Andrew Janiak

Kant as Philosopher of Science

Michael Friedmans Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992) refocused scholarly attention on Kants status as a philosopher of the sciences, especially (but not exclusively) of the broadly Newtonian science of the eighteenth century. The last few years have seen a plethora of articles and monographs concerned with characterizing that status. This recent scholarship illuminates Kants views on a diverse group of topics: science and its relation to metaphysics; dynamics and the theory of matter; causation and Humes critique of it; and, the limits of mechanism and of mechanical intelligibility. I argue that recent interpretations of Kants views on these topics should inuence our understanding of his principal metaphysical and epistemological arguments and positions.

Space and motion in nature and Scripture: Galileo, Descartes, Newton

In the Scholium to the Definitions in Principia mathematica, Newton departs from his main task of discussing space, time and motion by suddenly mentioning the proper method for interpreting Scripture. This is surprising, and it has long been ignored by scholars. In this paper, I argue that the Scripture passage in the Scholium is actually far from incidental: it reflects Newtons substantive concern, one evident in correspondence and manuscripts from the 1680s, that any general understanding of space, time and motion must enable readers to recognize the veracity of Biblical claims about natural phenomena, including the motion of the earth. This substantive concern sheds new light on an aspect of Newtons project in the Scholium. It also underscores Newtons originality in dealing with the famous problem of reconciling theological and philosophical conceptions of nature in the seventeenth century.

Mathematics and Infinity in Descartes and Newton

The concept of the infinite has often been regarded as inherently problematic in mathematics and in philosophy. The idea that the universe itself might be infinite has been the subject of intense debate not only on mathematical and philosophical grounds, but for theological and political reasons as well. When Copernicus and his followers challenged the old Aristotelian and Ptolemaic conceptions of the world’s finiteness, if not its boundedness, the idea of an infinite, if not merely unbounded, world seemed more attractive. Indeed, the infinity of space has been called the “fundamental principle of the new ontology” (Koyre in From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1957, p. 126). Influential scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century helped to solidify the idea that it was specifically in the seventeenth century that astronomers and natural philosophers fully embraced the infinity of the universe. As Kuhn writes in his Copernican Revolution (1957, p. 289): “From Bruno ’s death in 1600 to the publication of Descartes ’s Principles of Philosophy in 1644, no Copernican of any prominence appears to have espoused the infinite universe, at least in public. After Descartes , however, no Copernican seems to have opposed the conception.” That same year saw the publication of Alexandre Koyre ’s sweeping volume about the scientific revolution, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. The decision to describe and conceive of the world as infinite might be seen as a crucial, if not decisive, aspect of the overthrow of Scholasticism. As Kuhn and Koyre knew, one finds a particularly invigorating expression of this historical-philosophical interpretation in an earlier article by Marjorie Nicholson (Studies in Philology 25:356–374, 1929, p. 370).