Metaphysics of Science, Session 2 - Barabarians at the Gate!

FOR NEXT TIME! We had a great discussion and got some overall introduction into Kantian philosophy. We will continue getting our feet wet and sink deeper into the metaphysical well. READ Chapter 1 for next meeting:

Pages 194 to 208, Cambridge edition or
Sections 4:481 - 4:495, all editions

I will be using the Cambridge volume entitled Theoretical Philosophy after 1981 which includes this work plus other writings about science.

Amazon version: https://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Philosophy-after-Cambridge-Immanuel/dp/0521147646/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3IA8Y8QUOOWTN&keywords=kant+theoretical+philosophy&qid=1695008033&sprefix=Kant+theo%2Caps%2C153&sr=8-4

Public domain: https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/books/philosophy-and-psychology/book/modern-western-philosophy-130/prolegomena-and-metaphysical-foundations-of-natural-science-1643

COMING UP
Metaphysics of Natural Science, Session 2, 11/26/23 - 1st Chapter
Metaphysics of Natural Science, Session 3, 12/10/23 - begin 2nd Chapter
Metaphysics of Natural Science, Session 3, 12/31/23 finish 2nd Chapter

GROUNDWORK SECTION III

How is the Categorical Imperative Possible?
To my will affected by sensible desires there is added the idea of the same will but belonging to the world of the understanding which is like the concepts of the understanding being added to intuitions of the world of sense and thereby making possible synthetic propositions a priori on which all cognition of a nature rests. The moral ''will" is thought by him [by any human being] as "ought" only insofar as he regards himself at the same time as a member of the world of sense.

METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SCIENCE
"Since in any doctrine of nature there is only as much proper science as there is aprioriknowledge therein, a doctrine of nature will contain only as much proper science as there is mathematics capable of application there." --from the Preface, Metaphysics of Natural Science

Separation into proper and purely inductive natural science. Any systematic doctrine is supposed to be a science, and since principles may be an empirical or of rational connection of cognitions into a whole, then natural science would have be divided into historical or rational natural. Therefore, the doctrine of nature can be divided into historical doctrine of nature which contains nothing but systematically ordered facts about natural things, and natural science. Proper natural science treats its object wholly according to a priori principles, whereas so-called science would be purely inductive. Are we beginning a continental divide here?

Was Kant a Continental Philosopher?
The term "continental philosophy" came in vogue in the 1970s and 80s and referred backward to a time when outright hostility developed between analytic thinkers like Carnap and phenomenologists like Heidegger. Rather than these superficial, somewhat artificial, divisions, a more insightful approach is to show how the philosophies developed historically and where they overlap and part. For Critchley, Kant is the last overlap and the first parting, but I could argue that the history goes back further, to Francis Bacon, the early champion of scientific empiricism, and to Hobbes who took up that gauntlet. It represented a split from the main line of rationalism along which Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz continued to travel, while Locke, Berkeley, and Hume followed Hobbes up the new line. The real divide is not one of materialism (analytical philosophy) versus idealism (Continental philosophy) but of empiricism versus rationalism. The rationalists, detecting the potential for atheism, sought to maintain a ground for ethics, which they believed relied either on a nonmaterial reality (Leibniz) or on a nonempirical epistemology (Kant) for they believed empirical science could never be used to demonstrate moral action. Unfortunately, the last rationalist, Kant, could not do this successfully. And through this ruptured gap poured the Continental hordes: the idealists, the Marxists, the nihilists, the existentialists, the Freudian's, the phenomenologist , and the the post-modernists--the Franks, Normans, Huns, and Visigoths of philosophy.

Recommend Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

More from the Preface of the Metaphysics of Natural Science

Proper vs improper science. What can be called proper science is only that whose certainty is apodictic while cognition that can contain mere empirical certainty (induction) is only knowledgea improperly so-called. Any whole of cognition that is systematic can, for this reason, already be called science, and, if the connection of cognition in this system is an interconnection of grounds and consequences, even rational science, but chemistry, on the other hand, should be called a systematic art rather than a science.