Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the by Michael Friedman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the by Michael Friedman Daniel Sutherland Michael Friedman. Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xix + 624. Cloth, $111.95. Kant’s Construction of Nature (KCN) marks a major milestone in Kant scholarship. Friedman draws on over thirty years of research to make Kant’s deep engagement with Newtonian natural science accessible, and shows its relevance to Kant’s critical philosophy, especially the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR). Friedman has benefited from other excellent scholarship on Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations (MF), but no other scholar combines such detailed textual analysis and understanding of the issues with a systematic presentation of the whole and its connection to Kant’s critical philosophy. The MF is an extreme distillation of Kant’s views on a complex set of topics, but Friedman writes exceptionally clearly, and includes many cross-references that make it easy to review an issue when it resurfaces. The connection between the MF and the four sets of synthetic a priori principles receive extended treatment, and introductory and concluding chapters focus helpfully on the role of the MF in Kant’s critical philosophy. This makes KCN particularly valuable to anyone working on Kant’s critical metaphysics and epistemology. Friedman clarifies how Kant simultaneously pursues multiple themes in the MF, and how he reforms both Leibnizian metaphysics and Newton’s fundamental concepts and principles, for example, how Kant rejects Newton’s conception of matter in favor of a dynamical theory and redefines substance in terms of permanence rather than unity. In addition, Kant reconstructs Newtonian physics without presupposing absolute space and time; Friedman explains Kant’s strategy to exploit Newton’s procedure for successively determining a privileged frame of reference to reconceptualize absolute space and time as the never fully attained outcome of this procedure. Friedman also emphasizes that Kant sought to explain the possibility of Newtonian mathematical physics and hence how the properties of matter “acquire their mathematical structure” (103–4). This includes an account of how Kant’s mechanical laws of motion make it possible to measure the quantity of matter. Throughout, Friedman reveals Kant’s depth of understanding of Newtonian physics. In a particularly nice example, he explains why Kant appeals to Newton’s arguments concerning the oblate shape of the earth: in order to argue for the crucial feature of matter that every part acts on every other part. Friedman’s interpretation of the MF includes a subtle understanding of Kant’s project and how he carries it out. In Friedman’s view, Kant did not simply attempt to provide an a priori deduction of Newton’s laws of motion or his dynamical conception of matter by applying the categories and principles of the CPR to the empirical concept of matter. The MF is instead a broader exploration of the conditions for the possibility of Newtonian [End Page 173] mathematical physics that also relies on empirical data. Thus, for Friedman, the laws of motion turn out to be a priori in the sense that they are conditions for mathematizing quantity of matter. Friedman also argues that Kant does not attempt an a priori construction of the concept of matter itself; instead, Kant’s “construction” is a demonstration of how the various properties of matter acquire their mathematical structure. Friedman provides an interpretation of the relationship between the MF and the CPR: the former is not required to complete the deduction of the latter, but provides the first and most important instantiation and only full realization of the latter’s concepts and principles in the phenomenal world. While the CPR provides a perspective on the phenomenal world grounded in the transcendental unity of apperception, the MF provides a more specific perspective on the phenomenal world as mathematically realized in pure natural science. A strength of Friedman’s work is that it brings so much to bear on puzzling passages and makes sense of the whole. This sometimes leads Friedman to depart from the most natural reading of a passage in favor of one that makes more overall sense. Only a philosopher and historian of...