Is Modern Physics Possible within Kant’s Philosophy?

Abstract

A question which the scientist as well as the philosopher not infrequently asks concerns the function of philosophic thought about the sciences. One direction in which answers to a question of this kind sometimes tend is indicated by Weyl’s remarks upon Kant’s speculation on mirror images. Kant noted that the right and left hands are not interchangeable, yet they reflect each other. He asked how this curious difference could be more exactly understood. In an early writing, being unaware of the mathematics of the problem, he drew the conclusion that the two hands differ with relation to absolute space; later he rejected the doctrine of absolute space and reflected that the difference between the two hands is non-conceptual and hence must depend only upon intuition. He returned to the question in his Prolegomena and used the same curious phenomenon as a proof that space is nothing in itself but is a consequence of our way of perceiving. Thus, he took the problem out of mathematics and put it into his metaphysics of experience. Weyl, however, notes that the problem has a mathematical solution; although, out of reach of the mathematics available in Kant’s time. And he adds an unfavorable comment upon the metaphysician’s handling of a mathematical problem.¹