenment thought rests. Descartes (1596–1650) undertakes to establish the
sciences upon a secure metaphysical foundation. The famous method of doubt
Descartes employs for this purpose exemplifies (in part through exaggerating) an
attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment. According to Descartes, the
investigator in foundational philosophical research ought to doubt all propositions
that can be doubted. The investigator determines whether a proposition is
dubitable by attempting to construct a possible scenario under which it is false. In
the domain of fundamental scientific (philosophical) research, no other authority
but one’s own conviction is to be trusted, and not one’s own conviction either,
until it is subjected to rigorous skeptical questioning. With his method, Descartes
casts doubt upon the senses as authoritative source of knowledge. He finds that
God and the immaterial soul are both better known, on the basis of innate ideas,
than objects of the senses. Through his famous doctrine of the dualism of mind
and body, that mind and body are two distinct substances, each with its own
essence, the material world (allegedly) known through the senses becomes
denominated as an “external” world, insofar as it is external to the ideas with
which one immediately communes in one’s consciousness. Descartes’
investigation thus establishes one of the central epistemological problems, not
only of the Enlightenment, but also of modernity: the problem of objectivity in our
empirical knowledge. If our evidence for the truth of propositions about extra-
mental material reality is always restricted to mental content, content before the
mind, how can we ever be certain that the extra-mental reality is not other than we
represent it as being? Descartes’ solution depends on our having secured prior and
certain knowledge of God. In fact, Descartes argues that all human knowledge
(not only knowledge of the material world through the senses) depends on
metaphysical knowledge of God.
Despite Descartes’ grounding of all scientific knowledge in metaphysical
knowledge of God, his system contributes significantly to the advance of natural
science in the period. He attacks the long-standing assumptions of the scholastic-
aristotelians whose intellectual dominance stood in the way of the development of
the new science; he developed a conception of matter that enabled mechanical
explanation of physical phenomena; and he developed some of the fundamental
mathematical resources – in particular, a way to employ algebraic equations to
solve geometrical problems – that enabled the physical domain to be explained
with precise, simple mathematical formulae. Furthermore, his grounding of
physics, and all knowledge, in a relatively simple and elegant rationalist
metaphysics provides a model of a rigorous and complete secular system of
knowledge. Though major Enlightenment thinkers (for example Voltaire in
his Letters on the English Nation, 1734) embrace Newton’s physical system in
preference to Descartes’, Newton’s system itself depends on Descartes’ earlier
work, a dependence to which Newton himself attests.
Cartesian philosophy also ignites various controversies in the latter decades of the
seventeenth century that provide the context of intellectual tumult out of which the
Enlightenment springs. Among these controversies are the following: Are mind
and body really two distinct sorts of substances, and if so, what is the nature of
each, and how are they related to each other, both in the human being (which
presumably “has” both a mind and a body) and in a unified world system? If
matter is inert (as Descartes claims), what can be the source of motion and the
nature of causality in the physical world? And of course the various
epistemological problems: the problem of objectivity, the role of God in securing
our knowledge, the doctrine of innate ideas, and others.
Baruch Spinoza’s systematic rationalist metaphysics, which he develops in
his Ethics (1677) in part in response to problems in the Cartesian system, is also
an important basis for Enlightenment thought. Spinoza develops, in contrast to
Cartesian dualism, an ontological monism according to which there is only one
substance, God or nature, with two attributes, corresponding to mind and body.
Spinoza’s denial, on the basis of strict philosophical reasoning, of the existence of
a transcendent supreme being, his identification of God with nature, gives strong
impetus to the strands of atheism and naturalism that thread through
Enlightenment philosophy. Spinoza’s rationalist principles also lead him to assert
a strict determinism and to deny any role to final causes or teleology in
explanation. (See Israel 2001.)
The rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz (1646–1716) is also foundational for the
Enlightenment, particularly the German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung), one
prominent expression of which is the Leibnizian rationalist system of Christian
Wolff (1679–1754). Leibniz articulates, and places at the head of metaphysics, the
great rationalist principle, the principle of sufficient reason, which states that
everything that exists has a sufficient reason for its existence. This principle
exemplifies the characteristic conviction of the Enlightenment that the universe is
thoroughly rationally intelligible. The question arises of how this principle itself
can be known or grounded. Wolff attempts to derive it from the logical principle
of non-contradiction (in his First Philosophy or Ontology, 1730). Criticism of this
alleged derivation gives rise to the general question of how formal principles of
logic can possibly serve to ground substantive knowledge of reality. Whereas
Leibniz exerts his influence through scattered writings on various topics, some of
which elaborate plans for a systematic metaphysics which are never executed by
Leibniz himself, Wolff exerts his influence on the German Enlightenment through
his development of a rationalist system of knowledge in which he attempts to
demonstrate all the propositions of science from first principles, known a priori.
Wolff’s rationalist metaphysics is characteristic of the Enlightenment by virtue of
the pretensions of human reason within it, not by reason’s success in establishing
its claims. Much the same could be said of the great rationalist philosophers of the
seventeenth century. Through their articulation of the ideal of scientia, of a
complete science of reality, composed of propositions derived demonstratively
from a priori first principles, these philosophers exert great influence on the
Enlightenment. But they fail, rather spectacularly, to realize this ideal. To the
contrary, what they bequeath to the eighteenth century is metaphysics, in the
words of Kant, as “a battlefield of endless controversies.” However, the
controversies themselves – regarding the nature of God, mind, matter, substance,
cause, et cetera, and the relations of each of these to the others – provide
tremendous fuel to Enlightenment thought.

