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Public Private login e. Kant and Lambert on Geometrical Postulates in. Two Studies in the Reception of Kants Philosophy. Philosophy Geometry and Logic in Leibniz Wolff. Mathematical Method in Kant Schelling and Hegel.
The Paracletes of Quantum Gravity. Theory Coordination and Empirical Meaning.
The Role of the Foundations of Mathematics in. Intimate Relationship or Marriage of Convenience? Do the methods employed by historians of science -- "focused, more or less, on the specific events, contexts, and influences surrounding the development and acceptance or rejection of a concept or theory" -- provide material to draw useful philosophical lessons, without further argument ? On the other hand, does reading an episode in the history of science as an illumination of a philosophical problem, such as induction or scientific realism, illegitimately impose the concerns of the present on the practices and arguments of the past?
Giere suggests that historians and philosophers of science take the burden of proof on themselves, and this volume contains an impressive set of arguments on this score. A final position, implicitly held in common by the contributors to this volume, is a commitment to anti-Whiggishness. As the editors urge, we ought not take history to be a list of failings that lead ineluctably to the glorious present.
Rather, history is a teacher, and her teachings allow us to take a more nuanced position on how we should best move forward One note before moving on: I will not assess Friedman's concluding essay separately, but rather will discuss it in relationship with the essays in the volume. Parts I and II: Friedman focuses on Kant's relationship to Newtonian physics and, by extension, on Kant's engagement with the differences between Cartesian, Leibnizian, and Newtonian physics.
Friedman pays significant attention to the influence of the theological tradition in the work of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz; here, he takes his cue from Stephen Menn's excellent study Menn Owing to the clear connections between the projects of the two Parts, I will discuss them together.
History of science and methodology of history and philosophy of science.
The essays share a focus on historical techniques and methodologies for philosophy and science. In consequence, they address, if implicitly, Giere's challenge for history and philosophy of science.
But the essays here go beyond that, to defend controversial and remarkable positions on alchemy, on the place of Newton in the early modern tradition, and on the axiomatic method in history. In "Newton as Historically-Minded Philosopher," Domski focuses on the distinction between Cartesian and Newtonian methods and arguments in the foundations of geometry.
According to Domski, as Friedman points out, "the main target of Newton's rejection of 'relationalism' in favor of an 'absolutist' metaphysics of space is Descartes" In the case of geometry, instead of beginning from Cartesian first principles and clear and distinct ideas, Newton "takes the certainty" of ancient mathematics as his "given" Domski urges, as well, that we take Newton's methods seriously as an attempt to replace Cartesian methods, as an historical form of argument, not as a mere "appeal to authority.
Meli's "The Axiomatic Tradition in Seventeenth-Century Mechanics" explores the "Archimedean tradition" of seeking "principles to which the mind naturally consents, such as symmetry, or principles based on generalized experiences describing the normal course of nature," as opposed to the method of "contrived experiments" often associated with Mersenne, Boyle, and Mariotte Meli sees in Stevin, Galileo, Torricelli, and Huygens a "common concern for establishing knowledge about nature in an axiomatic fashion" In "The Reduction to the Pristine State in Robert Boyle's Corpuscular Philosophy," Newman argues that "it is precisely the absence of an approach like Friedman's," which provides "an awareness of the interaction between scholastic natural philosophy and empirical practice," that has led scholarship to become "simply adrift in a sea of unrelated facts that lend themselves all too easily to the facile misinterpretations populating past and current surveys of the Scientific Revolution" It is this lack of a coherent narrative of the relationship between natural philosophy and empirical practice "that has led both historians and philosophers to overlook one of the major reasons for the move to corpuscular matter theory in the early modern period" Newman concludes that "It was the field of chymistry [a corpuscularian strain of alchemy] that supplied Boyle's primary ammunition against early modern scholastic matter theory as taught in the universities" Descartes, Leibniz, Lambert, Newton, Kant.
Collected, these essays give an excellent perspective on the interaction between Kant and the early modern tradition. In that volume, Anja Jauernig argues against an "influential and popular story about Kant's philosophical development and about his relationship to Leibniz," which has it that Kant, after an "eye-opening" reading of Newton's Principia , at first tried to reconcile the Newtonian picture with the Leibniz-Wolff metaphysics, but was gradually led, over time, to "the total rejection of the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason " Jauernig , To Jauernig, this reading "tends to overemphasize Newton's influence in Kant's gradual emancipation from Leibniz-Wolff" Ibid.
