Synopses & Reviews
A new understanding of Kants theory of a priori knowledge and his natural philosophy emerges from Jeffrey Edwardss mature and penetrating study. In the Third Analogy of Experience, Kant argues for the existence of a dynamical plenum in space. This argument against empty space demonstrates that the dynamical plenum furnishes an a priori necessary condition for our experience and knowledge of an objective world.
Such an a priori existence proof, however, transgresses the limits Kant otherwise places on transcendental arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason because it establishes a material transcendental condition of possible experience. This finding motivates Edwards to examine the broader context of Kants views about matter, substance, causal influence, and physical aether in connection with the developmental history of his theory of transcendental idealism. Against the backdrop of early modern metaphysics and contemporaneous physical theory, Edwards explicates the origins of the Third Analogy in Kants early work on the metaphysics of nature.
The argument against empty space presented in the Third Analogy reveals a central aspect of Kants transcendental theory of experience that Edwards explains lucidly. By clarifying the epistemological standpoint at issue in the Third Analogy, he shows that the fundamental revisions to which Kant subjects his theory of knowledge in the Opus postumum not only originate in his precritical metaphysics of nature but are developments of an argument central to the Critique of Pure Reason itself. Edwardss work is important to scholars working in the history of philosophy and the history and philosophy of science, as well as to Kant specialists.
Synopsis
"An outstanding, permanent contribution to Kant scholarship. No previous work places Kants concern with the dynamic theory of matter into such clear, detailed, and illuminating relation to the contemporaneous scientific and metaphysical background of these issues, or traces Kants fundamental concern with a dynamic plenum through the entire career of his philosophical thought. Edwards provides a major reassessment, not only of Kants theory of matter, but of the basic aims and character of Kants idealism and his transcendental theory of knowledge." Kenneth R. Westphal, University of New Hampshire
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-263) and index.
About the Author
Jeffrey Edwards is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Table of Contents
The transcendental principle of community and its proof -- Problems in the third analogy -- Influence, matter, and force in the transcendental analytic and the metaphysical foundations of mechanics -- Substance and substantial force in Leibniza and Wolff -- Dynamical community, physical influence, and universal harmony in the development of Kant's metaphysics -- Corpuscular and dynamical theories of matter in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy -- The theory of physical aether in Kant's philosophy of nature -- The third analogy and the Opus postumum --Kant's transcendental theory: heterodox considerations on its history.