1.2 Empiricism and the Enlightenment

Despite the confidence in and enthusiasm for human reason in the Enlightenment
– it is sometimes called “the Age of Reason” – the rise of empiricism, both in the
practice of science and in the theory of knowledge, is characteristic of the period.
The enthusiasm for reason in the Enlightenment is primarily not for the faculty of
reason as an independent source of knowledge, which is embattled in the period,
but rather for the human cognitive faculties generally; the Age of Reason contrasts
with an age of religious faith, not with an age of sense experience. Though the
great seventeenth century rationalist metaphysical systems of Descartes, Spinoza
and Leibniz exert tremendous influence on philosophy in the Enlightenment;
moreover, and though the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has a rationalist strain
(perhaps best exemplified by the system of Christian Wolff), nevertheless, that
the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert is dedicated to three empiricists
(Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton), signals the ascendency of
empiricism in the period.
If the founder of the rationalist strain of the Enlightenment is Descartes, then the
founder of the empiricist strain is Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Though Bacon’s
work belongs to the Renaissance, the revolution he undertook to effect in the
sciences inspires and influences Enlightenment thinkers. The Enlightenment, as
the age in which experimental natural science matures and comes into its own,
admires Bacon as “the father of experimental philosophy.” Bacon’s revolution
(enacted in, among other works, The New Organon, 1620) involves conceiving the
new science as (1) founded on empirical observation and experimentation; (2)
arrived at through the method of induction; and (3) as ultimately aiming at, and as
confirmed by, enhanced practical capacities (hence the Baconian motto,
“knowledge is power”).
Of these elements of Bacon’s revolution, the point about method deserves special
emphasis. Isaac Newton’s work, which stands as the great exemplar of the
accomplishments of natural science for the eighteenth century, is, like Bacon’s,
based on the inductive method. Whereas rationalist of the seventeenth century tend
to conceive of scientific knowledge of nature as consisting in a system in which
statements expressing the observable phenomena of nature are deduced from first
principles, known a priori, Newton’s method begins with the observed phenomena
of nature and reduces its multiplicity to unity by induction, that is, by finding
mathematical laws or principles from which the observed phenomena can be
derived or explained. The evident success of Newton’s “bottom-up” procedure
contrasts sharply with the seemingly endless and fruitless conflicts among
philosophers regarding the meaning and validity of first principles of reason, and
this contrast naturally favors the rise of the Newtonian (or Baconian) method of
acquiring knowledge of nature in the eighteenth century.
The tendency of natural science toward progressive independence from
metaphysics in the eighteenth century is correlated with this point about method.
The rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeds
through its separation from the presuppositions, doctrines and methodology of
theology; natural science in the eighteenth century proceeds to separate itself from
metaphysics as well. Newton proves the capacity of natural science to succeed
independently of a priori, clear and certain first principles. The characteristic
Enlightenment suspicion of all allegedly authoritative claims the validity of which
is obscure, which is directed first of all against religious dogmas, extends to the
claims of metaphysics as well. While there are significant Enlightenment thinkers
who are metaphysicians – again, one thinks of Christian Wolff – the general thrust
of Enlightenment thought is anti-metaphysical.
John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is another
foundational text of the Enlightenment. A main source of its influence is the
epistemological rigor that it displays, which is at least implicitly anti-
metaphysical. Locke undertakes in this work to examine the human understanding
in order to determine the limits of human knowledge; he thereby institutes a
prominent pattern of Enlightenment epistemology. Locke finds the source of all
our ideas, the ideas out of which human knowledge is constructed, in the senses
and argues influentially against the rationalists’ doctrine of innate ideas. Locke’s
sensationalism exerts great influence in the French Enlightenment, primarily
through being taken up and radicalized by the philosophe, Abbé de Condillac. In
the Treatise on Sensations (1754), Condillac attempts to explain how all human
knowledge arises out of sense experience. Locke’s epistemology, as developed by
Condillac and others, contributes greatly to the emerging science of psychology in
the period.
Locke and Descartes both pursue a method in epistemology that brings with it the
epistemological problem of objectivity. Both examine our knowledge by way of
examining the ideas we encounter directly in our consciousness. This method
comes to be called “the way of ideas”. Though neither for Locke nor for Descartes
do all of our ideas represent their objects by way of resembling them (e.g., our
idea of God does not represent God by virtue of resembling God), our alleged
knowledge of our environment through the senses does depend largely on ideas
that allegedly resemble external material objects. The way of ideas implies the
epistemological problem of how we can know that these ideas do in fact resemble
their objects. How can we be sure that these objects do not appear one way before
the mind and exist in another way (or not at all) in reality outside the mind?
George Berkeley, an empiricist philosopher influenced by John Locke, avoids the
problem by asserting the metaphysics of idealism: the (apparently material)
objects of perception are nothing but ideas before the mind. However, Berkeley’s
idealism is less influential in, and characteristic of, the Enlightenment, than the
opposing positions of materialism and Cartesian dualism. Thomas Reid, a
prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, attacks the way of ideas and
argues that the immediate objects of our (sense) perception are the common
(material) objects in our environment, not ideas in our mind. Reid mounts his
defense of naïve realism as a defense of common sense over against the doctrines
of the philosophers. The defense of common sense, and the related idea that the
results of philosophy ought to be of use to common people, are characteristic ideas
of the Enlightenment, particularly pronounced in the Scottish Enlightenment.

1.3 Skepticism in the Enlightenment

Skepticism enjoys a remarkably strong place in Enlightenment philosophy, given
that confidence in our intellectual capacities to achieve systematic knowledge of
nature is a leading characteristic of the age. This oddity is at least softened by the
point that much skepticism in the Enlightenment is merely methodological, a tool
meant to serve science, rather than a position embraced on its own account. The
instrumental role for skepticism is exemplified prominently in
Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), in which Descartes employs
radical skeptical doubt to attack prejudices derived from learning and from sense
experience and to search out principles known with certainty which may serve as a
secure foundation for a new system of knowledge. Given the negative, critical,
suspicious attitude of the Enlightenment towards doctrines traditionally regarded
as well founded, it is not surprising that Enlightenment thinkers employ skeptical
tropes (drawn from the ancient skeptical tradition) to attack traditional dogmas in
science, metaphysics and religion.
However, skepticism is not merely a methodological tool in the hands of
Enlightenment thinkers. The skeptical cast of mind is one prominent manifestation
of the Enlightenment spirit. The influence of Pierre Bayle, another founding figure
of the Enlightenment, testifies to this. Bayle was a French Protestant, who, like
many European philosophers of his time, was forced to live and work in politically
liberal and tolerant Holland in order to avoid censorship and prison.
Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), a strange and wonderful book,
exerts great influence on the age. The form of the book is intimidating: a
biographical dictionary, with long scholarly entries on obscure figures in the
history of culture, interrupted by long scholarly footnotes, which are in turn
interrupted by further footnotes. Rarely has a work with such intimidating
scholarly pretentions exerted such radical and liberating influence in the culture. It
exerts this influence through its skeptical questioning of religious, metaphysical,
and scientific dogmas. Bayle’s eclecticism and his tendency to follow arguments
without pre-arranging their conclusions make it difficult to categorize his thought.
It is the attitude of inquiry that Bayle displays, rather than any doctrine he
espouses, that mark his as distinctively Enlightenment thought. He is fearless and
presumptuous in questioning all manner of dogma. His attitude of inquiry
resembles both that of Descartes’ meditator and that of the person undergoing
enlightenment as Kant defines it, the attitude of coming to think for oneself, of
daring to know. This epistemological attitude, as manifest in distrust of authority
and reliance on one’s own capacity to judge, expresses the Enlightenment values
of individualism and self-determination.
This skeptical/critical attitude underlies a significant tension in the age. While it is
common to conceive of the Enlightenment as supplanting the authority of tradition
and religious dogma with the authority of reason, in fact the Enlightenment is
characterized by a crisis of authority regarding any belief. This is perhaps best
illustrated with reference to David Hume’s skepticism, as developed in Book One
of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and in his later Enquiries Concerning
Human Understanding (1748). While one might take Hume’s skepticism to imply
that he is an outlier with respect to the Enlightenment, it is more convincing to see
Hume’s skepticism as a flowering of a crisis regarding authority in belief that is
internal to the Enlightenment. Hume articulates a variety of skepticisms. His
“skepticism with regard to the senses” is structured by the epistemological
problem bound up with the way of ideas, described above. Hume also articulates
skepticism with regard to reason in an argument that is anticipated by Bayle.
Hume begins this argument by noting that, though rules or principles in
demonstrative sciences are certain or infallible, given the fallibility of our
faculties, our applications of such rules or principles in demonstrative inferences
yield conclusions that cannot be regarded as certain or infallible. On reflection, our
conviction in the conclusions of demonstrative reasoning must be qualified by an
assessment of the likelihood that we made a mistake in our reasoning. Thus, Hume
writes, “all knowledge degenerates into probability” (Treatise, I.iv.i). Hume
argues further that, given this degeneration, for any judgment, our assessment of
the likelihood that we made a mistake, and the corresponding diminution of
certainty in the conclusion, is another judgment about which we ought make a
further assessment, which leads to a further diminution of certainty in our original
conclusion, leading “at last [to] a total extinction of belief and evidence”. Hume
also famously questions the justification of inductive reasoning and causal
reasoning. According to Hume’s argument, since in causal reasoning we take our
past observations to serve as evidence for judgments regarding what will happen
in relevantly similar circumstances in the future, causal reasoning depends on the
assumption that the future course of nature will resemble the past; and there is no
non-circular justification of this essential assumption. Hume concludes that we
have no rational justification for our causal or inductive judgments. Hume’s
skeptical arguments regarding causal reasoning are more radical than his skeptical
questioning of reason as such, insofar as they call into question even experience
itself as a ground for knowledge and implicitly challenge the credentials of
Newtonian science itself, the very pride of the Enlightenment. The question
implicitly raised by Hume’s powerful skeptical arguments is
whether any epistemological authority at all can withstand critical scrutiny. The
Enlightenment begins by unleashing skepticism in attacking limited,
circumscribed targets, but once the skeptical genie is out of the bottle, it becomes
difficult to maintain conviction in any authority. Thus, the despairing attitude that
Hume famously expresses in the conclusion to Book One of the Treatise, as the
consequence of his epistemological inquiry, while it clashes with the self-
confident and optimistic attitude we associate with the Enlightenment, in fact
reflects an essential possibility in a distinctive Enlightenment problematic
regarding authority in belief.

