Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy from 1747 to 1770 [1st ed.] 9783030607418, 9783030607425

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
Introduction: An Overview of the Metaphysics of the Pre-Critical and Critical Kant (Matthew Rukgaber)....Pages 1-17
Space, Force, and Matter in the Early Natural Science Writings (Matthew Rukgaber)....Pages 19-58
Substances, Space, and Causality in the Early Metaphysical Writings (Matthew Rukgaber)....Pages 59-107
The Development of Kant’s Pre-Critical Metaphysics from 1758 to 1766 (Matthew Rukgaber)....Pages 109-151
The Asymmetry of Space: Kant’s Theory of Absolute Space in 1768 (Matthew Rukgaber)....Pages 153-173
The Moment of Transformation: Time and the Critical Turn in the Inaugural Dissertation (Matthew Rukgaber)....Pages 175-216
Kant’s Theory of Space in the Inaugural Dissertation and the Birth of Transcendental Idealism (Matthew Rukgaber)....Pages 217-273
Back Matter ....Pages 275-284

Citation preview

Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy from 1747 to 1770

Matthew Rukgaber

Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism

Matthew Rukgaber

Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy from 1747 to 1770

Matthew Rukgaber Eastern Connecticut State University Willimantic, CT, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-60741-8    ISBN 978-3-030-60742-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60742-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

While I remember having conversations about Kant after my first introduction to his thought, which was given to me by Sandra Edwards, a medievalist at the University of Arkansas, I did not plan to continue studying it. However, at the University of Illinois, I was introduced to the revolutionary interpretation that Arthur Melnick began publishing in the early 1980s, culminating with Space, Time, and Thought in Kant (1989, Kluwer) and the more accessible Themes in Kant’s Metaphysics and Ethics (2004, Catholic University Press). His embedding of Kant’s mature philosophy in action theory remains central to my own approach. I owe him a great debt. While this work is not a part of my dissertation, I do owe my dissertation committee member David Sussman thanks for pushing me to make sure that my approach to Kant’s theoretical philosophy was able to account for the metaphysical commitments generated by his moral and religious philosophy. I owe thanks also to Richard Schacht and William Schroeder, who sat on that committee, and to Richard Mohr, who (if I remember correctly) was on it at some point. Permission has been granted by Penn State University Press to reproduce some portions of an earlier article in Chap. 4.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Rukgaber, Matthew. 2018. Immaterial Spirits and the Reform of Metaphysics: The Continuation of Kant’s pre- Critical Project in Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Journal of the History of Ideas 79: 363–383. Permission has also been given by Cambridge University Press for republication of an earlier version of Chap. 5. Rukgaber, Matthew. 2016. The Asymmetry of Space: Kant’s Absolute Theory of Space in 1768. Kantian Review 21: 415–435.

Contents

1 Introduction: An Overview of the Metaphysics of the Pre-Critical and Critical Kant  1 References  16 2 Space, Force, and Matter in the Early Natural Science Writings 19 The Alternative to a Relationist Reading of Kant’s Early View of Space  19 Space and Nature in Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces  23 Space and Matter in Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens  32 Conclusion  43 References  53 3 Substances, Space, and Causality in the Early Metaphysical Writings 59 Interpreting the New Elucidation and the Physical Monadology  59 The Metaphysics of the Causal Nexus in the New Elucidation  61 The Principle of Succession: Physical Influence or Pre-established Harmony?  68 The Principle of Co-existence: God’s Presence to Substances  74

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Space and Bodies in the Physical Monadology  83 Conclusion  95 References 105 4 The Development of Kant’s Pre-Critical Metaphysics from 1758 to 1766109 The Steady Separation of Sense and Reason 109 Philosophical Method and the Relation of Mathematics to Metaphysics 111 Interpretations of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 123 Analysis of the First Chapter of Dreams of a Spirit-­Seer: Clarifying Spiritualism 130 Analysis of the Remainder of Dreams: Reforming Metaphysics 135 Conclusion 142 References 147 5 The Asymmetry of Space: Kant’s Theory of Absolute Space in 1768153 Space as Dynamic and Asymmetrical 153 Basic Concepts: Position (Lage) and Direction (Gegend) 155 Kant’s Argument for Absolute Space Based on Incongruent Counterparts 158 Kant’s Solution and the Fall of Parity 160 Resolution of Some Interpretative Difficulties 162 Conclusion 167 References 171 6 The Moment of Transformation: Time and the Critical Turn in the Inaugural Dissertation175 The Collapse of the Pre-Critical Metaphysics 175 The Subreptic Axioms and the Role of Time in Kant’s Turn 180 The Dependency of Time on the Subject 189 Conclusion 207 References 214

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7 Kant’s Theory of Space in the Inaugural Dissertation and the Birth of Transcendental Idealism217 Comparing Space and Time 217 The Perceptual Account of Kant’s Theory of Space 219 The Deflationary Account of Kant’s Theory of Space 229 The Constructivist Account of Kant’s Theory of Space 236 The Dependency of Space on the Subject 242 Conclusion 259 References 269 Index275

Abbreviations of Kant’s Works

Gesammelte Schriften. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–. New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. MonPh The Employment in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, … the Physical Monadology. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. BDG The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. NG Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. UD Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. NEV M. Immanuel Kant’s announcement of his programme of his lectures for the winter semester 1765–1766. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. TG Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. GUGR Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. AA PND

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Abbreviations of Kant’s Works

On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World. Trans. David Walford. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. V-Lo Lectures on Logic. Trans. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. KprV Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Mary Gregor. In Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. WDO What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? Trans. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni. In Religion and Rational Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. V-Met Lectures on Metaphysics. Trans. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. KrV Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Br Correspondence. Trans. Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Prol Prolegomena. Trans. Gary Hatfield. In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. MAN Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Trans. Michael Friedman. In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ÜE On a Discovery whereby any New Critique of Pure Reason is to be Made Superfluous by an Older One. Trans. Henry Allison. In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Refl Notes and Fragments. Trans. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. GSK Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces. Trans. Jeffery Edwards and Martin Schönfeld. In Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. UFE Examination of the Question whether the Rotation of the Earth on its Axis […] has Undergone any Change. Trans. Olaf Reinhardt. In Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. FEV The Question, Whether the Earth is Aging, Considered from a Physical Point of View. Trans. Olaf Reinhardt. In Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. NTH Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. Trans. Olaf Reinhardt. In Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Di Succinct Exposition of Some Mediations on Fire. Trans. Lewis White Beck. In Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. NLBR New Doctrine of Motion and Rest. Trans. Olaf Reinhardt. In Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. MSI

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: An Overview of the Metaphysics of the Pre-Critical and Critical Kant

