Metaphysical foundations of natural science (1786)

Summary

The Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (hereinafter: Metaphysical Foundations) first appeared in 1786 (with second and third printings in 1787 and 1800 respectively). This work thus belongs to the most creative decade of Kant's so-called critical period: the decade of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Prolegomena (1783), the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and finally the Critique of Judgement (1790). Until very recently, however, the Metaphysical Foundations has had by far the least impact of any of these works, and has accordingly attracted the least amount of scholarly attention. Both the content and the form of the work have contributed to this situation. For, on the one hand, the Metaphysical Foundations is concerned with relatively specialized questions belonging to natural philosophy and even to physics: questions about the character and behavior of attractive and repulsive forces, for example, or about impact and the communication of motion. And, on the other hand, it is written in an inhospitable and forbidding style – organized in quasi-mathematical fashion into definitions (“explications”), propositions, proofs, remarks, and so on. In both of these respects the Metaphysical Foundations is more akin to some of Kant's precritical writings on natural philosophy – especially the Physical Monadology (1756) – than to the great works of the critical period.