1.4 Science of Man and Subjectivism in the

Enlightenment
Though Hume finds himself struggling with skepticism in the conclusion of Book
One of the Treatise, the project of the work as he outlines it is not to advance a
skeptical viewpoint, but to establish a science of the mind. Hume is one of many
Enlightenment thinkers who aspire to be the “Newton of the mind”; he aspires to
establish the basic laws that govern the elements of the human mind in its
operations. Alexander Pope’s famous couplet in An Essay on Man (1733) (“Know
then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man”)
expresses well the intense interest humanity gains in itself within the context of
the Enlightenment, as a partial substitute for its traditional interest in God and the
transcendent domain. Just as the sun replaces the earth as the center of our cosmos
in Copernicus’ cosmological system, so humanity itself replaces God at the center
of humanity’s consciousness in the Enlightenment. Given the Enlightenment’s
passion for science, the self-directed attention naturally takes the form of the rise
of the scientific study of humanity in the period.
The enthusiasm for the scientific study of humanity in the period incorporates a
tension or paradox concerning the place of humanity in the cosmos, as the cosmos
is re-conceived in the context of Enlightenment philosophy and science. Newton’s
success early in the Enlightenment of subsuming the phenomena of nature under
universal laws of motion, expressed in simple mathematical formulae, encourages
the conception of nature as a very complicated machine, whose parts are material
and whose motions and properties are fully accounted for by deterministic causal
laws. But if our conception of nature is of an exclusively material domain
governed by deterministic, mechanical laws, and if we at the same time deny the
place of the supernatural in the cosmos, then how does humanity itself fit into the
cosmos? On the one hand, the achievements of the natural sciences in general are
the great pride of the Enlightenment, manifesting the excellence of distinctively
human capacities. The pride and self-assertiveness of humanity in the
Enlightenment expresses itself, among other ways, in humanity’s making the study
of itself its central concern. On the other hand, the study of humanity in the
Enlightenment typically yields a portrait of us that is the opposite of flattering or
elevating. Instead of being represented as occupying a privileged place in nature,
as made in the image of God, humanity is represented typically in the
Enlightenment as a fully natural creature, devoid of free will, of an immortal soul,
and of a non-natural faculty of intelligence or reason. The very title of J.O. de La
Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1748), for example, seems designed to deflate
humanity’s self-conception, and in this respect it is characteristic of the
Enlightenment “science of man”. It is true of a number of works of the
Enlightenment, perhaps especially works in the more radical French
Enlightenment – notable here are Helvétius’s Of the Spirit (1758) and Baron
d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770) – that they at once express the remarkable
self-assertiveness of humanity characteristic of the Enlightenment in their
scientific aspirations while at the same time painting a portrait of humanity that
dramatically deflates its traditional self-image as occupying a privileged position
in nature.
The methodology of epistemology in the period reflects a similar tension. Given
the epistemological role of Descartes’ famous “cogito, ergo sum” in his system of
knowledge, one might see Descartes’ epistemology as already marking the
transition from an epistemology privileging knowledge of God to one that
privileges self-knowledge instead. However, in Descartes’ epistemology, it
remains true that knowledge of God serves as the necessary foundation for all
human knowledge. Hume’s Treatise displays such a re-orientation less
ambiguously. As noted, Hume means his work to comprise a science of the mind
or of man. In the Introduction, Hume describes the science of man as effectively a
foundation for all the sciences since all sciences “lie under the cognizance of men,
and are judged of by their powers and faculties.” In other words, since all science
is human knowledge, scientific knowledge of humanity is the foundation of the
sciences. Hume’s placing the science of man at the foundation of all the sciences
both exemplifies the privilege afforded to “mankind’s study of man” within the
Enlightenment and provides an interpretation of it. But Hume’s methodological
privileging of humanity in the system of sciences contrasts sharply with what he
says in the body of his science about humanity. In Hume’s science of man, reason
as a faculty of knowledge is skeptically attacked and marginalized; reason is
attributed to other animals as well; belief is shown to be grounded in custom and
habit; and free will is denied. So, even as knowledge of humanity supplants
knowledge of God as the keystone of the system of knowledge, the scientific
perspective on humanity starkly challenges humankind’s self-conception as
occupying a privileged position in the order of nature.
Immanuel Kant explicitly enacts a revolution in epistemology modeled on the
Copernican in astronomy. As characteristic of Enlightenment epistemology, Kant,
in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787) undertakes both to
determine the limits of our knowledge, and at the same time to provide a
foundation of scientific knowledge of nature, and he attempts to do this by
examining our human faculties of knowledge critically. Even as he draws strict
limits to rational knowledge, he attempts to defend reason as a faculty of
knowledge, as playing a necessary role in natural science, in the face of skeptical
challenges that reason faces in the period. According to Kant, scientific knowledge
of nature is not merely knowledge of what in fact happens in nature, but
knowledge of the causal laws of nature according to which what in fact
happens must happen. But how is knowledge of necessary causal connection in
nature possible? Hume’s investigation of the idea of cause had made clear that we
cannot know causal necessity through experience; experience teaches us at most
what in fact happens, not what must happen. In addition, Kant’s own earlier
critique of principles of rationalism had convinced him that the principles of
(“general”) logic also cannot justify knowledge of real necessary connections (in
nature); the formal principle of non-contradiction can ground at best the deduction
of one proposition from another, but not the claim that one property or event must
follow from another in the course of nature. The generalized epistemological
problem Kant addresses in the Critique of Pure Reason is: how is science possible
(including natural science, mathematics, metaphysics), given that all such
knowledge must be (or include) knowledge of real, substantive (not merely logical
or formal) necessities. Put in the terms Kant defines, the problem is: how is
synthetic, a priori knowledge possible?
According to Kant’s Copernican Revolution in epistemology addressed to this
problem, objects must conform themselves to human knowledge rather than
knowledge to objects. Certain cognitive forms lie ready in the human mind –
prominent examples are the pure concepts of substance and cause and the forms of
intuition, space and time; given sensible representations must conform themselves
to these forms in order for human experience (as empirical knowledge of nature)
to be possible at all. We can acquire scientific knowledge of nature because we
constitute it a priori according to certain cognitive forms; for example, we can
know nature as a causally ordered domain because we originally synthesize a
priori the given manifold of sensibility according to the category of causality,
which has its source in the human mind.
Kant saves rational knowledge of nature by limiting rational knowledge to nature.
According to Kant’s argument, we can have rational knowledge only of the
domain of possible experience, not of supersensible objects such as God and the
soul. Moreover Kant’s solution brings with it a kind of idealism: given the mind’s
role in constituting objects of experience, we know objects only as appearances,
only as they appear according to our faculties, not as they are in themselves. This
is the subjectivism of Kant’s epistemology. Kant’s epistemology exemplifies
Enlightenment thought by replacing the theocentric conception of knowledge of
the rationalist tradition with an anthropocentric conception.
However, Kant means his system to make room for humanity’s practical and
religious aspirations toward the transcendent as well. According to Kant’s
idealism, the realm of nature is limited to a realm of appearances, and we can
intelligibly think supersensible objects such as God, freedom and the soul, though
we cannot know them. Through the postulation of a realm of unknowable
noumena (things in themselves) over against the realm of nature as a realm of
appearances, Kant manages to make place for practical concepts that are central to
our understanding of ourselves even while grounding our scientific knowledge of
nature as a domain governed by deterministic causal laws. Though Kant’s idealism
is highly controversial from its initial publication, a main point in its favor,
according to Kant himself, is that it reconciles, in a single coherent tension, the
main tension between the Enlightenment’s conception of nature, as ordered
according to deterministic causal laws, and the Enlightenment’s conception of
ourselves, as morally free, as having dignity, and as perfectible.

