Integrating Chemistry, Electricity and Magnetism into Dynamical Natural Philosophy: J. F. Fries’s Extension of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations

摘要

Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science has an almost exclusive focus on Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Other research fields like electrostatics, magnetism, chemistry or biology are hardly dealt with. A successor of Kant, the philosopher, natural scientist and mathematician Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), accommodates Kant’s major thoughts on a metaphysical foundation but aims at assisting natural science of his time by employing a heuristic interpretation of Kant’s fundamental forces. In my paper, I will trace Fries’s application of his heurist maxims on the development of other evolving fields of research. This will provide concrete examples on how Fries thought philosophy to support science. For that reason, I will highlight the different status that Kant and Fries concede non-mechanic research areas. To restrict the analysis, I will focus on the actual incorporation of chemical dissolution, Coulomb’s law and magnetism into Kantian Dynamics as a concrete example of Fries’s methodology.