Abstract
Chapter 3 studies the collapse of the pre-critical system. In the 1760s Kant increasingly questioned the principles of his 1755/1756 metaphysics, beginning with the distinction between logical and real grounds introduced in the Negative Magnitudes and the Only Possible Argument of 1763, culminating in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer of 1766 and the Directions of Space of 1768. According to the Dreams, the pre-critical system failed with regard to the interaction between body and soul, or, in terms of a system of metaphysics in Wolff’s style, the relation between rational cosmology and rational psychology. The argument from incongruent counterparts of 1768 made him think that things were even worse, resulting in the refution of Leibniz’s relational theory of space which Kant had adopted from his very first writings. Yet in view of Leibniz’s invariance arguments set out in the correspondence with Clarke, Kant could not adopt Newton’s theory either. Now he realized that the pre-critical project of giving metaphysical foundations to physics by means of the analytic method had definitely gone astray. Even the cosmology part of the system remained without viable foundations, and only the epistemic shift of metaphysics first articulated in the Dreams offered a solution.
Metaphysics, with which […] I have fallen in love […], offers two kinds of advantages. The first is: it can solve the problems thrown up by the enquiring mind, when it uses reason to spy after the more hidden properties of things. But hope is here all too often disappointed by the outcome. And, on this occasion, too, satisfaction has escaped our eager grasp. (2:367)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Here, ‘analytically’ is meant in the sense of Kant’s later, critical account of analytic judgments. The bridge from Kant’s pre-critical analytic-synthetic method, as defended in the Prize Essay, to his later account of analytic and synthetic judgments, is conceptual analysis (see Appendix A.2.2.3).
- 2.
“Ob ein Gegenstand ‘real’ ist, hängt davon ab, ob sein Begriff als Bestandteil des Systems aller möglichen Begriffe und Begriffsverbindungen gilt. Damit übernimmt Kant eine grundlegende rationalistische Voraussetzung.” My translation.
- 3.
Kant employs the notion of the focus imaginarious to explain why the spirit seer locates the objects of his imaginations outside the mind (2:346). Grier (2001, 37) emphasizes that this notion “will become central to Kant’s account of the illusory metaphysical ideas of reason in the Critique” and she observes a “striking semblance to the account of the optical illusion related to mirror vision in Newton’s Opticks”, that is, another analogy between metaphysics and Newton’s methods. This analogy, however, was now in the service of criticizing metaphysics.
- 4.
The argument reappears in the antinomy of pure reason, in the proof of the antithesis of the first antinomy, which Kant did not consider to be fallacious from a critical point of view (CPR, A 427–431/B 455–459; see Sect. 5.4.1.2).
- 5.
The distinction between an ens rationis or “empty concept without object”, and an ens imaginarium or “empty intuition without concept” (CPR, 348) does here not yet apply, given that it presupposes the theory of space and time as forms of pure intuition, which Kant first presented in 1770.
- 6.
“Ob es ein spatium absolutum oder tempus absolutum gebe, würde soviel sagen wollen, ob man zwischen zwey Dingen im Raume alles […] dazwischen liegende vernichten könne und doch die bestimte leere Lücke bleiben würde, und ob, wenn […] ein gantzes Jahr Bewegungen und veränderungen überhaupt aufhöreten, nicht das folgende Anheben könne, so dass ein leeres zwischen Jahr verlaufen wäre.” My translation (note not contained in the Cambridge edition). See also Sect. 3.4.3.
- 7.
Based on a variant of this argument, Kant later proved the antithesis of the first antinomy (see Sect. 5.4.1): “[…] the relation of the world to empty space would be a relation of the world to no object. Such a relation, however, and hence also the boundedness of the world by empty space, is nothing [….]” (CPR, B 457; see Sect. 5.4.1). Contrary considerations anticipating the proof of the thesis of the first antinomy can also be found in the notes on metaphysics prior to 1769; cf. N. 3840 and N. 3912. See Sect. 4.2.1. However, there is still no mention of a cosmological antinomy. These notes on metaphysics belong at most in a very vague sense to the so-called problem of the antinomy.