1.5 Emerging Sciences and the Encyclopedia

The commitment to careful observation and description of phenomena as the
starting point of science, and then the success at explaining and accounting for
observed phenomena through the method of induction, naturally leads to the
development of new sciences for new domains in the Enlightenment. Many of the
human and social sciences have their origins in the eighteenth century (e.g.,
history, anthropology, aesthetics, psychology, economics, even sociology), though
most are only formally established as autonomous disciplines later. The
emergence of new sciences is aided by the development of new scientific tools,
such as models for probabilistic reasoning, a kind of reasoning that gains new
respect and application in the period. Despite the multiplication of sciences in the
period, the ideal remains to comprehend the diversity of our scientific knowledge
as a unified system of science; however, this ideal of unity is generally taken as
regulative, as an ideal to emerge in the ever-receding end-state of science, rather
than as enforced from the beginning by regimenting science under a priori
principles.
As exemplifying these and other tendencies of the Enlightenment, one work
deserves special mention: the Encyclopedia, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean La
Rond d’Alembert. The Encyclopedia (subtitled: “systematic dictionary of the
sciences, arts and crafts”) was published in 28 volumes (17 of text, 11 of plates)
over 21 years (1751–1772), and consists of over 70,000 articles, contributed by
over 140 contributors, among them many of the luminaries of the French
Enlightenment. The work aims to provide a compendium of existing human
knowledge to be transmitted to subsequent generations, a transmission intended to
contribute to the progress and dissemination of human knowledge and to a positive
transformation of human society. The orientation of the Encyclopedia is decidedly
secular and implicitly anti-authoritarian. Accordingly, the French state of
the ancien régime censors the project, and it is completed only through the
persistence of Diderot. The collaborative nature of the project, especially in the
context of state opposition, contributes significantly to the formation of a shared
sense of purpose among the wide variety of intellectuals who belong to the French
Enlightenment. The knowledge contained in the Encyclopedia is self-consciously
social both in its production – insofar as it is immediately the product of what the
title page calls “a society of men of letters” – and in its address – insofar as it is
primarily meant as an instrument for the education and improvement of society. It
is a striking feature of the Encyclopedia, and one by virtue of which it exemplifies
the Baconian conception of science characteristic of the period, that its entries
cover the whole range and scope of knowledge, from the most abstract theoretical
to the most practical, mechanical and technical.

Kant’s Philosophy of Science

First published Tue Oct 21, 2003; substantive revision Fri Jul 18, 2014
Kant's philosophy of science has received attention from several different
audiences and for a variety of reasons. It is of interest to contemporary
philosophers of science primarily because of the way in which Kant attempts to
articulate a philosophical framework that places substantive conditions on our
scientific knowledge of the world while still respecting the autonomy and diverse
claims of particular sciences. More specifically, Kant develops a philosophy of
science that departs from (i) broadly empiricist views — such as David Lewis's,
according to which purely contingent events in space and time (along with
considerations of simplicity, etc.) determine what the laws of nature ultimately are
— and (ii) certain necessitarian views — such as David Armstrong's, according to
which the laws of nature consist of necessitation relations between universals,
which place constraints on what events occur in space and time. Kant does so by
holding that (i) scientific laws do involve necessity, but that (ii) this necessity is
based not on (purely metaphysical and hence inaccessible) relations between
universals, but rather on certain subjective, a priori conditions under which we can
experience objects in space and time.
Kant's scientific writings are also of interest to historians of modern philosophy,
historians of science, and historians of philosophy of science. Historians of
modern philosophy are especially interested in determining how Kant's views on
science might complement or clarify his distinctive metaphysical and
epistemological doctrines (e.g., as expressed in the Critique of Pure Reason).
Historians of science reflect on the way in which Kant's position fits in with the
views of other natural philosophers of the period, such as Newton and Leibniz,
including his novel account of the formation of the solar system according to
Newtonian principles. Historians of philosophy of science investigate, among
other things, Kant's work in the conceptual foundations of physics — in particular,
his matter theory (e.g., the infinite divisibility of matter, attractive and repulsive
forces, inertia, atoms and the void), his theory of motion, and his dynamical
account of the laws of mechanics.
Because physics was Kant's primary (though not exclusive) focus over the course
of his lengthy career, his views on physics during his pre-Critical (1746-1770),
Critical (1781-1790), and Post-Critical periods (after 1790) will be discussed in
separate sections. Subsections will be devoted to each of the chapters of Kant's
most influential work in philosophy of science, the Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science (1786). Kant's basic positions on other sciences, including
psychology, chemistry, and history, will be presented thereafter.

 1. Physics: The Pre-Critical Period

 2. Physics: The Critical Period (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science)
o 2.1 Preface
o 2.2 Phoronomy
o 2.3 Dynamics
o 2.4 Mechanics
o 2.5 Phenomenology
 3. Physics: The Post-Critical Period (Opus postumum)
 4. Biology
 5. Chemistry
 6. Psychology
 7. Other Sciences: History, Physical Geography, and Anthropology
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Physics: The Pre-Critical Period

Kant's early pre-Critical publications (1746-1756) are devoted primarily to solving
a variety of broadly cosmological problems and to developing an increasingly
comprehensive metaphysics that would account for the matter theory that is
required by the solutions to these problems. Kant's first publication, Thoughts on
the True Estimation of Living Forces (1746), explicitly attempts to solve the vis
viva controversy, which had been hotly contested ever since Leibniz's attack on
Descartes' laws of motion in the Acta Eruditorum in 1686. While Kant attempts to
occupy an intermediary position between the Cartesian and Leibnizian positions
by maintaining that both mv and mv² could be conserved in different contexts,
what is of particular note is how his solution in Parts II and III rests on the
conception of force developed in Part I. According to this conception, force is
understood in terms of the activity of substances, an activity that Kant then uses to
explain how the motions of bodies are generated, to solve the mind-body problem,
and to account for both the possibility of other, actually existing worlds and the
three-dimensionality of space.
His solution to the vis viva dispute is especially interesting, because it presages his
later approach to philosophical controversy. Rather than offering a conclusive
argument in favor of one position, Kant seeks to mediate between the two parties,
Leibnizian and Cartesian. He argues that each measure of force is correct, but in
different contexts. Kant distinguishes two ways of studying bodies,
“mathematical” and “metaphysical,” and claims that they presuppose distinct
conceptions of body. According to mathematical mechanics, a body cannot
accelerate unless an external cause acts on it; for that reason, Kant declares, the
Cartesians' quantity mv is the only one appropriate measure of force in this
context. “Natural bodies,” in contrast, have features that mathematics brackets.
One such feature is a capacity for “vivification,” whereby a body increases by
itself the force of motion that an external cause merely “awakens.” In light of that,
Kant concludes, the Leibnizian quantity mv2 is the correct measure of force in
metaphysical considerations of “natural bodies” (1:140f).
Kant develops his account of the nature of substance in greater detail in A New
Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755). While the
first two sections of this work undertake revisions of Wolff's principles of non-
contradiction and sufficient reason, the third section argues for two substantive
principles that are alleged to follow from the principle of sufficient (or rather,
following Crusius, determining) reason, namely the principles of succession and
coexistence. The main thrust of the principle of succession is directed against
Leibnizian pre-established harmony, arguing that only causal
connections between substances can bring about changes in their states. Kant's
position appears to be designed to account primarily for changes of bodily states
(with changes in mental states being parasitic upon them, as was explicitly
asserted in the True Estimation). For he maintains that mutual changes of state
require mutual interaction, where it is clear that changes in motion are precisely
the kind of mutual change that he has in mind (since one body cannot move closer
to another without the other body moving closer to it). The principle of
coexistence then argues that harmonious causal interaction between otherwise
isolated, independently existing substances is possible only by means of God's
coordination (just as Leibniz thought was required for harmonious relations
between the states of such substances).
Kant's Physical Monadology (1756) takes as its task the reconciliation of the
infinite divisibility of space, as maintained in geometry, with the simplicity of
substances, which Kant believes is required in metaphysics. As was the case with
his earlier works, the essential feature of his reconciliation lies in the way in which
his matter theory is supported by his metaphysical views. Specifically, Kant
asserts that simple substances fill space not by means of their mere existence, but
rather in virtue of their spheres of activity. As a result, any division of the relevant
spheres of activity does not compromise the simplicity of the substances
themselves, since the spatial properties of substances (including the infinite
divisibility of space) arise from the interaction between their activities rather than
from their intrinsic features. In the course of the Physical Monadology, Kant also
argues for the necessity of attractive and repulsive forces and attributes a
significant role to the force of inertia. Kant's acceptance of such Newtonian
principles represents an important change of position over the True Estimation,
where Kant rejects the principle of inertia and pursues a dynamical theory much
more in line with Leibniz's views.
In addition to these works, which bridge the gap, as it were, between physics and
metaphysics, during this period Kant is interested in a series of specific issues in
cosmology and empirical physics. For example, Kant writes several short
exclusively scientific essays between 1754 to 1757, including “Brief Outline of
Certain Meditations on Fire,” “Investigation of the question of whether the Earth
has suffered changes in its axial Rotation,” “The Question of the Aging of the
Earth, considered physically” as well as three papers on earthquakes. Of much
greater significance is his Universal Natural History and Theory of the
Heavens (1755), which represents an important contribution to science as such.
For in it Kant explains how one can account for the formation of the solar system
from an initial state, in which matter is dispersed like a cloud, solely by means of
the interaction of attractive and repulsive forces. In 1796, Laplace, unaware of
Kant's argument, would develop a very similar derivation, with the result that the
view is now typically referred to as the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis.
Some of Kant's youthful insights have yielded long-lasting contributions to
scientific knowledge. His intuition that tides slow down the Earth's rotation over
time is correct. In his New Remarks toward an Elucidation of the theory of Winds,
Kant correctly explained that North-South winds in our hemisphere suffer a
Coriolis deflection due to the Earth's rotation. Moreover, broadly Kantian accounts
of planetary formation have been the dominant model since the emergence of
sophisticated nebular models in the 1970s (see, e.g., Safronov 1972 and Prentice
1978).
Later in his pre-Critical period (1763-1770), Kant attempts to build a
comprehensive metaphysical account on the basis of the framework that he had
established in his first works. Thus, in his The Only Possible Basis for a
Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763) he attempts to extend his reasoning
to fundamental issues in both philosophical theology and teleology, presenting, for
the first time, his now famous criticisms of the three traditional arguments for the
existence of God, while developing a new theistic proof, based on the idea that
God is necessary as a real ground of the possibilities of things. After reading
Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in German translation
sometime after 1755, Kant distinguishes between real and logical
grounds/opposition in his Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative
Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763) to avoid Hume's objection that there is no
logical contradiction in the existence of one thing not following the existence of
another. But in this work he is also interested in exploring the notion of a real
ground/opposition further by applying it more widely, e.g., to bodies, mental
states, etc. Also relevant is Kant's Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the
Distinction of the Directions in Space (1768) which modifies his earlier account of
space insofar as he seems to hold that certain spatial properties — viz., chirality,
or handedness — may not be able to be explained entirely in terms of direct
relations between material substances. In his so-called Inaugural
Dissertation (1770), Kant continues to develop a more comprehensive
philosophical system, which would encompass the principles of both the sensible
and the intelligible world, and in so doing modifies his account of space and time
even further. Over the course of the next ten years, during which he published
almost nothing, Kant would revise his views more systematically, with the
publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 representing the first major
step in his “critical turn.”
Adickes (1924), Harman (1982), Friedman (1992), Laywine (1993), Schönfeld
(2000), Kuehn (2001), Lefevre & Wunderlich (2000), and Watkins (1997, 2001,
2003, 2006, 2013) have emphasized the importance of scientific issues in the
development of Kant's thought during his pre-Critical period, as he reacted to
Leibniz, Newton and other, more immediate predecessors (such as Christian
Wolff, Christian August Crusius, Leonard Euler, Pierre Louis Moreau de
Maupertuis, and Martin Knutzen). Smith (2013) reconstructs Kant's picture of
matter in the Physical Monadology.

