Kants Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft: Ein kritischer Kommentar (review)

Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MFNS) was published in 1786, one year after his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and thus also falling in the period between the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason. Long assigned a tertiary status within the corpus, the MFNShas for several reasons been the subject of renewed scholarly attention in the past two decades. Attempts to trace the origins of analytic philosophy beyond the work of the logicists and the Vienna Circle have focussed attention on neo-Kantian "scientific epistemologists" such as Helmholtz, Hertz, and their contemporaries, for whom Kant's philosophy of science formed a common point of departure. This more general concern is complemented by Kant scholars' increasing interest in his philosophies of mathematics and the sciences. Finally, there is greater appreciation of the importance of the Metaphysical Foundations for our understanding of Kant's revisions to the first Critique, for instance his emphasis in the B-edition on the necessity of external intuition to the "objective reality" of the categories.

Earlier neglect of the MFNS was not merely the product of indifference to these issues, for it is an obscure book, even for Kant. In extending the transcendental metaphysics of the Critique into the domain of empirical science, Kant demands of his reader a thorough grasp of the critical philosophy. To complicate matters, the larger part of the text involves a detailed analysis of classical scientific concepts taken from the Leibnizian and Newtonian traditions. Kant often draws on his earlier writings on the natural sciences, such as the Physical Monadology, and either modifies or, in the case of pre-critical sources, inverts these to fit their new context. The book often seems to be little more than a rationalist deduction of the key concepts of Newtonian physics, at least as Kant understood them. In order to extract philosophically interesting arguments from this mixture of physical science and transcendental philosophy, one must have a firm grasp of the background in the history of science and of Kant's oeuvre as a whole. To date, there have been only two full-length studies (by Addickes and Plaass) devoted to this short work, and neither of them attempted to cover it as a whole. Konstantin Pollok's commentary of the MFNSwill therefore fill an important gap in the secondary literature.

Pollok's Critical Commentary, which is written in a clear anduncomplicated academic German, steers a middle course between textual analysis and criticism. The author accords each major division of the book (the Preface, Phoronomy, Dynamics, Mechanics, and Phenomenology) its own chapter, and then follows the argumentative lines of these closely. But Pollok's text does not mirror Kant's "mathematical" sub-division of the MFNSinto axioms, theses, and scholia. These are often grouped together and commented on as a single argumentative whole, which is keyed with the title of the main sub-division. The body text of the commentary consists of textual exegesis, quotations, and references to historical sources, as well as to the larger context of Kant's philosophy. The lengthy footnotes address discussions and controversies in recent secondary literature, as well as Pollok's evaluation of these. He quotes both primary and secondary sources at length, thereby freeing the reader from the bother of tracking down quotations in order to grasp what is at issue. This aid is, however, counterbalanced by his legitimate decision to quote all sources in the original language, with the exception of those available to Kant only in translation.

Critical discussion is strictly confined to the conceptual context of Kant's time, in that the significance of Kant's arguments for later developments in the philosophy of science, and their status from the standpoint of such later developments are not addressed. But this decision still leaves open significant interpretative play: one can approach the...