- 8.
See n. 3 of Chap. 2.
- 9.
This is the adequate translation of “Vom ersten Grund des Unterschieds der Gegenden im Raum” given in the Cambridge edition of Kant’s works (Walford 1992). For the confusion in the Anglo-American literature generated by inadequate or even absurd translations, see Byrd (2008) and Rusnock and George (1995); and Walford and Meerbote (1992, 456–457, n. 1).
- 10.
In particular Buroker (1981, 1991). The otherwise excellent analyses of Mühlhölzer (1992), George and Rusnock (1994), and Rusnock and George (1995) clarify some misunderstandings found in van Cleve and Frederick 1991, but not this one. The claim “that Kant had no good argument” (George and Rusnock 1994, 466) is related only to mathematics, and misses the cosmological aspects of the argument.
- 11.
De Risi (2007, 284–286) gives a very detailed account of Leibniz’s (two) definition(s) of incongruence and their relation to Kant’s 1768 argument.
- 12.
“Ich habe einen solchen Begriff von Raum, daß er ein unbestimmter Umfang sey, darin vieles nebeneinander seyn kann. Soll ich die Richtigkeit dieses Begriffs noch wider die Gegner darthun: so gebe ich zu bedenken, daß wir ja in einem Theil des Raums leben und uns bewegen; daß wir aus der Erfahrung wissen, dieser Raum und Umfang erstrecke sich in die Länge, Breite, Tiefe, Höhe.” My translation.
- 13.
“[…] so wird man bald begreifen, dass die gewöhnlichen Erklärungen […] des unermeslichen Umfangs […] nur betrügerische Begriffe, und an sich widersprechend seien. […] Die erste erstreckt sich in die Länge, die andere in die Breite oder Ausbreitung. Wir verstehen hieraus noch nichts. Ob andere den Verfasser besser verstehen werden, daran zweifeln wir mit gutem Grund. Aber weis man denn nicht, dass in dem Umfang, oder in dem Raum, auch eine Länge sey? Und wie unterscheidet man die Länge von der Breite oder Ausbreitung?” My translation.
- 14.
Euler considers the three dimensions of space only in the Letters to a German Princess. The French version of the first and second part appeared in 1768, the German translation in 1769. The Letters only influenced Kant after 1768, and he quotes them in his Dissertation of 1770 (2:414, 2:419).
- 15.
“D’où il est evident, que l’identité de direction, qui est un circonstance fort essentielle dans les principes généraux du mouvement, ne sauroit absolument être expliquée par la rélation, ou l’ordre des corps coëxistants. Donc il faut qu’il y ait envore quelque autre chose de réell, outre les corps, à laquelle se rapporte l’idée d’une même direction; & il n’y a aucun doute, que ce ne soit l’espace, dont nous venon d’etablir la réalité.”
- 16.
“[…] qu’il est impossible qu’il y ait une raison, pourquoy Dieu, gardant les mêmes situations des corps entre eux, ait placés le corps dans l’espace ainsi et non pas autrement, et pourquoy tout n’a pas été mis àss rebours (par exemple) par un échange d l’orient et de l’occident.”
- 17.
Weyl (1952, 21) understands him in this way, too.
- 18.
“So wie nun Newton die Möglichkeit für abwegig hielt, dass für ein rotierendes System in einem ansonsten leeren Kosmos keine Trägheitskräfte mehr auftreten, hält Kant es für abwegig, dass ein einziges händiges Objekt im Kosmos keine spezifische Händigkeit besitzt.” My translation.
- 19.