2. Physics: The Critical Period (Metaphysical

Foundations of Natural Science)
Though Kant discusses issues relevant to physics in various works throughout the
Critical period (esp. the Critique of Pure Reason), his views on this topic are
developed most explicitly in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science (1786), which consists of a preface and four chapters.

2.1 Preface
In the Preface to the Metaphysical Foundations Kant (i) analyzes the concepts of
nature and science so as to establish what conditions must be met for a body of
knowledge to constitute natural science in the proper sense, (ii) explains why
science so understood requires “a pure part” (4:469) and what criteria would have
to be satisfied for such a pure part to exist, (iii) argues that chemistry and
psychology cannot at present meet these criteria, and (iv) describes what
procedure should be followed to satisfy these criteria and thus to provide the “pure
part” that science proper requires.
The feature of Kant's conception of natural science proper that is most
immediately striking is how restrictive it is. It requires that cognition (i) be
systematically ordered (ii) according to rational principles and (iii) be known a
priori with apodictic certainty, i.e., with “consciousness of their necessity”
(4:468). Because properly scientific cognition must satisfy these strict conditions,
it requires “a pure part on which the apodictic certainty that reason seeks can be
based” (4:469). But since Kant identifies pure rational cognition that is generated
from concepts with metaphysics, it follows that science proper requires a
metaphysics of nature. He then specifies that such a metaphysics of nature could
consist in either a “transcendental part,” which discusses the laws that make
possible the concept of a nature in general — “even without relation to any
determinate object of experience” (4:469) — or a “special metaphysical” part,
which concerns a “particular nature of this or that kind of things” for which an
empirical concept is given.
Kant's very conception of natural science proper thus immediately gives rise to
several systematically important questions. First, if the “transcendental part” of the
metaphysics of nature can be identified with the results of the Critique of Pure
Reason, then the Metaphysical Foundations is a work in special metaphysics. But
what exactly is a special metaphysics? In particular, what particular natures or
kinds of things could be its object? And how precisely can an empirical concept of
such things be given without compromising the necessity required of the pure part
of natural science? Second, how is the special metaphysics provided by
the Metaphysical Foundations supposed to be related to the transcendental part of
the metaphysics of nature that was established in the Critique of Pure Reason?
Does the former presuppose the principles of the latter or are they logically
independent, but still related to each other in some other way? Another question
concerns the method of special metaphysics. Is that method the conceptual
analysis (of the notion of matter), the transcendental investigation of the
presuppositions of the mathematical science of nature, or something else entirely?
First, Kant suggests that in special metaphysics the principles of the transcendental
part “are applied to the two species of objects of our senses” (4:470). Thus, the
particular kinds of things that could be investigated in a special metaphysics are (i)
the objects of outer sense, i.e., matter, and (ii) the objects of inner sense, i.e.,
thinking beings, which would thus result in a doctrine of body and a doctrine of
soul. Kant then argues that because “the possibility of determinate natural things
cannot be cognized from their mere concepts … it is still required that
the intuition corresponding to the concept be given a priori, that is, that the
concept be constructed” (4:470), which is a task that requires mathematics. This is
Kant's justification for his famous claim that “in any special doctrine of nature
there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein” (4:470).
This argument suggests that the necessity required of the pure part of natural
science derives from the necessity of the rules by which the mathematical
construction of determinate things must proceed.
Kant then uses the claim that science proper requires the construction of the
concept of the object in a priori intuition to exclude the possibility that chemistry
and psychology, at least as they were practiced at that time, could count as science
proper. In the case of chemistry, the problem is that “no law of the approach or
withdrawal of the parts of matter can be specified according to which … their
motions and all the consequences thereof can be made intuitive and presented a
priori in space (a demand that will only with great difficulty ever be fulfilled)”
(4:471). Since its principles are “merely empirical,” it can, at best, be a
“systematic art” (ibid.). The case of psychology is more complex, since Kant
provides (at least) two separate reasons in the Preface for denying it the status of
natural science proper. First, Kant claims that mathematics is inapplicable to the
phenomena of inner sense and their laws, though he grants that the law of
continuity (discussed, e.g., at A207–209/B253–255 and A228–229/B281 in
the Critique of Pure Reason) ought to apply to changes in our representations as
well. He downplays the significance of this application of the law of continuity,
however, by noting that time has only one dimension, which does not provide
enough material to extend our cognition significantly. Second, Kant also
complains that empirical psychology cannot separate and recombine the
phenomena of inner sense at will; rather, our inner observations can be separated
“only by mere division in thought” (4:471). Kant's fuller views on chemistry and
psychology will be discussed further below.
Second, in explaining how mathematics can be applied to bodies Kant asserts that
“principles for the construction of the concepts that belong to the possibility of
matter in general must first be introduced. Therefore a complete analysis of the
concept of a matter in general [must be provided in which it] makes use of no
particular experiences, but only that which it finds in the isolated (although
intrinsically empirical) concept itself, in relation to the pure intuitions in space and
time, and in accordance with laws that already essentially attach to the concept of
nature in general” (4:472). Kant then explains that this means that the concept of
matter must be determined according to the Critique of Pure Reason's categories
of quantity, quality, relation, and modality (4:474–476). Further, Kant holds that
“a new determination” (4:476) must be added to the concept of matter in each
chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations. This suggests not only that the
principles argued for in the Metaphysical Foundations are to be developed “in
accordance with” the principles defended in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also
that both the concept of matter and the Metaphysical Foundations itself is
structured according to the Critique of Pure Reason's table of categories.
Unfortunately, these points of clarification do not resolve all of the issues that are
immediately raised by Kant's pronouncements about what is required for natural
science proper. One further issue that is relevant here concerns the concept of
matter that is at the heart of the Metaphysical Foundations. Kant introduces it in
the Critique of Pure Reason (A847–848/B875–876) as the concept of something
that is impenetrable, extended, and inert. Yet, in the beginning of the Preface of
the Metaphysical Foundations, he describes it as whatever is an object of outer
sense, and later he argues that the “basic determination of something that is to be
an object of the outer senses had to be motion, because only thereby can these
senses be affected” (4:476). Whatever weight one accords Kant's justification of
the connection between matter, outer sense, and motion, one faces a dilemma. If
the concept of matter, most fundamentally, is simply the concept of any object of
outer sense, then how is it still empirical in any genuine sense (and what has
become of the structural difference Kant draws between the Critique of Pure
Reason and the Metaphysical Foundations)? If, by contrast, impenetrability,
extension, and movability are deemed the basic traits of the concept of matter,
then how can one know a priori that any object we might encounter in outer sense
must behave in accordance with the laws that would govern matter so defined?
Moreover, even if one can find an appropriately nuanced sense in which the
concept of matter is empirical while still allowing for an appropriate kind of
necessity, questions can still be posed about the “new determinations” that are to
be added to that concept in each chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations. For
example, what is the justification for each specific determination that is added
when one thinks of matter as having a quantity, a quality, etc.? Also, what is the
relationship between each new determination of matter and the various claims that
Kant makes in each chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations? In particular, when
Kant explicitly invokes principles for constructing concepts belonging to the
possibility of matter, is his idea that these principles are required insofar as they
make experience of the relevant “new determination” of matter possible (so that
Kant would be developing a transcendental argument in the Metaphysical
Foundations similar in many respects to the Critique of Pure Reason)? Answers to
these questions depend on how one interprets the arguments Kant develops
throughout the Metaphysical Foundations.
The conception of science that Kant presents in the Preface has been the focus of
considerable attention over the past several decades. In the German literature, the
issues raised above have been discussed at length by Plaass (1965), Schäfer
(1966), Hoppe (1969), Gloy (1976), and Cramer (1985). Pollok (2001) has
recently produced a detailed and comprehensive textual commentary on
the Metaphysical Foundations. Important work has also been done in the English
literature by Walker (1974), Brittan (1978), Buchdahl (1968, 1969, and 1986),
Parsons (1984), Butts (1986), and Watkins (1998a). Friedman (1992, 2001, 2002
and 2013) has been especially influential on these issues as well.

