Kant's Newtonianism (Immanuel Kant, Sir Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).

摘要

Kant's understanding of two significant philosophical issues, the status of space and the nature of scientific explanation, can be illuminated by considering his reaction to the emergence of Newtonian gravitational physics. Although Kant accepts—with important provisos—the view that space bears an absolute status, he rejects Newton's philosophical interpretation of that status. Characterizing this rejection poses a problem. It is commonly thought that Kant's conception of space can be understood as a competitor to Newtonian absolutism and Leibnizian relationalism per se, but Kant contends that these views commit a common mistake. Leibniz and Newton each picture space as real in a philosophically significant sense; Kant seeks to reject the reality of space in the Critique of Pure Reason. I argue that, from Kant's perspective, contending that space is absolute is compatible with thinking that it lacks reality. This illuminates, in turn, Kant's conception of things-in-themselves.; In his work on scientific explanation, Wesley Salmon distinguishes an “ontic” conception, according to which explanations make reference to the cause of events or of phenomena; and an “epistemic” conception, according to which explanations make reference to covering laws. To begin with, I argue that Newtonian physics, which famously fails to discover gravity's cause, can be interpreted as providing nomological explanations of (e.g.) gravitational phenomena like the planetary orbits. Unlike Leibniz, who explicitly rejects the law of universal gravitation's explanatory status, Kant recognizes the significance of this notion for understanding the science of Newton's Principia Mathematica. In tandem, several puzzling aspects of the conception of spatial objects presented in the Critique of Pure Reason can be illuminated by considering Kant's adoption of a related Newtonian view: the content of the ascription of a force to a spatial object, or to a system of such objects, is exhausted by the physical law governing the operation of that force. In this respect, in rejecting a Leibnizian conception of force, Kant adopts an explicitly Newtonian conception; Kant's conception of spatial objects is closely linked with that adoption. Thus, important aspects of Kant's metaphysics can be illuminated by considering their relation to philosophical issues raised by Newtonian physics.