Any work on Kant’s theoretical philosophy must orient itself within a set of problems that has been developed in a steady stream of literature starting with the initial reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason in the 1780s. There are many ways to phrase the perennial questions that swirl around both the pre-Critical and Critical metaphysics. My foci are on the debates about realism and idealism, the nature of space and time, and the distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances. While the present work concentrates on Kant’s early works up to and including the 1770 Dissertation, the interpretation that it provides of Kant’s metaphysics prior to the Critique of Pure Reason has implications for how we interpret that work as well. In order to justify a detailed study of Kant’s early thought, which many might dismiss as superseded by and irrelevant to the mature works, I want to illustrate, in the clearest terms as possible, how this present work can be situated within the major trends within Kant scholarship. Philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be characterized by, among other things, the rejection of metaphysical dualisms of any sort. That trend has deeply informed the research into Kant’s writings, which has been a remarkable hotbed of activity and has cross-fertilized a host of topics in Anglo-American philosophy. Out of that prodigious activity, a division between two approaches to Kant’s potential metaphysical dualism has emerged. The first approach shows how Kant speaks to anti-metaphysical research projects in epistemology, the philosophy of © The Author(s) 2020 M. Rukgaber, Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60742-5_1

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mind, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of psychology, and the philosophy of language. This approach is championed by scholars like Henry Allison (2004), who look to defend such an anti-metaphysical approach as a correct historical reading of Kant, as well those such as Abela (2002) and Hanna (2001), who follow in the footsteps of Wilfrid Sellars by using Kant to construct contemporary theories of cognition, perception, and reference. The second approach follows the tradition of Strawson (1966) and does not attempt to tame the metaphysical dualism within Kant’s writings. Instead, it tends to focus on its failures, ambiguities, contradictions, and the general implausibility of some of its core ideas. Instances of this approach are found in Westphal (2004) and Van Cleve (1999), although some have argued that such dualism is not as disastrous as it seems (Langton 1998). These divisions straddle a further distinction between rationalist reconstructionism or “appropriationism” versus a more historical “contextualism” (Mercer 2019). The debate between metaphysical versus anti-metaphysical (cognitive or epistemological) approaches has the field divided, and it is not clear that either interpretative method can mediate the dispute. Ultimately, the ambiguity within Kant’s texts, which allows them to sustain this division, demands a hermeneutical approach that goes beyond mere historical contextualism. Some anachronisms are inevitable. There are at least two significant reasons for this. Firstly, if scholars make no effort to translate Kant’s language and ideas into accessible concepts outside of his specialized terminology, then contextualist research, whether attempting to avoid or accept metaphysical dualism, remains of interest only to a few well-trained Kantian scholars. Kant’s texts and ideas will remain wrapped in an opaque argot. Explanations of obscure concepts will rely on other equally obscure notions resulting in an empty and alienating edifice. A sort of scholasticism emerges, which can of course be said of a great amount of scholarly output in any field, but which appears to outsiders to be little more than a debate about the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin.1 It is telling that Kant’s notion of an “architectonic” has become synonymous with this for some. The second barrier to simple contextualism is that Kant himself seems to have been a less-than-careful reader of other thinkers. Geographically isolated and hampered by his health, his correspondence pales in comparison to most other major philosophers of the time. His references to and explicit readings of the work of others are minimal. While contextualism in Kant scholarship is certainly in full swing as more and more scholarship

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appears on German thinkers that may have influenced Kant or that were contemporaries with him, it is not clear to me that this has moved the needle in terms of our ability to solve longstanding interpretive disputes. This lack of progress has less to do with the excellent scholarship on “minor figures” (according to the mainstream philosophical canon) and more to do with the idiosyncrasies of Kant’s language and ideas. Kant seems to have rarely stepped into another’s philosophical system without distorting it. His influences and contemporaries offer us only more complications to an already complicated, jargon-heavy system. Strangely, Kant’s own early works are rarely read as a helpful guide to his transcendental idealism. I think that this is a mistake for which Kant himself is partially responsible as he notoriously disowned his earlier writings. Kant’s thought is dominated, in my view, by a metaphysical vision that has been called a “two-world” metaphysics, which I take to mean a dualistic vision of two spheres of being, which lack any shared objects or forms, although it is not impossible that there is some connection between them. Allais describes it as follows: “The traditional ‘two world’ camp sees Kant’s appearances and his things as they are in themselves as different kinds of entities that are in some kind of (unknown) relation to each other, and is generally committed to understanding appearances in terms of phenomenalism, as mental or virtual entities” (Allais 2004, p. 657). So-called one world views convert this distinction into one between two types of properties (Langton 1998, p. 13) or aspects (Allison 2004, p. 16) that belong to the same object. Immediately, I should note that I deny that the two-worlds interpretation is committed to phenomenalism or to  understanding appearances as intentional, virtual, or mental objects (e.g. Van Cleve 1999, pp.  8–9). Nor did the pre-Critical Kant think that this relation was unknown, even if it could not be made fully and determinately understood. Of course, the fundamental issue in the study of Kant’s theoretical philosophy is not whether he held such a two-world metaphysics between the years that are my focus (1747–1770). After all, the pre-Critical works are largely ignored and most who have an opinion about them assume that they contain objectionable metaphysics of some sort. Most scholars are concerned with whether he held a two-worlds ontology in the Critique of Pure Reason. While I generally do not discuss works after the 1770 Dissertation, I do give some reasons to think that this ontology may remain in some form in the Critical era. In particular, I hold that the fundamental assumption that leads scholars to agree that a two-worlds commitment to

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things-in-themselves renders observable reality less than real, illusory, mental, or imaginary is a mistake.2 A two-worlds metaphysics must resist any connection between worlds that threatens to reduce one to the other or eliminate one as imaginary, for that would be, by definition, a one-­ world view. But critics of two-world views are convinced that the undeniable subject-dependence of the notion of appearances inevitably collapses into a noumenalistic one-world view if any substantial two-world distinction is allowed. In other words, to allow a two-worlds distinction turns the world we experience into a subjective projection atop an unexperienced and, thus, unknown reality. This must be the case, they reason, because Kant’s theory of space and time is tied to the mental operations that the human mind performs in perception to represent the world. Given that space and time are said to be a priori forms of intuition, what else then could a two-worlds view mean except that the subjective world of appearances is a mental construction? My sense is that such a threat of phenomenalist falsification of empirical reality is a problem for both one-world and two-world theories as long as space and time are something like mental-­ perceptual schema. This internalization of space and time makes it difficult for every sort of interpretation to resist the idea that Kant’s ontology gives a fundamental status to things-in-themselves and degrades the sensible world to the mental. By showing that this internalist interpretation of the Critical theory of space and time is mistaken, I open the door to the possibility that the phenomenalist threat of a two-worlds metaphysics can be eliminated. To demonstrate the precise nature of his metaphysical commitments in Critique of Pure Reason is a task for the sequel to the present work. By exploring a non-phenomenalist two-worlds metaphysics in the pre-Critical works, the groundwork will have been lain for extending that view, with appropriate modifications, to the mature works. A two-world metaphysics is not committed to phenomenalism. The phenomenalist thinks of appearances as mental entities rather than the empirically real objects of experience. The lack of ontological reduction on a two-worlds view is clearly seen in the pre-Critical period, where it is less controversial (but not entirely without controversy) to say that Kant held such a view. During this time, he never believed that phenomenalism or ontological reductionism was the implication of such a metaphysics. While Leibniz himself was often charged with such phenomenalism, the early works can be seen as a sort of “apology for Leibniz,” and his two-worlds division between the Kingdoms of Nature and the Kingdoms of Grace, as Kant even says of his own Critique of Pure Reason (ÜE, AA 8:250). Kant’s