2.2 Phoronomy
The first chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations, the Phoronomy, considers the
quantity of motion of matter and how it is to be constructed in intuition a priori (so
as to produce the kind of rules that are necessary for our experience of matter in
motion). Since extension and impenetrability are not directly relevant to how
different magnitudes (or degrees) of motion can be represented, Kant restricts his
discussion in this chapter to matter considered as a point. Since the motion of a
point in space can be represented straightforwardly, the main issue is how to
represent the composition of two different motions. Kant's primary claim in this
chapter is that due to the relativity of space (i.e., the fact that every motion can be
viewed arbitrarily as either the motion of a body in a space at rest, or as a body in
a state of rest in a space which is in motion in the opposite direction with the same
velocity) “the composition of two motions of one and the same point can only be
thought in such a way that one of them is represented in absolute space, and,
instead of the other, a motion of the relative space with the same speed occurring
in the opposite direction is represented as the same as the latter” (4:490). The
proof of this Theorem considers the three possible cases for the composition of
two motions: (i) The two motions are in the same direction; (ii) the two motions
are in opposite directions; (iii) the two motions enclose an angle. Kant then shows
how one can construct a priori in intuition a single motion out of the two motions
described in cases (i)-(iii). The synthetic a priori outcome of this constructive
procedure is a composition theorem that covers two fundamental results of
classical physics: the parallelogram rule for velocity addition, and the Galilean
kinematic transformations. The theorem is needed for architectonic reasons too,
not just as a foundation for science. Kant uses the composition theorem as a
premise in his Dynamics, so as to infer a priori to forces from the composite
motions they cause (e.g., 4:497). And, he invokes the theorem explicitly in his
Mechanics, in the course of “constructing the communication of motion,” i.e.
deriving the laws of impact (4:546).
Until recently, very little has been written directly on Kant's Phoronomy. (By
contrast, Kant's philosophy of mathematics has long received considerable
attention.) Palter (1972) first broached the Phoronomy from the modern standpoint
of coordinate transformations between frames. Pollok (2001) is a historically rich
commentary. Friedman (2013) untangles the complex strands of thought in Kant's
chapter. His leading idea is that Kant's categories of quantity (of the First Critique)
guarantee that motion is a magnitude, hence mathematics is applicable to the
motions of bodies--as kinematics.