The Cambridge translation “figment of the imagination” is not correct here. The German expression “bloßes Gedankending” indicates that Kant here does not yet anticipate his 1770 theory of intuition. The translation “figment of the imagination” suggests that Kant speaks of an ens imaginarium, a mere fiction of perception. But the expression “bloßes Gedankending” is much closer to Kant’s critical account of an ens rationis, i.e., a figment of thought. The distinction between an ens rationis or “empty concept without object” and an ens imaginarium or “empty intuition without concept” (CPR, B 348) presupposes Kant’s theory of space and time as forms of pure intuition, which is first mentioned in Kant’s 1769 notes on metaphysics. Even if Kant here already anticipates his later transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience, the idea of space for him is still a concept, not an intuition. His use of the terms “idea of reason” and “intuitive” (“anschauend”) is not yet specific; see below and next note. His distinction between concepts and intuitions would finally become his way out of the 1768 puzzle (see Sect. 3.4.3).
- 20.
See Friedman (1992, 29) as well as the objections against identifying the 1768 result with Newton’s concept of absolute space in von Wolff-Metternich (1995, 88–90) and Kauark-Leite (2017). Kaulbach (1960, 98) suggests that Kant in 1768 argues that our idea of space is bound to our body. De Risi (2007, 291) points out that Kant’s source for doing so, as for his examples of incongruent counterparts, is Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, mentioned at the beginning of Directions in Space (3:277). Kaulbach (1960) and Kauark-Leite (2017) identify the 1768 result with the 1770 conception of space as a form of intuition. But in 1768, Kant did not yet have his later account of space as a repraesentatio singularis. See the wavering remarks on space in the notes on metaphysics of 1768–1769 (see Sect. 3.4.3). De Risi (2007) stresses the difference between Kant’s 1768 version of the argument and his later accounts based on the critical theory of space and time. He, however, interprets Kant’s 1768 argument as an argument in favour of Newton’s absolute space and concludes that it “fails to achieve its goal” (De Risi 2007, 292), whereas in the versions of 1770 and later, “Kant’s argument on the incongruents would prove nothing at all—as it would assume from the start the ideality it would want to deduce” (De Risi 2007, 286). I hope to show here that the state of affairs is much more complicated than any of these authors realized.
References
Allison, Henry E. 2012. Essays on Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beiser, Frederick C. 1992. Kant’s intellectual development. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. P. Guyer, 26–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buroker, Jill V. 1981. Space and Incongruence. The origin of Kant’s idealism. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Buroker, Jill V. 1991. The Role of Incongruent Counterparts in Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy. In van Cleve et al. 1991, 315–319.
Byrd, Jeremy. 2008. A remark on Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16: 789–800.
De Risi, Vincenzo. 2007. Geometry and Monadology. Leibniz’s Anaslysis Situs and Philosophy of Space. Birkhäuser: Basel.
Earman, J. 1989. World Enough and Spacetime. Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Euler, Leonhard. 1748. Reflexions sur l’espace et le temps. In: Memoires de l’academie des sciences de Berlin 4, 1750, 324–333. Engl. transl. by M. Saclolo and P. Wake: Reflections on Space and Time. http://eulerarchive.maa.org/docs/translations/E149tr.pdf.
Euler, Leonhard. 1763. Vernünftige Gedanken von dem Raume, dem Orth, der Dauer und der Zeit. Quedlinburg: Gottfried Heinrich Schwans Wittwe.
Falkenburg, Brigitte. 2006. Intuition and cosmology: The puzzle of incongruent counterparts. In: Intuition and the Axiomatic Method, ed. E. Carson and R. Huber, 157–180. Dordrecht: Springer.
Friedman, Michael. 1992. Kant and the Exact Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
George, Rolf, and Paul Rusnock. 1994. Snails rolled up contrary to all sense. Philosophy and Phemenological Research 54: 459–466.
Grier, M. 2001. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hanna, Robert. 2008. Kantian non-conceptualism. Philosophical Studies 137: 41–64.
Hatfield, Gary. 1997. Introduction to the translation of Kant’s “Prolegomena”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, revised ed. 2004.
Hoefer, Carl. 2000. Kant’s hands and Earman’s pions: Chirality arguments for substantival space. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14: 237–256.
Kanzian, Christian. 1993. Kant und Crusius 1763. Kant-Studien 83: 399–407.