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life-long project in metaphysics was to show that phenomenalism was not the result of metaphysics: one could maintain a commitment to the reality and truth of the two separate domains of physics and metaphysics without one collapsing into the other. The fact that this is not recognized and, in fact, quite the opposite aim is regularly attributed to him, is puzzling but not without explanation. There are (at least) two mistakes—one regarding the pre-Critical writings and one regarding the Critical writings—that are at work here. Both mistakes are the heritage of rational reconstructionism with its ambition to make Kant’s thought speak to our modern anti-metaphysical and anti-­ dualistic worldview. In the dominant interpretations of the pre-Critical philosophy by leading English-language scholars (Laywine 1993; Schönfeld 2000; Kanterian 2018), it is largely ignored that Kant accepted the Leibnizian conception of substances as living, mind-like beings, whose interconnection with each other, via the creative power of God’s divine intellect, gives rise to the harmonious material order of nature. Even in works of remarkable insight on Kant’s philosophy of nature (e.g. Friedman 1992; Watkins 2005), it is commonly held that Kant’s pre-Critical metaphysics is simply an account of “composite corporeal substances,” with a “monistic conception of substantial force” in which everything is explained via “the same agency of transuent causation or physical influence” (Edwards 2000, pp. 74–8). The baroque, dualistic metaphysics that I will show that Kant held, which tends toward pre-established harmony, is so far outside the realm of plausibility for most philosophers that I suspect that it is a mixture of both of the principle of charity and a desire to show the contemporary value of Kant’s thinking that keeps such a reading from gaining traction. Yet there is more at work here. In English-language literature at least, the interpretation of the pre-Critical metaphysics that I propose is not even mentioned, let alone explicitly excluded for either textual or charitable reasons, even though it has support in the pioneering research of Heimsoeth (1960, 1967). One reason for its exclusion certainly stems from the fact that Kant is often relying ambiguous notion of substance that is sometimes an appearance in the world (via physical force) and sometimes a non-spatial and internal essence containing representations and being preserved by God. Scholars tend to focus on the former and entirely ignore the latter. Thus, some of the problems here lie with Kant himself. But I think the contemporary default to eliminate dualism and read historical works through the presumption of a one-world metaphysics is also to blame.

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One consequence of this winnowing of his metaphysical worldview is that Kant’s pre-Critical theory of space is misunderstood. When Kant says that the order of space and time is grounded upon the reciprocal determinations of substances, it is assumed that what he means is that substances are essentially bodies in space, and that space and time are the relations (or form of the causal reactions) that are between them (Edwards 2000, pp.  76, 80). In effect, scholars tend to read the pre-Critical Kant as a “transcendental realist,” who holds that appearances (spatio-temporal objects) are just collections of things-in-themselves (metaphysical substances). The pre-Critical Kant was apparently a one-worlder who, according to the leading interpretation offered by Schönfeld, wanted to combine metaphysics and physics into a single room of reality (Schönfeld 2000, p. 168). According to Allais, the Critical-era “one world” interpretation “is the view that the very same things that appear to us as being a certain way have a certain way they are in themselves, which is unknown to us” (Allais 2004, p. 657). Presumably, the only difference between the pre-­ Critical and Critical Kant is that former believed that we could know something of the way that things are in themselves. The abandonment of such metaphysical aspirations in favor of a humbler critical epistemology constitutes the Critical turn, as the story goes. Essentially, the pre-Critical Kant is thought to hold a one-world metaphysics modeled more on the mechanics of Newton than the metaphysics of Leibniz, with the additional, non-Newtonian commitment to things-in-themselves (substances) as physical beings with causal powers. This aligns well with the standard reading of Kant’s Critical-era one-world view, in which he rejects the causal powers of transcendentally real substances and, instead, simply focuses on the perceptual and cognitive schemas that frame our experience and support our judgments. But as just stated by Allais, it would appear that such a Critical one-world view cannot escape some commitment to an intrinsic nature or set of properties that are unknown to us and that constitute the objects that we experience as they are in themselves. I maintain that this story of Kant’s pre-Critical and Critical one-world metaphysics is mistaken. The pre-Critical Kant has a metaphysical notion of substances and their relation to God, which constitute a set of entities and relations that are so fundamentally distinct from the natural order of things that they can rightfully be called their own world, although he believed that a connection between worlds could be posited. The Critical Kant effectively widens this gap by arguing that things-in-themselves are of such a radically different order from the experientially given and

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scientifically studied world that to say that the one gives rise to the other is to gesture unknowingly at an unintelligible miracle. This is because such things are merely the logical idea of possibilities, which cannot have a place in our philosophical ontology. I hold that the notion of a thing-in-­ itself is the idea of a metaphysical essence that acts as the ground of possibility. While the pre-Critical Kant saw them as monadic entities capable of representation, in the Critical philosophy they belong to the realm of ideas or to the set of compossible things that constitute the idea of this possible world. Another way to put the difference between the pre-Critical and Critical philosophies is that the former believes that we can give ontological status to such essences (possibilia) and think of them as living beings or simple substances that generate the actual world in conjunction with the creative-preserving act of God. The Critical philosophy holds that things-in-themselves constitute the transcendental matter of a possible world. They are purely logical ideas that we cannot eliminate from thinking for various reasons but that we also cannot give ontological status to, at least not without moving into the domain of morality. Ironically, the opinion of many philosophers who are not Kant specialists and who simply take the pre-Critical and Critical Kant to be engaging in “bad” or “spooky” metaphysics is perhaps closer to the truth than the readings of specialists in the field. While specialists are right to deny phenomenalism, they attempt to preserve the given world and scientific truth only by eliminating all signs of a “spooky” metaphysics. But I do not believe that Kant ever thought that a two-world metaphysics resulted in such an invalidation of science and experience. The mistaken connection between a two-world metaphysics and a phenomenalist devaluing of the given world emerges in interpretations of the Critical philosophy because of the idea that space and time are a priori forms of intuition. This doctrine pushes even those who wish to assert Kant’s “empirical realism” to accept an internalization of space and time (and the “appearances” within them) to the human mind. How else is one to then make sense of the idea that “things as they appear to us are mind-dependent, in some sense and to some extent” (Allais 2004, p. 656)? Scholars tend to interpret subjector mind-dependence by either reducing external objects into mental ones (Van Cleve 1999) or by weakening the idea to mean that only some aspects of things are mind-dependent (Allais 2004) or by shifting the topic to a deflated epistemic claim that knowledge and reference contain ineliminable references to the cognitive subject (Allison 2004). My sense is that these three options are all to be rejected. The first is empirical idealism that

