Kant's Theory of Science [antikvár]

Preface It is not necessary to come from the West to be bound inescapably to one's own history. Philosophers, too, beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Inevitably they carry some of the present with them. There is at least this much truth to Croce's dictum that all history is contemporary history. In this study, I have tried to reconstruct rationally Kant's theory of science, drawing largely on the Critique of Pure Reason and downplaying the fact that his position changed and developed over the years. If anything justifies my title, it is the attempt to give a general account of this "theory" and to show how, for Kant, it clarifies the relations between philosophy and science. At the same time, the title "Kant's Theory of Science" is both too broad and too narrow. It is too broad because there are many features of Kant's theory of science, particularly having to do with methodological questions and the role of reason in its regulative aspect, about which I have said very little. There is already an excellent discussion of these questions and this role in Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. The title is too narrow because the differences between Kant's theory of science and his more general metaphysics of experience are ones of detail and emphasis only. What I have to say about the former should illuminate the latter as well. The reconstruction has been guided by three criteria of adequacy formulated by Professor Wolfgang Stegmüller. ^ He asks that a reconstructed philosophical theory be presented (1) in such a way that it remains in accordance with the basic 1 In a pair of clarifying papers, "Towards a Rational Reconstruction of Kant's Metaphysics of Experience," Ratio, i, 1967, pp. 1-32, and ii, 1968, pp. 1-37. Professor Stegmüller has also directed my attention to some little-known but extremely interesting lectures on Kant given by Professor Heinrich Scholz in the winter semester, 1943-1944, at the University of Münster, very much in the same spirit as my study, if not always with the same results.