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EMMANUEL KANT
« PRINCIPES METAPHYSIQUES DE LA SCIENCE DE LA NATURE »
Introduction, traduction et notes par A. Pelletier, Paris: Vrin, 2017. ISBN 978-2-7116-2544-4

Abstract
In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant develops what the Critique of Pure Reason calls the “rational physiology”, which is the metaphysics of corporeal nature. The aim of this text is to specify the object in general as matter and as the “movable in space” and, for this purpose, to take into account the various properties that make possible the material donation of the object, such as rest, speed, direction, impenetrability, attraction, repulsion, etc., the so-called predicables of the pure understanding (§ 10 of the CPR). Those predicables constitute the properties that are indeed necessary to ground the natural science (mathematical physics) and are here examined from a transcendental point of view thanks to the system of the categories and principles of the Analytics of Principles. The structure of the book is thus the following: Phoronomy deals with quantity (Axioms of Intuition), the Dynamics with quality (Anticipations of Perception), the Mechanics with relations (Analogies of Experience) and the Phenomenology with modalities (Postulates of Empirical Thought). What Kant seeks to account for, then, is the applicability of the mathematics that make the intuitive and apodictic certainty possible thanks to the construction of the object in an a priori intuition. The methodological problem concerns the possibility of this a priori construction, which must be here realized in the realm of existence. How to connect the empirical properties of the object to the necessary and universal principles provided by the categories in order to account for the possibility of the mathematical construction of the object? The metaphysics of the corporeal nature is different from the transcendental cognition of the pure nature in general because it considers the transcendental schematism from the point of view of space and not of time.

Key words
Kant, natural science, rational physiology, objective reality of the categories, transcendental schematism, transcendental epistemology, space, matter, force.

References

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