Kant, Science, and Human Nature: chapter 8

Natur und Freiheit: Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, hrsg. v. Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing und David Wagner,, 2018

In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason we find the idea that providing a causal explanation for a certain natural phenomenon is necessarily equivalent with providing a sufficient reason for the occurrence of that phenomenon. In this work, I examine, first, this fundamental equivalence between the principle of causality and the principle of sufficient reason as it is presented in the “Second Analogy of Experience” and second, I explore this equivalence in contrast with other forms of explanations, in the light of the distinction between mechanical causality and teleological causality, as presented in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. I aim to show, contrary to what Béatrice Longuenesse² has argued, that the principle of sufficient reason, in the context of scientific explanation of nature, cannot be either identified with or otherwise reduced to the principle of causality in “Second Analogy of Experience”.

This paper examines Kant’s account of causal knowledge by paying particular attention to the Critique of Teleological Judgment where Kant is concerned not with his well-known account of causality as the transcendental conditions of experience but with the possibility of causally explaining concrete objects in nature and, more specifically, material nature. The chapter develops an interpretation of Kant’s maxim of mechanism as a purely regulative principle that enables us to make determining judgments about mechanical causes. It concludes that knowledge of particular mechanical causes is essentially dependent on both constitutive and regulative principles.

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the foundations of the human sciences How is it possible for the human sciences to avoid the risk (and the suspicion) that they might produce nothing else than subjective opinions -instead of objective science. My answer is: the conditions of the possibility of experience, as exposed in Kant's First Critique, not only allow the natural sciences, but also the human sciences to transcend subjective impressions attaining objective determination of the given facts, i.e. the transformation of phenomena to experience.