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Kant openly rejects. The second is a form of transcendental realism that he also rejects. The third simply eliminates idealism and metaphysics altogether which I call deflationism. These traditions of interpretation lead many of the best scholars in the field to argue that the Critical Kant cannot be a two-world “noumenalist” (Allais 2004, p.  658). This denial of noumenalism is a thesis about the nature of the things that we experience: we experience what is real, but perhaps not all of it and not without distortion. Interestingly, an anti-­ reductivist two-world noumenalism is simply not committed to the idea that the ultimate analysis of given objects is that they consist of a “special kind of object, distinct from the objects of which we have knowledge and experience, which would be an object for a different kind of intuition than ours” (Allais 2004, p. 659). The two-world view is not committed to the intelligibility of this statement simply because of the radical divide between worlds. They are not committed to the two worlds being the difference between different types of objects in our world. Nor are they committed to the two-world thesis even being a claim about objects, as opposed to a distinction between a world of objects and a world of ideas (in the Platonic sense). While the pre-Critical Kant refers to these possibilia (essentia) to explain certain phenomena in our world (esse), the Critical Kant sees this as a mistake. The ultimate metaphysical analysis of actual objects in the Critical era appeals only to how space and time are real and yet belong only to the world that houses our perspective. The two-world view is not necessarily committed to any sort of shared principle of individuation that would allow one to keep the reference of “the same object” across the two worlds. Kant never believed, even in the pre-Critical writings, that the proper and complete metaphysical analysis of objects consisted solely of their noumenal description (as monadic essences or principles preserved and sustained by the divine mind).3 Instead, such a description was metaphysically generated by the attempt to explain the harmony and perfection of the universe, which is true even in the Critical Philosophy. In the Critical period, the ideational essence of things qua things-in-themselves is recognized as a logical posit of pure reason to which we cannot immediately give any ontological status. But if the two-worlds view does not require ontological reductionism, then the only thing objectionable about it is its openness to the conceptual usefulness and non-contradictoriness of a fundamentally distinct order of being, which may even be supported by practical reason. Ironically, after entirely eliminating metaphysics for a theory of reference, the deflationist approach seems unable to escape a “spooky”

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property-dualism as being a part of Kant’s Critical ontology, precisely because they cannot separate being into two worlds. Many one-worlders remain ontologically committed to spooky property-dualism because they have converted an account of the sensible world into an account of sensible cognition alone and left Kant’s Critical ontology attached to a univocal notion of being. Ultimately, a two-worlds view ends up having the resources to thoroughly disentangle these separate ontologies (the ideational and non-relational from the physical and relational), which it can do because it recognizes that Kant is giving a metaphysical account of the world. Undoubtedly, the two-world metaphysics of the pre-Critical Kant is spooky. After all, the metaphysical foundation of the world is said to consist of simple substances that possess “principles of action” through which they act in response to their representations of the world. Not only do they act in response to their representation of alterations external to them, they do so in reciprocal determination with other substances, while retaining their inner simplicity and their core non-relationality. They are able to exist in such harmony with other substances because each possesses a representation of the universe that is given to them by the preserving and creative power of God. The substances that underlie material objects are thought of as slumbering or unconscious monads, which are incapable of forming a mind, but nevertheless existing as active, representing beings. Although the non-relational, essential nature of these substances is unchanging, being a principle of individuation tied to rules of action, their representational state (a contingent mode of the substance) changes by their own power. In order that they act in response to each other and to actual changes in the world, God superadds to them the power to construct material forces in the world. Substances then have a metaphysically dualistic nature: an internal principle to alter their own inner states and an external principle to alter force relations in the material world. They are a mind and body and in this way only are they able to form a perfect, fecund, and creative nexus. This is the account Kant gives of how the change of one substance’s state results in a change of the state of the material, force-­ based world, which leads to a representational change in other substances that then alter their own states in response to the evolving picture of the world. While Kant views this as a version of the physical influence theory of the mind-body relation, he rejects the defining feature of physical influence theory, namely, that the only active forces are physical ones. His metaphysical vision is deeply indebted to Baumgarten, and when he looks

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back at it from the Critical period, he is able to see its close links to the doctrine of pre-established harmony and even to a sort of Spinozism. Admittedly, this exotic two-worlds metaphysics is startling even to many people familiar with Kant’s work. In the following pages, I will demonstrate the textual evidence for it and show that it remains relatively unchanged from 1747 to 1770. Besides clarifying and unifying the pre-Critical writings, this vision has surprising advantages when considering the relationship between the early and mature works. Firstly, it clearly shows that the notion of things-in-­ themselves and appearances has a long history in Kant’s thinking and that its origin is the fundamental ontological difference between a world of principles or essences, which contains all possible determinations of a thing, and physical objects and forces that are actualizations of the possibilities of simple substances. The division between a realm of ideas or principles and a world of material objects and forces presents us with an ontological divide that resists reduction of one to the other. Secondly, when Kant comes to reject the legitimacy of explaining the physical world through the causal powers and temporal properties of simple substances in 1770, the divide between these realms grows in such a way that the ontological status of essences (now mere possibilia) is seriously undermined. While I cannot defend the status of such notions in the Critical system at present, I simply want to point out how out of touch with Kant’s usage and how transcendentally realistic it is to say either that the world as it is given to us really consists of things-in-themselves or that it is the same object that is both given as appearance and as possessing of some inaccessible inner nature or set of properties that define it as it is in itself. From the position of a two-world interpretation, these are simply category mistakes that make appearances into things-in-themselves. A third advantage of the view that I offer is that we can precisely identify the break from the pre-Critical metaphysics in Kant’s elimination of time and, thus, activity from simple substances in the 1770 Dissertation. This enacts an unbridgeable gap between the two worlds, a gap that had previously only existed between the non-spatial and atemporal God and his relation to the simple, active substances. Now all things-in-themselves (God, simple substances, and souls) are isolated to the atemporal, logical, and noumenal ground of the world as possibilia, at least within the domain of theoretical reason. Fourthly, Kant’s pre-Critical conception of metaphysical, simple substances illustrates that he thinks of representations as relations that carry information about the spatio-temporal world. He also always seems to