2.3 Dynamics
The second chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations, the Dynamics, considers
how it is possible to experience matter as filling a determinate region in space.
Propositions 1–4 are devoted to exhibiting the nature and necessity of repulsive
forces. In Proposition 1 Kant argues that repulsive force is required for matter to
fill space, since solidity, understood by “Lambert and others” as the property
matter would have by means of “its mere existence” (4:497), cannot truly explain
how one matter resists another matter's attempt to penetrate it. Kant then specifies
several central features of repulsive forces in Propositions 2 and 3. Repulsive
forces admit of degrees to infinity, since one must always be able to think of a
slightly greater or lesser force, and although matter can be compressed to infinity,
it can never be penetrated, since that would require an infinite compressing force,
which is impossible.
In Proposition 4 Kant draws an important consequence from his characterization
of repulsive forces, namely that matter is infinitely divisible (4:503). What is
especially striking about this point is that it represents a significant departure from
his own earlier Physical Monadology, where he had accepted attractive and
repulsive forces, but denied the infinite divisibility of what ultimately constitutes
matter, namely physical points or monads. It is true that part of Kant's rationale for
his change of position on this point stems from the “critical turn” undertaken in
the Critique of Pure Reason (and in its Second Antinomy in particular). For once
one recognizes that both space and spatial properties such as divisibility are not
properties of things in themselves but rather only appearances, one can reject the
proposition that seems to necessitate the acceptance of simple substances, namely
the idea that simple substances must precede the wholes they compose (4:506).
However, Kant's proof also seems to depend, in its details, not merely on the idea
that every space is filled by means of some repulsive force or other, but on the
stronger claim that every space is divisible into smaller spaces that are filled
by different repulsive forces.
Propositions 5–8 are all devoted to attractive force. In Proposition 5 Kant argues
that matter must have an attractive force in order to fill space. Kant's argument is
that if there were only repulsive forces, then matter “would disperse itself to
infinity” (4:508) since neither space nor other matter could limit it. Proposition 6
argues that both attractive and repulsive forces must be considered essential to
matter. That is, attractive forces alone are not sufficient to account for matter
filling a space, since if matter consisted solely of attractive forces, there would be
no force to counteract the attractive force being exercised and the universe would
collapse into a single point. Together, Propositions 5 and 6 make up a ‘balancing
argument’, which Kant had already used in the earlier Physical Monadology. (A
balancing argument is an existence proof for a type of force. Its premises are (1)
an accepted universal fact, viz. that a certain stable configuration obtains; and (2) a
type of force independently known to exist. The argument seeks to prove that the
stability in question is impossible unless a second kind of force exists to balance
the first kind. In Kant's particular version of the balancing argument, the universal
fact is the constancy of mass density in a control volume; and the given force is
“original repulsion,” whose existence he proves in Proposition 4.) Proposition 7
then specifies how attractive forces are to be understood, namely as the immediate
action of matter on other matter through empty space (and therefore at a distance).
Kant thus directly confronts the metaphysical question of how to understand
attraction that Newton attempted to avoid by positing it merely mathematically. As
Kant interprets the situation, Newton “abstracts from all hypotheses purporting to
answer the question as to the cause of the universal attraction of matter … [since]
this question is physical or metaphysical, but not mathematical” (4:515). In
response to the “most common objection to immediate action at a distance,”
namely “that a matter cannot act immediately where it is not” (4:513), Kant argues
that action at a distance is no more problematic than action by contact (whether it
be by collision or pressure), since in both cases a body is simply acting outside
itself. Proposition 8 concludes by arguing that attractive forces act immediately to
infinity and by adding a “preliminary suggestion” (4:518) as to how one might be
able to construct the concept of cohesion (which Kant understands as attraction
that is restricted to contact).
In the General Remark to Dynamics Kant addresses two main issues. First, Kant
considers how it is that the specific varieties of matter (e.g., water as different
from mercury) might be reduced, at least in principle, to the fundamental forces of
attraction and repulsion. The second issue concerns the fundamental distinction
between the “mathematical-mechanical” and the “metaphysical-dynamical mode
of explanation”. The former mode of explanation, which is associated with the
postulation of atoms and the void, employs nothing more than the shapes and
motions of fundamental particles and empty interstices interspersed among them.
It contrasts with the metaphysical-dynamical mode, which employs fundamental
moving forces (e.g., attraction and repulsion) in its explanations. Kant grants that
the mathematical-mechanical mode has an advantage over the metaphysical-
dynamical mode, since its fundamental posits can be represented (indeed,
“verified” (4:525)) mathematically, whereas he repeatedly admits that the
possibility of fundamental forces can never be comprehended, i.e., their possibility
can never be rendered certain. However, Kant thinks that this advantage is
outweighed by two disadvantages. First, by presupposing absolute impenetrability,
the mathematical-mechanical mode of explanation accepts an “empty concept” at
its foundation. Second, by giving up all forces that would be inherent in matter,
such a mode of explanation provides the imagination with more freedom “than is
truly consistent with the caution of philosophy” (4:525).
Given that the bulk of Kant's matter theory is presented in the Dynamics, it is
unsurprising that it has received the greatest amount of attention in the literature.
Of particular note are discussions by Buchdahl (1968, 1969), Brittan (1978),
Kitcher (1983), Butts (1986), Carrier (1990), Friedman (1990), Malzkorn (1998),
Warren (2001, 2010), Pollok (2002), Holden (2004), and Engelhard (2005).
Friedman (2013) is an extensive commentary, under the overarching theme that
Kant in the Dynamics aims to explain how certain features of body – density,
volume, static weight – become mathematizable, as Newton's dynamics illustrates
paradigmatically.

2.4 Mechanics
The third chapter of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations, the Mechanics, concerns
how it is possible to experience matter as having a moving force, that is, how one
matter communicates its motion to another by means of its moving force. Kant
begins, in Proposition 1, by clarifying how the quantity of matter is to be estimated
before stating, in Propositions 2–4, three Laws of Mechanics.
After first defining the quantity of matter and the quantity of motion (or, in
contemporary terms, impulse, i=mv), Kant asserts that the quantity of matter, in
comparison with every other matter, can be estimated only by the quantity of
motion at a given speed (4:537). Kant's proof proceeds by way of elimination. The
quantity of matter, which is the aggregate of the movable in a determinate space,
cannot be estimated by counting the number of parts it has, since, as was
established in the Dynamics, every matter is infinitely divisible. Nor can one
estimate the quantity of matter merely by considering its volume, since different
matters can have different specific densities. As a result, the only universally
applicable way of estimating the quantity of matter is to hold the velocity of matter
constant.
In Proposition 2, Kant states his First Law of Mechanics: the total quantity of
matter remains the same throughout all changes in matter (4:541). His proof seems
to rely (i) on the principle of the First Analogy of Experience that no substance
arises or perishes throughout any change in nature and (ii) on the identification of
what in matter must be substantial. On this latter point, Kant quickly assumes that
the ultimate subject of all accidents inhering in matter must be the movable in
space, and that its quantity is the aggregate of the movable in space. In his remark
to this proposition, Kant explicitly notes that there is a crucial difference between
spatial and non-spatial substances, since the latter, unlike the former, could
gradually fade away by degrees. (Kant cites the possibility of consciousness as a
concrete example.) Kant uses this difference to argue that since the quantity of
matter consists in a plurality of real things external to each other that cannot fade
away (as consciousness might), the only way to decrease its quantity is by
division.
Kant's Second Law of Mechanics, stated in Proposition 3, is that every change in
matter has an external cause. (Immediately after this principle, Kant adds in
parentheses a version of the law of inertia that is much closer to Newton's: “every
body persists in its state of rest or motion, in the same direction, and with the same
speed, if it is not compelled by an external cause to leave this state” (4:543). Since
Kant's Second Law of Mechanics is not identical to Newton's law of inertia, it
would require argument to show that, and by means of what additional
assumptions, the former entails the latter.) The proof of the main principle depends
on the Second Analogy of Experience (which asserts that all changes occur in
accordance with the law of cause and effect and thus entails that every change in
matter has a cause) as well as on the further assumption that matter has no internal
grounds of determinations (such as thinking and desiring), but rather only external
relations in space. In his remark to this proposition, which clarifies this “law of
inertia,” Kant explains that inertia is to be contrasted with life or the ability of a
substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle. Thus, a body's
inertia “does not mean a positive striving to conserve its state” (4:544), but rather
what it does not do, its lifelessness.
Kant also asserts that the very possibility of natural science proper depends on the
law of inertia, since the rejection of it would be hylozoism, “the death of all
natural philosophy” (4:544). In a later remark in the Mechanics, Kant explicitly
objects that “the terminology of inertial force (vis inertiae) must be entirely
banished from natural science, not only because it carries with it a contradiction in
terms, nor even because the law of inertia (lifelessness) might thereby be easily
confused with the law of reaction in every communicated motion, but primarily
because the mistaken idea of those who are not properly acquainted with the
mechanical laws is thereby maintained and even strengthened” (4:550). Kant goes
on to point out that if inertia were to entail an active force of resistance, then it
would be possible that when one moving body hits another, the moving body has
to apply part of its motion solely to overcome the inertia of the one at rest and
might not have any motion left over, as it were, to set the body at rest into motion,
which is contrary to experience (and Proposition 2).
Kant's Third Law of Mechanics, expressed in Proposition 4, asserts the equality of
action and reaction in the communication of motion. Kant formulates a version of
the Third Analogy of Experience (according to which all external action in the
world is interaction) and suggests that the main point at issue in mechanics is
establishing that mutual action is necessarily reaction. Kant's argument for this
law is based on the following line of thought: (i) if all changes of matter are
changes of motion; (ii) if all changes of motion are reciprocal and equal (since one
body cannot move closer to/farther away from another body without the second
body moving closer to/farther away from the first body and by exactly the same
amount); and (iii) if every change of matter has an external cause (a proposition
that was established as the Second Law of Mechanics), then the cause of the
change of motion of the one body entails an equal and opposite cause of a change
of motion of the other body or, in short, action must be equal to reaction.
In Remark 1, Kant then shows how his position differs from that of other authors.
Newton “by no means dared to prove this law a priori, and therefore appealed
rather to experience” (4:449). Kepler likewise derived it from experience, though
he went further, conceiving of it in terms of a special force of inertia. Certain
unnamed “transfusionists” (presumably Locke and perhaps Descartes or Rohault)
attempted to deny the law altogether by suggesting that motion could simply be
transferred from one body to another in the communication of motion, a view Kant
rejects on the grounds that explaining the communication of motion in terms of the
transfer of motion is no explanation at all and also amounts to admitting that
accidents could be literally transferred from one substance to another.
Kant's Laws of Mechanics have been discussed widely in the secondary literature.
One can point to discussions by Palter (1972), Duncan (1984), Friedman (1989,
1992, and 1995), Brittan (1995), Westphal (1995), Carrier (2001), and Watkins
(1997 and 1998b). Much of the modern tradition of scholarship used to regard
Kant's laws of mechanics as derived from, or even identical with, Newton's three
laws in the Principia. Watkins (1997; 1998b) showed that Kant's formulation and
justification of his laws was strongly influenced by a philosophy of nature
stemming from Leibniz not Newton. Stan (2013) further corroborated these
findings. As a result, it is safe to say that Kant's foundations of mechanics were
significantly shaped by post-Leibnizian rationalism too, not just Newton's
mechanics. This fact is now reflected in Friedman (2013), the most recent and
detailed account of Kant's interpretation of the conceptual foundations of
mechanics. Stan (2014) examines the conceptual link between Kant's theory of
matter and his laws of mechanics.