Kauark-Leite, Patricia. 1993. On the epistemic status of absolute space: Kant’s directions in space read from the standpoint of his critical period. Kant-Studien 108: 175–194.
Kaulbach, Friedrich. 1960. Die Metaphysik des Raumes bei Leibniz und Kant. Köln: Univ.-Verlag.
Kaulbach, F. 1982. Immanuel Kant. Zweite, durchgesehene Auflage. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Landy, David. 2013. What incongruent counterparts show. European Journal of Philosophy 21: 527–527.
Laywine, A. 1993. Kant’s early metaphysics and the origins of the critical philosophy. Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1715. Initiarerum mathematicarum metaphysica. In: Mathematische Schriften, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, Berlin, 1849–1860, repr.: Hildesheim: Olms 1971, vol. 7, 17–29. Engl. (in extracts): The metaphysical foundations of mathematics. In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, L.E. Loemker. Philosophical Papers and Letters, 666–674. Dordrecht: Reidel 1969.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, and Samuel Clarke. 1715/1716. Correspondence. In: Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, Berlin, 1875–1890, repr.: Hildesheim: Olms 1965, vol. 7, 345–440. Quoted after the Engl. transl. and repr.: Edited, with Introduction, by Roger Ariew. Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. 2000.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. 2001. In Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresse. Band 1: Hauptvorträge, ed. V. Gerhardt, R.P. Horstmann, R. Schumacher. Berlin: de Gruyter, 66–85.
Lyre, Holger. 2005. Metaphysik im “Handumdrehen”: Kant und Earman, Parität und moderne Raumauffassung. Philosophia Naturalis 42: 49–76. Quoted after the digital version: http://www.lyre.de/kanthand.pdf. Access: 23 Mar 2020.
Mühlhölzer, Felix. 1992. Das Phänomen der inkongruenten Gegenstände aus Kantischer und aus heutiger Sicht. Kant-Studien 83: 436–453.
Nerlich, Graham. 2009. Incongruent counterparts and the reality of space. Philosophy Compass 4/3: 598–613.
Newton, Isaac. 1726. Principia mathematica philosophiae naturae, 3rd edn. Quoted after: The Principia: A New Translation by I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman, 1999. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Reich, Klaus. 1958. Einleitung zu: Kant, Immanuel: Über die Form und die Prinzipien der Sinnen- und Geisteswelt. Lat.-dt. Hamburg: Meiner, VII–XVI.
Rusnock, Paul, and Rolf George. 1995. A last shot at Kant and incongruent counterparts. Kant-Studien 86: 257–277.
Schönfeld, M. 2000. The Young Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Severo, Rogério Passos. 2005. Three remarks on the interpretation of Kant on incongruent counterparts. Kantian Review 9: 30–57.
Severo, Rogério Passos. 2007. A puzzle about incongruent counterparts and the Critique of Pure Reason. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88: 507–521.
van Cleve, James, and Robert E. Frederick, ed. 1991. The Philosophy of Right and Left. Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
von Wolff-Metternich, Brigitta-Sophie. 1995. Die Abkehr vom Mathematischen Methodenideal. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Walford, David. 1992. Introduction to: Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770. Translated and edited by D. Waldford in collab. with R. Meerbote. New York: Cambridge University Press, xxxv–lxxxi.
Walford, David. 1999. The aims and method of Kant’s 1768 Gegenden im Raum essay in the light of Euler’s 1748 Réflexions sur L’Éspace. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 7: 305–332.
Walford, David, and Ralf Meerbote. 1992. Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770. Translated and edited by DẆaldford in collab. with R. Meerbote. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Waschkies, Hans-Joachim. 1987. Physik und Physikotheologie des jungen Kant. Die Vorgeschichte seiner Allgemeinen Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. Amsterdam: B. Grüner Publishing Company.
Weyl, Hermann. 1952. Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Falkenburg, B. (2020). The Collapse of the Pre-critical Cosmology. In: Kant’s Cosmology . European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52290-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52290-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52289-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52290-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)