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have thought of representational beings as having an a priori representation of the world-whole, which obviously is transformed into our idea of having an a priori intuition of space and time in the Critical era. There are of course many other connections to be made between the early and mature works, but that will perhaps be sufficient to convince readers who are skeptical of the merits of such a “spooky” metaphysics that it has some value for the interpretation even of Kant’s mature writings. While the avoidance by scholars of the pre-Critical two-world metaphysics consists of little more than simply ignoring the discussions of simple substances and the exact nature that they have to one another and to God, scholars of the Critical philosophy have legitimate concerns rooted in the longstanding debate about its compatibility with the restrictions on knowledge that Kant argues for in 1781. While that cannot be addressed here, the “internalist” mistake that I mentioned above can be combatted within the limits of my present focus. The internalization of the notions of space and time within the mind pushes almost every interpreter—whether they accept one-world or two—toward the vision of a Cartesian subject trapped in the theater of the mind. Interestingly, the analysis of Kant’s pre-­ Critical account of the mind and representation suggests that he never accepts such an internalist conception of representation. Representation is always thought of as a relationship of depiction of and action in the external world. Thus, I do not believe that Kant thought we were blocked from reality by mediating representations that are constructed out of sensations by a variety of processes either passive or active. This internalist conception of Kant’s theory of space and time means that the “subject-­ dependence” or “mind-dependence” of the world of “appearances” is little more than the idea that the properties of the objects of experience are either entirely or partially a mental projection within experience. But what is the alternative? The last two chapters of the present work offer what I call an “externalist” account of the subjective nature of space and time in the Critical philosophy. Space and time are real relations between events and objects outside of the mind, relations that we can even perceive empirically. Contrary to the nearly universal idea that Kant is committed to all spatial and temporal information being an addition by the subject as he or she processes and represents the world, all that he is actually committed to regarding our perceptions of space and time is that they are made possible by an a priori grasp on the nature of space and time. While our pure representations of space and time are an intimate part of our empirical

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representations, they are not filters on otherwise non-spatial and non-­ temporal data. Perception for Kant is of a direct realist variety, and the objects that affect us are spatio-temporal objects and forces. Kant’s theory of space and time is not simply a theory of the cognition or mental representation of space and time. It is a metaphysical thesis about the subject-­ dependence of space and time themselves. In order to be able to say that appearances simply are spatio-temporal objects outside of the mind whose properties we are able to perceive, one needs an account of how they and space and time themselves can be subject-dependent without being mental. That means one needs to understand how the existence of space, time, and the objects that affect us are metaphysically dependent on the presence of cognitive subjects and yet are not mere structures within the mind. The solution depends on Kant’s conception of the natural world, which he believes to be made up of infinite continua. Totality, either in the succession of parts toward the whole or in the division of parts toward the simple, is not a part of nature. This means that there is no simple, intrinsic metric by which things are naturally individuated. There is no such thing as a position, point, or a single, simple moment in nature. Instead, everything, as it is given in appearance, is always an infinite succession toward the One—either the one single world or the one single part. On this view, nature consists of nothing but relations, which implies that it has no intrinsic relata. Therefore, we cannot say that nature is intrinsically spatio-­ temporal, because space and time require there to be positions, relations, and events. Space and time demand determinacy and individuation. Nature in itself, or what Kant calls “transcendental matter” in 1770, lacks both of these: it lacks any intrinsic form and, thus, lacks the internal resources to determine what counts as individuals and what relations hold between them. Nature in itself is the mere possibility of some system of individuation and measurement. Calling it intrinsically spatial or temporal becomes a meaningless, anthropocentric claim. From an eternal perspective, the entire infinite universe of space and time could just as well be compacted into a single point in a higher order system. This is what it means to call the natural world “appearance”: its form of individuation and relationality is relative to a determinate metrical perspective that possesses transformation rules for individuating and measuring. Kant’s view is that the cognitive subject institutes form (individuation and relation) by existing as an essentially indexical “now” and “here.” These are perspective-­ relative simples that act as fundamental units of measure. We also introduce through our mere existence the rules for continuously constituting

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the “now” and the “here” through rigid, continuous movements that have directionality or orientation (past-present-future and up-down-left-­ right-front-back). These directional notions are what are sometimes called A-series relations in the study of time. Kant’s argument for the subject-­ dependence and transcendental ideality of space and time is that objective and positional relations between any two points in space and time (so-­ called B-series relations) depend on there being such directionality (A-series relations). Of course, those A-series or directional notions require the presence of a relative simple element (the “now” and the “here”), which is not found in nature and which is the condition upon any possible measurement. The simple in nature only comes to be through the existence of the perspective of a cognitive subject such as ourselves. This view is a version of what is called conventionalism or constructivism. This too may appear “spooky,” because it suggests that in the absence of the human perspective, it makes no sense to talk about the planets and matter whirling about in space. Such a story about matter and the origins of the universe prior to human existence was of course an important feature of Kant’s pre-Critical works, although, in truth, none of it was prior to mind-like substances, whose activity introduced the individuation, metric, and rules of transformation that define the natural world. When such metaphysical, mind-like objects are not allowed within matter itself, Kant can of course speak counterfactually of the possible experience of possible minds that would have experienced planets whirling about in space billions of years ago. But he must also hold, starting in 1770, that absent the human perspective, we cannot think of nature as being in and of itself a world of matter in motion and must conceive of it as the mere possibility of such a world. While this sounds bizarre to many, it seems to presage a problem at the heart of modern physics. Arthur Koestler once fretted about the position modern science places us in: Each of the ‘ultimate’ and ‘irreducible’ primary qualities of the world of physics proved in its turn to be an illusion. The hard atoms of matter went up in fireworks; the concepts of substance, force, of effects determined by causes, and ultimately the very framework of space and time turn out to be as illusory as the ‘tastes, odours, and colours’ which Galileo had treated so contemptuously. Each advance in physical theory, with its rich technological harvest, was brought by a loss in intelligibility. (Koestler 1959, p. 540)

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These waves [on the theory of quantum mechanics], then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, traveling through a non-medium in multi-­ dimensional non-space, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man’s question after the nature of reality. The waves that seem to constitute matter are interpreted by some physicists as completely immaterial ‘waves of probability’ marking out ‘disturbed areas’ where an electron is likely to ‘occur’. ‘They are as immaterial as the waves of depression, loyalty, suicide, and so on, that sweep over a country.’ From here there is only one step to calling them abstract, mental, or brain waves in the Universal Mind— without irony. (Koestler 1959, p. 542) Thus the medieval walled-in universe with its hierarchy of matter, mind, and spirit, has been superseded by an expanding universe of curved, multi-­ dimensional empty space, where the stars, planets, and their populations are absorbed into the space-crinkles of the abstract continuum—a bubble blown out of ‘empty space welded onto empty time.’ (Koestler 1959, p. 543)

Faced with this worrisome situation Koestler sees modern science as filled with hubris for trying to grasp the impossible. Should we go along with it, then we must say that “the universe is indeed of such a nature that it cannot be comprehended in terms of human space and time, human reason, and human imagination” (Koestler 1959, p.  545). Kant’s Critical viewpoint is not so far removed from this. The material world in-itself absent the human being cannot be said to consist of space and time or to adhere to human reason and imagination. It can only be thought of logically as the realm of possibility, which he had in his pre-Critical works thought of without irony in terms of the Universal Mind. But rather than the despair that Koestler feels when faced with what seems like the phenomenalist reduction of the natural world that we experience into an illusion, Kant recovers the a priori necessity, empirical reality, and transcendental ideality of that “walled-in world” that Koestler thinks we have lost. Kant recovers it through our being in the world, our essentially indexical self-experience, and the a priori form of a being that experiences like we do, which is to say, that moves about and contacts things as we do, thereby constructing those walls. If Kant’s theory of space and time is as revolutionary as I make it out to be and as central to his Critical turn as it appears, then the fact that his mature works are rarely read through the lens of his early one is rather unfortunate. The first four chapters following this introduction aim to give a detailed, consistent, and textually well-supported account of Kant’s

