A Radical Reading of the World
Kant’s transcendental idealism as a reconciliation of physics and general metaphysics
The exact character of Kant’s transcendental idealism, his philosophical system centered on a division between “appearances” and “things as they are in themselves,” as well as how he arrived at this system, is a subject of great contention.
I argue (see below) that Kant’s arrival at transcendental idealism was precipitated by the realization that his early view of the metaphysics of physics led to problems for the metaphysics of ethics.
I am also developing two related papers on chapters of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the “Antinomy” and “Amphiboly” chapters, both of which are central to the question of the nature of transcendental idealism.
Additionally, I have begun work on a close study of Kant’s first attempt at providing a metaphysical foundation for physics, his Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, mostly written when Kant was only 22.
In “‘The Better We Get to Know Nature’: The Physical Roots of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism” I explore Kant’s career-long project of grounding Newtonian physics on a Leibnizian metaphysics of substance, showing how his growing knowledge of physics helped to push him between three iterations of this project, the third being his mature critical philosophy. I show why certain kinds of spatial structure, and not others, were enough to convince Kant to give up the “dogmatism” that assumed that physical processes could give insight into the nature of intelligible reality. I also suggest that Kant’s eventual belief in the metaphysical unnaturalness of the phenomena as described by physics—which I refer to as “phenomenal peculiarity”—helps not only to contextualize, but also to delimit the scope of, his famous doctrine of noumenal ignorance.