2.5 Phenomenology
The final chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations, the Phenomenology, focuses
on how the motion of matter can be experienced modally, that is, in terms of it
being possibly, actually, or necessarily in motion. Its three Propositions specify (in
accordance, Kant suggests, with the results of the three previous chapters) that (i)
rectilinear motion is a merely possible predicate of matter, (ii) circular motion is
an actual predicate of matter, and (iii) the equal and opposite motion of one matter
with respect to another is a necessary motion of that matter. In the General
Remark to the Phenomenology, Kant discusses the status of absolute space, which
had been presupposed by the possible, actual, and necessary motions of matter at
issue in the three main propositions, and explains that since it is not itself an object
of experience, it must be represented by means of an idea of reason (in Kant's
technical sense of “idea”, namely as a concept for which a corresponding object
could never be given to us in intuition). Though we can never know absolute
space, it nonetheless functions as a regulative principle that guides us in our
scientific practice by forcing us to look for further conditions for the conditioned
objects we meet with in experience. Kant's view that ideas of reason can function
as regulative principles is developed in the Appendix to the Transcendental
Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason.
Friedman's interpretation (1992) of the Phenomenology deserves special mention.
According to him, in light of Kant's rejection of Newton's absolute space and time,
he must give an account of the concept of true motion – as change of true place
over time – presupposed by classical mechanics. To this end, Kant “views the laws
of motion as definitive or constitutive of the spatio-temporal framework of
Newtonian theory,” hence these laws “count as a priori” for him (p. 143). The
reason Kant takes them as constitutive is the following. In Kant's Phenomenology,
the three Newtonian laws define a concept of true motion: the true motions of
bodies just are those that obey the dynamical laws. Moreover, the concept must be
given “objective meaning in experience,” viz. measured empirically. To do so,
Kant views Newton's three laws as holding primarily in a privileged system of
reference, namely the center-of-mass (CM) frame of the system of the world,
which the CM-frame of our Solar System approximates to a very good degree.
Thus, by measuring the motions of bodies relative to this frame, we produce
objective experience of these motions. However, this frame must first be located.
To do so, Kant thinks, we must likewise count the law of universal gravitation as a
priori, not empirical-inductive. If we know a priori that all bodies in the Solar
System necessarily attract each other, from their observable, mutually-induced
accelerations we can infer their masses. In turn, knowing their masses will enable
us to locate the CM-frame of the system. (In a system of bodies, the center of mass
is the point relative to which the bodies' distances are in inverse proportion to their
masses.) With respect to this distinguished frame, the motions of bodies count as
their true motions, Friedman claims. Hence, immediate and essential gravitation
“cannot be straightforwardly obtained from our experience of matter and its
motions – by some sort of inductive argument, say” – because universal
gravitation is “necessarily presupposed in making an objective experience of
matter and its motions possible in the first place” (pp. 157–158). However, the
CM-frame of the Solar System is just approximately an inertial frame. Scientific
inquiry must ultimately look beyond it, to better and better approximations of an
inertial frame. And, Kant's absolute space is just the concept that directs our search
for such approximations. More recently, Friedman updated and expanded his
interpretation in (2013). In view of recent scholarship, Friedman has now made a
convincing case that it is Kant's laws of mechanics – not Newton's three laws, as
claimed in (1992) – that define the privileged frame (Kantian absolute space)
relative to which bodies have true motions, in the Phenomenology.
Apart from Friedman's interpretation, there is relatively little secondary literature
that discusses Kant's Phenomenology. Palter (1971) interprets Kant's doctrine of
absolute space and motion in terms of transformation groups for Galilean
kinematics. Carrier (1992) provides an alternative to Friedman's account of Kant
on absolute space. Stan (forthcoming) is an alternative to Friedman's reading of
Kant's doctrine of circular motion, and its relation to Newton's dynamics.

3. Physics: The Post-Critical Period (Opus

postumum)
Kant's interest in physics continued after the publication of the Metaphysical
Foundations, in fact, until the very end of his productive years. Though Kant
never completed a manuscript that could be put forward as a publication, the
various notes, sketches, and drafts on topics in physics that he was working on
intensively during this time (especially after 1796) were gathered together over a
century after his death and published as his so-called Opus postumum.
Despite the fragmentary nature of the Opus postumum, Kant makes it clear that it
is designed to fill an important gap in his system. Just as the Metaphysical
Foundations had attempted to connect the transcendental principles of
the Critique of Pure Reason and the principles that explain how matter is possible,
the Opus postumum undertakes the task of effecting a transition from the special
metaphysics of nature contained in the Metaphysical Foundations to physics itself.
However, Kant does not clarify adequately what systematic principles would
guide this transition project, nor is it clear whether he takes the project to yield
substantive principles or heuristic guidelines. On the one hand, in a note that stems
from a period shortly after the publication of the Metaphysical Foundations, Kant
suggests that one could “follow the clue given by the categories and bring into
play the moving forces of matter according to their quantity, quality, relation, and
modality” (21:311), a procedure that could be similar to that of the Metaphysical
Foundations. On the other hand, if the Metaphysical Foundations already
presupposes an empirical concept (namely matter), the transition to be carried out
in the Opus postumum cannot be understood as moving from something non-
empirical to something empirical. As Kant struggles with the problems that result
from trying to account for now much more specific features of matter, it is unclear
that (or how) the categories are supposed to be of help in structuring Kant's
argument. Thus, the precise argumentative structure of the Opus postumum (i.e.,
its relationship to Kant's other works and its fundamental presuppositions) remains
problematic. Equally problematic is the exact nature of Kant's transition project.
Given his stated aim to account for specific features of matter—e.g., particular
aggregation states, special forces—one would think that such contingent features
are a problem for empirical science not philosophy, since Kant sees the latter as
pursuing knowledge that is, in various senses, necessary.
Whatever its form, the content of the Opus postumum includes reflections on a
series of important topics in physics. Three clusters are particularly noteworthy.
(1) Kant develops more detailed views about a number of outstanding issues
concerning matter theory that he had discussed (often in a tentative way) in
the Metaphysical Foundations, such as fluidity, rigidity, cohesion, and the
quantity of matter. (2) Kant argues for the existence of an all-encompassing ether.
This might seem to be a natural development, since the Metaphysical
Foundations was non-committal on the point, but what is surprising is that Kant
thinks that the ether can be established a priori (e.g., 21:222), which might seem to
conflict with Kant's project in the Critique of Pure Reason (or with his description
of his position as “formal idealism,” 4:337). (3) Kant also explores the idea that
the subject must posit itself in positing the various forces in matter, a doctrine that
has come to be known as the Selbstsetzungslehre, and attempts to incorporate it
into his views on how man is situated in between the world of experience and
God, whose existence is a central requirement of morality.
The Opus postumum has long been a topic of interest especially insofar as it offers
the hope of clarification and development of central issues in Kant's Critical
philosophy. While much of the original literature focussing on it was in German
(Adickes 1920, Hoppe 1969, Tuschling 1971, and, more recently, Blasche, 1991
and Emundts, 2004), it has received increased attention of late in English with
discussions by Friedman (1992, chapter 5), Förster (2000), Edwards (2000), Guyer
(2001), and Hall (2006, 2009).