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pre-Critical metaphysical system (1747–1768). They trace Kant’s notion of space as the first, natural expression of the harmonious interaction of metaphysical substances and as a field of attractive force, out of which the rest of nature springs. In spite of Schönfeld’s monograph (2000) and the more recent work by Kanterian (2018), there is no presentation in the English-language literature of the pre-Critical philosophy as a coherent idealistic system that uses the mathematical, dynamical, and cosmological perfection of the universe as a symbol for the community of ultimate metaphysical substances or essences. For most scholars, the pre-Critical writings are plagued with inconsistencies and ambiguities, but I find this reading to be the result of a failure to trace the two-world or Platonic element of Kant’s writings and to see how it is meant to sit alongside a philosophical method that is sensitive to the empirical components of knowledge. A standard assessment is that “Kant’s original philosophical orientation may be safely described as rationalist, but his early, ‘pre-­Critical’ writings, taken as a whole do not express a unified philosophical outlook. Nor do they display cumulative progress towards one. The impression they give is rather of continual dissatisfaction and experimentation” (Gardner 1999, p. 13). After these failures, the Critical philosophy emerges as a form of critical epistemology or transcendental psychology. The classic narrative of the relation of the early works to the mature ones is that the former are simply a form of “transcendental realism” that places reality in substances (monads) but also takes those substances to be given physically. It is then argued that in the 1760s Kant goes through a skeptical, empiricist phase in which he doubts the very possibility of such a hybrid physical metaphysics. Supposedly, this then leads to Critical-era philosophy understood as an analysis of the nature and structure of human cognition. I intend to show that this standard view of Kant’s development is mistaken. The viewpoint that I advocate is one largely absent from the English-language literature, but it was advocated for by Heinz Heimsoeth (1960) and other German Kant scholars who are part of the “metaphysical” interpretative tradition. That tradition says that the pre-Critical philosophy is an idealist metaphysics that is deeply and positively influential of the mature Critical philosophy.

Notes 1. Ironically, this is a topic I will be discussing in Chap. 2. 2. The idea that any attempt to make the distinction a metaphysical one between “two distinct types of entities” collapses into phenomenalism and,

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thus, noumenalism or “transcendental realism” is stated by Allison (2004, p.  55). Critics of Kant’s two-world metaphysics (e.g. Strawson 1966; Westphal 2004) agree with Allison, as do those who accept such a metaphysics (Van Cleve 1999, p. 123). 3. While this reading of the distinction may strike English readers as strange, the German metaphysical school of Kant interpretation offers just such a Platonic-Augustinian interpretation.

References Abela, Paul. 2002. Kant’s Empirical Realism. Oxford/New York: Oxford University. Allais, Lucy. 2004. Kant’s One World: Interpreting ‘Transcendental Idealism’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12: 655–684. Allison, Henry. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jeffery. 2000. Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge: On Kant’s Philosophy of Material Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedman, Michael. 1992. Kant and the Exact Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gardner, Sebastian. 1999. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. London: Routledge. Hanna, Robert. 2001. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1960. Atom, Seele, Monade: Historische Ursprünge und Hintergründe von Kants Antinomie der Teilung. Weisbaden: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1967. Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism. In Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke Gram, 158-199. Chicago: Quandrangle Books. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Theoretical Philosophy After 1781. Trans. and ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kanterian, Edward. 2018. Kant, God and Metaphysics: The Secret Thorn. London/ New York: Routledge. Koestler, Arthur. 1959. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. London: Arkana. Langton, Rae. 1998. Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laywine, Allison. 1993. Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy. Atascadero: Ridgeview. Mercer, Christia. 2019. The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy. Journal of the History of Philosophy 57: 529–548.

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Schönfeld, Martin. 2000. The Philosophy of Young Kant: The Precritical Project. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strawson, P.F. 1966. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Methuen. Van Cleve, James. 1999. Problems from Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watkins, Eric. 2005. Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westphal, Kenneth. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Space, Force, and Matter in the Early Natural Science Writings

The Alternative to a Relationist Reading of Kant’s Early View of Space Kant’s early writings on physics and cosmology provide an account of space in which it is an evolving plenum made up solely of attractive force.1 There is little evidence that he holds that space is an immaterial, empty receptacle.2 Nor do his metaphysics of substance, his claims about the reality of space, and his theory of physical force support the view that space is nothing but the order of relations among bodies. I shall make the case for this by looking at Kant’s first work, True Estimation of Living Forces from 1747, several articles from 1754, his famous work on cosmology from 1755 Universal Natural History, and his Latin dissertation from 1755, Meditations on Fire. These natural scientific writings are prior to his explicit treatment of metaphysics in the remaining two Latin dissertations from late 1755 and early 1756, which have dominated scholarly thinking. Across the course of this chapter and the next, I will show that Kant’s metaphysics demands a concept of substance that is not simply physically dynamic but is also capable of representation. A failure to distinguish the physical from the metaphysical is what I regard to be the fundamental problem with interpretations of the pre-Critical philosophy. His thought is often read as an abstract justification of Newtonian physics and a monadology transformed into physical atomism. The result in both cases is the looming threat of materialism. While the early metaphysics should be read

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as compatible with Kant’s philosophy of nature, a fundamental division between two must be maintained. It is typically asserted that “early in his career Kant’s view of space was relationist and basically Leibnizian” (Parsons 1992, p.  67; also Hatfield 1990, p.  87; 2006, p.  69; Carrier 1992, p.  402; Butts 1984, p.  119; Polonoff 1973, p. 91; Slowik 2016, p. 342).3 According to Buroker, the pre-Critical Kant’s view is “that physical objects are ontologically independent of and prior to space” (Buroker 1981, p.  38; 1991, p.  319). Why precisely is this view attributed to Kant? This “relationist conception of space” seems to follow from the fact that “space is the product of the real interaction of corporeal substances” (Edwards 2000, p. 76).4 Here he returned to a strictly Leibnizian view of space, although he stated a different reason for it. … Some substances, according to Kant, interact; that is, they act outside of themselves. Such action is indirectly the basis of the order which is space. Without interaction, there would be no connection between substances, and without this connection no order, and without this order no space. (Garnett 1939, p. 97)