She cites Friedman's Kant and the Exact Sciences as one source of this story. She goes on to argue that it is much more likely that, in many cases, Kant was motivated by reasons internal to the Leibniz-Wolff philosophy. The essays here take their cue from Friedman's work, and the perspective they offer goes well beyond any simple story of the transition from Kant's early work to the reform of metaphysics in the later work.
In his "Validity in the Cultural Sciences? Two Studies in the Reception of Kants Philosophy. On this count, see also Friedman's Afterword, ff. Laywine's "Kant and Lambert on Geometrical Postulates in the Reform of Metaphysics" takes as its goal to "make one concrete suggestion: The key to understanding this, Laywine suggests, is in reading the use of "the constructive postulates of geometry" as suggesting an answer to the question Kant raised in his letter to Marcus Herz of February
In the context of these narratives, it appears that the dichotomy set up by Jauernig -- In developing the Critical system, was Kant responding to Newton or to internal tensions within Leibnizian metaphysics? What about other figures whom Kant had read and with whom he was in correspondence? While several of the contributions to this volume begin from the thesis of external, Newtonian influence, they by no means suggest that that influence was the only one.
The essays in this section argue for several related claims. First, that Kant's defense of dynamism is traceable to his defense of Newton against Cartesian mechanism Warren and Janiak. In "Newton's Forces in Kant's Critique ," Janiak proposes a way to read the Critique that resolves the tension between Kant's arguments regarding attractive forces in the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection in the first Critique , and Kant's abstract, transcendental form of argument there.
Since attractive forces are empirical, it would appear they cannot be given a pure treatment.
Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science [Mary Domski, Michael Dickson] on bahana-line.com *FREE* . Addressing a wide range of topics, from Newton to Post-Kuhnian philosophy of science, these essays critically examine themes that have been central to the.
Janiak goes on to give an account of how Kant's account of forces can be read as part of his overall defense of the Newtonian dynamic picture over the Leibnizian monadic one, and that this context goes some way to resolve the apparent tension. Second, in "Kant on Attractive and Repulsive Force: The Balancing Argument," Warren too argues that reading Kant's arguments in the context of the defense of dynamism aids in understanding.
However, Warren argues that, while Kant thought that we could make substantive claims a priori about the necessary conditions for avoiding the collapse or dispersion of matter, problems arise with his arguments for these "necessary conditions" when they are taken out of the context of the Cartesian mechanism and Newtonian dynamism with which Kant was engaged.
The essays by Laywine and Sutherland support the view that Kant intended a thoroughgoing reform of metaphysics. They present a nuanced picture of this intended reform, based partly on Kant's evolving views on the role of mathematics, especially geometry, with respect to metaphysics. Sutherland gives a very clear account of Kant's early rejection, in the Inquiry , of Leibniz's universal characteristic, but also of Kant's later willingness to "entertain the possibility" of an ars combinatoria based on the categories Laywine's "Kant and Lambert on Geometrical Postulates in the Reform of Metaphysics" takes as its goal to "make one concrete suggestion: As Friedman observes in tracing this line of reasoning, Laywine's "very illuminating" contribution makes several intriguing further suggestions Laywine cites evidence that Kant, unlike Lambert and Wolff, did not take mathematics as a model for metaphysics.
Kant thought, nonetheless, that "thinking about the function and significance of postulates" can help philosophers to better understand problems in metaphysics Laywine's essay traces the role Kant's thought about postulates may have had as a background to the Transcendental Deduction. The key to understanding this, Laywine suggests, is in reading the use of "the constructive postulates of geometry" as suggesting an answer to the question Kant raised in his letter to Marcus Herz of February The constructive procedures of geometry establish a relationship between geometrical concept and geometrical object.
Why not make the case, then, that the understanding can carry out similar constructive procedures that explain how the intellect can represent objects a priori? Laywine concludes by making the interpretive suggestion that the project of the transcendental deduction could be to show that the "logical functions of the understanding … are indeed constructive procedures" In his concluding essay, Friedman links Laywine's project to his reading of the notion of construction in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science ff.
These discussions, along with Frederick C. Beiser's essay for this volume, make a persuasive case that an understanding of Kant's conception of construction, whether mathematical or philosophical, is necessary for a complete understanding of Kant's projects in the Critique and in the Metaphysical Foundations.