But relationism is in tension with the recognition that Kant also held that space was “objective and real” rather than ideal or imaginary (Earman 1991, p. 131).5 The problem is that relationism has a difficult time avoiding seeing the relations between substances as insubstantial and secondary.6 This problem haunts one of the few extended studies of Kant’s early thought in English, Schönfeld’s The Philosophy of Young Kant, where he argues that Kant grants the reality of substance and the reality of their relations or interactions, which means that the “relative space” of relations is also a “substantive space” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  167).7 But this account surely does not avoid making relations into accidents and giving them a degraded ontological status. After all, spatial relations are “generated by component substances” or by “extended composites” that are made up by “smaller extended components” that occupy a space, and so space seems to be nothing but an order among material things (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 166, 170). Because space is a product of substances, and those substances are characterized as corporeal and extended, then it seems unavoidable that “space is nothing but the spatial order of bodies” (Carrier 1992, p.  399). What sense can there be to saying that Kant holds a relational view of space but is not “downgrading the reality of space” into “an ideal relative space” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  166)? The order of bodies is an

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accident of substances.8 It is not unreal, but it is ideal, an alterable order that is extrinsic to the things themselves. While this does not mean that relations are necessarily imaginary, Kant’s claims about space are far more realistic than such a view can explain. Friedman says that Kant sees space as the “phenomenal expression” and a “secondary reality, derivative from the monads and their external relations,” but these external relations are “just as real” as their internal ones and so are not merely a “phenomenal reality” (Friedman 2009, p. 42).9 The difficulty, once more, is that if space is simply relations between bodies, then not only does the space between bodies seem to be an insubstantial void, but even if bodies are more than merely “phenomenal,” it is not at all clear that the relations between them are. Essentially, the dominant interpretation of Kant’s view is that substances are in space as the physical force of impenetrability (i.e. are bodies), and there are causal force relations between them (attraction, repulsion, and the mechanical transfer of motion). Thus, the relations of space are merely the mathematical form of the causal nexus of forces between interacting bodies, which again suggests a downgraded ontological status for spatial relations and for space itself. They would appear to be, from a metaphysical perspective, phenomenal, because substances need not stand in any such relation. The underlying problem is that scholars have not adequately reckoned with the fact that substances are not  primarily conceived of as bodies. Instead, substances contain a principle of internal activity, thought of as their having and altering representational states, which I will take to be synonymous with receiving and acting in response to information about the world.10 Those representing substances give rise to dynamic cells of attractive force that create space itself as something substantial in a physical sense (i.e. material  and well-founded but phenomenal in a metaphysical sense). These cells of attractive force exist prior to all “ordinary material objects” and make space substantive, although not in the classic Newtonian sense of space being independent of “physical fields” (Sklar 1974, p. 159). Space is the primary physical field rather than “a passive arena or container of the world” (Sklar 1974, p.  163). Through interaction with other attractive corpuscles, a secondary, repulsive force emerges, which causes shape and material extension to develop.11 In sum, Kant’s view is that space exists prior to bodies as small vortices of attractive force. These “attraction points” or molecules of space, as he will initially call them, are not to be thought of as vortices of tiny bodies (i.e. impentrable extension). These corpuscles and, thus, space itself evolve over time, but they do not

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mechanically move the heavenly bodies as on the Cartesian view. Kant avoids the problems of a dynamically relevant ether, Cartesian “fluid,” or “heavenly matter” of tiny fast-moving, shape-shifting particles that create vortices that swirl like a river (Descartes 1982, pp. 93–6).12 Kant’s corpuscles of attractive force draw in other cells and give rise to what we encounter as impenetrable, extended bodies. Once nature forms into the Newtonian universe that we experience, only weak cells of force remain unincorporated into bodies. These weak cells only have “harmless effects” and constitute what appears as empty space. So while space is the product of the order of metaphysical substances, it is not merely an order of relations among bodies. Neither substances nor their initial physical expressions are bodies. What scholars have thus failed to recognize is that Kant’s consistent pre-Critical claim that space exists because of the nexus of substances can have more than one interpretation. The mistaken interpretation is a transcendentally realistic one in which dynamical substances in space (i.e. atoms and bodies) are taken to be the ultimate components of his ontology, which makes space into the real (well-founded) but derivative and accidental relations that appear between them. But a more idealistic interpretation is possible, which is my view. Here the nexus of substances is recognized as a metaphysical order of supersensible, representing beings whose interrelation and coordination give rise to a world of sensible dynamical forces and causal powers that produce, firstly, space itself and then bodies.13 On this view, Kant can attribute reality to both the ground and the grounded, because he is operating with two notions of “reality.” The idea that space is real but an accident of substances qua bodies is a distinction between a substantial and insubstantial level of the same reality. On a “two-worlds” interpretation, space qua force is the real and primary manifestation of nature (natura naturans), while substances are a different world of entirely internal, representational activity, a world, we might say, of ideas in a substantial sense. Kant’s ontology is richer than a collection of bodies in space and the forces between them. He can make sense of a dynamic spatial field of force that is prior to and the ground of bodies. And his overall ontology contains even more than such dynamic, natural forces and beings. Kant’s view of space is akin to what Sklar calls a “variant on the substantivalist position,” in which “all there is spacetime,” which means that the “ordinary material contents of the world should be viewed as ‘pieces’ of spacetime itself” (Sklar 1974, p. 166). Such a view is found in Newton’s (2004) unpublished De Gravitatione, but he uses this idea to reject the metaphysics of substance altogether. Unlike Newton’s

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immaterialism about space, Kant imagines the pieces of space-time to be the result of ultimate substances, which have the power of representation and which give rise to a space made of a protean matter that is not yet impenetrable body and that consists entirely of attractive force.

Space and Nature in Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces While it is obvious that Kant’s pre-Critical work is attempting to “reconcile” metaphysics and science, interpreters must decide on the nature of this reconciliation (Schönfeld 2000, p. 9; Kanterian 2018, p. 140). I reject the idea that Kant aims to show that “both physical and metaphysical entities were the ontological furniture of the same room of reality” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  168, emphasis added). Ultimately, Kant’s combination of Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian physics cannot place them in the “same room” and make monads and physical forces simply “different levels of nature” that “complement each other” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  58, emphasis added). Holding that monads act “on one another and on material things by spiritual Newtonian force” is, if not an outright contradiction, little more than a collapse into materialism (Laywine 1993, p. 83, emphasis added; see also, Carpenter 2001, p. 8; Shell 1996, p. 21).14 Therefore, I maintain that the pre-Critical project keeps Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian physics in separate “rooms” of reality and refers to the latter as the appearance of the former. While it is true that Kant’s natural philosophy does argue for a ground floor of active nature, a realm of inherent force (natura naturans) that is neither simply bodies governed by Newton’s laws of motion (appearances) nor the representing beings that are substances, we cannot use this room to unify what is ultimately a dualism divided between mind and body, between the inner and the outer, and between representational powers and moving forces. The “essential force” that “inheres in a body and belongs to it even prior to extension” remains a postulation of rational physics that cannot combine simple substances and material extension in motion into a single ontology or reduce reality to a single type of causality, force, or being (GSK, AA 1:17).15 What Kant means by “inner natural force” in 1747 is the power of matter to perpetuate motion, which may be triggered by an external collision (moving force) or by action at a distance (attraction) and is variable due to the vim inertiae (GSK, AA 1:148, 27). While a dead mechanism

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description of nature might be mathematically possible, Kant holds it to be a construct that is not found in nature (GSK, AA 1:139–140). And so an actual natural body has “the capacity to increase, by itself and in itself, the force awakened externally by the cause of its motion,” which means that “there can be units of force in it that did not originate from the external cause of motion, that may be larger than this cause” (GSK, AA 1:140). This idea of a causal power of “intrinsically imperishable force” obviously is in conflict with Newton’s laws of motion (GSK, AA 1:28). Kant calls it a “striving intension” within material bodies, by which they “strive” to preserve motion, implying that the mathematically analyzed account of motion is merely an estimation of “the outward phenomenon of force” (GSK, AA 1:141).16 It is clear that Kant’s notion of such striving and its variation in nature depend on mass and the related notion of the force of inertia. In fact, he will come to equate the aspect of living force that is his focus in 1747 with inertia in 1756, claiming that inertia is that power in virtue of which matter “strives to persevere in the state of motion” (MonPh, AA 1:485).17 Importantly, Kant is clear that there may be infinitely small inertial masses that, nonetheless, contain living force, but which can never be vivified to perpetuate motion (GSK AA 1:163–4).18 This is one of several pieces of evidence that he gives to show that the reality of inner force is separate from observable matter and motion. Such tiny cells would be material by being a weakly attractive force, but their dynamical insignificance would mean that they never react to other attractive forces and do not make up composite matter (body) as we know it. Nor would such cells be able to react with bodies in motion and offer resistance. They could in fact appear as empty space but would still be the product of metaphysical substances. Motion is merely external and is the “outward phenomenon of the state of a body,” which means that it is not necessarily indicative of living force at all (GSK, AA 1:18). Living force is a power of matter, to generate (attraction) or preserve (inertia) motion. But this living being is itself the external expression of a monad or a simple substance that “contains within itself the complete source of all its determinations” and need not “stand in any connection with other things” (GSK, AA 1:22).19 Thus, even in 1747, he holds that all substances have an inner and outer being, which is equal to the distinction of “their being in themselves” versus “their externalization in influencing other substances” (Heimsoeth 1967, p.  162). Substances by definition are not bodies.20 Bodies are composite and, therefore, consist of relations, whereas substances can be thought of

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independent of all relation (GSK, AA 1:22). Monads are the “complete ground of the thing itself,” and they contain a “law that manifests itself in its mode of action” and determines how they “propagate their effects in union with each other” (GSK, AA 1:24).21 Kant informs us that “the whole” that this propagation gives rise to—namely, space as a whole—has three dimensions because of this law (GSK, AA 1:24).22 Because he wants to focus only on “substances in the existing world of which we are a part,” he will often elide the distinction between a substance and its external effects within a spatially arrayed community (GSK, AA 1:24). Admittedly, he causes confusion regarding his ontology by not keeping the spatial effects of a substance distinct from the substance itself that is the metaphysical ground of those effects. The reason why Kant should want to keep these notions distinct is obvious: if he simply equates the notion of substances with their effects, then he risks a collapse into materialism as Baumgarten noted (Baumgarten 2013, §395). He will also not be able to retain the simplicity of substances if he equates them. One of Kant’s main arguments in the metaphysical section of this early work is to “derive the origin of what we call motion from the general concepts of active force” (GSK, AA 1:19).23 It is important to note that this derivation has several assumptions that suggest that Kant’s point is a very unambitious one. He is simply showing that vim activam is a primitive notion and that vim motricem is not. Kant begins by asserting that substances have a force “determined to act externally (that is, to change the internal state of other substances)” (GSK, AA 1:19).24 While Kant asserts that his account shows the triumph of “physical influence” over the “doctrine of pre-established harmony,” not only does Kant beg that question, his own view is closer to the latter than he seems to recognize (GSK, AA 1:21). After all, he holds that the soul operates through “representations and images” and that because motion changes the external states of affairs that are “spatially connected with it,” then we must say that “matter changes the state of the soul” only in the sense that it possesses “status repraesentativus universi” or the “state of representing the world” (GSK, AA 1:21). The internal state of the soul or of any substance then is not a force relation: it is “nothing other than the summation of all its representation and concepts” brought to bear on the information of its situation vis-à-vis other substances (GSK, AA 1:21). We shall see in the next chapter that this view is consistent with Baumgarten’s definition of pre-­ established harmony and incompatible with the true notion of physical influence, which Kant himself becomes more and more aware of after

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1747.25 Besides merely asserting the doctrine of physical influence, Kant does not keep the metaphysical and the physical distinct in this work. He ends up summarizing the idea of the determination to cause representational change in other substances as the idea that “all connection and relation of separately existing substances is due to the reciprocal actions that their forces exert on one another,” which makes it sound that the exertion of force simply is all there is to such interaction (GSK, AA 1:21, my stress). While this sloppiness on Kant’s part helps to explain why scholars have continually overlooked the representational side of this picture in favor of the force-based theory of physical interaction, we cannot hope to do justice to his views if we just focus on one side or the other. We also should not overestimate what Kant thinks he can show. He does not argue for, but simply asserts that we are empirically acquainted with motion because of this substantial activity (GSK, AA 1:19).26 He notes that if all substantial activity took place all at once, then the world would be a static one, in which there was no change or motion, but this just assumes that motion is the appearance of the activity of substances changing the internal states of other substances. This suggests that Kant is not attempting to argue from the notion of simple substances as representational beings to the notion of bodies in motion, a deductive method that he calls “synthesis” in the 1760s. Instead, I take it that he is taking the natural world as empirically given and then showing what is implied about our conceptualization of the substances that are at its foundation. This is what he calls “analysis” in the 1760s. If so, his point is just that the general notion of active force is conceptually more primitive than the empirical notion of moving force. Rather than attempting to overcome or unify the difference between representation and motion, he is showing that our concept of substantial interaction hits bedrock with the notion of substances as having causal powers that produce change in the inner states of other substance. Thus, he would avoid the circularity of saying that moving force is the inherent striving to move in that which is movable, which Kant sees as a problem for the Wolffians but which was also a problem for Kant’s teacher, Knutzen (Knutzen 2009, p. 62). Wolff’s position is circular because, according to Kant, it regards living, propulsive force simply as an infinity of “dead forces,” which then requires a convoluted theory of vortices with “infinitely many strange motions” (GSK, AA 1:60).27 So it assumes motion to explain motion. By beginning with the bare idea of the action of a substance as the ground of changes in things, Kant is adopting Knutzen’s notion of action

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(Knutzen 2009, p.  61).28 It is also clear that Kant is envisioning these substances being in a “coexistent state of the world” or the world’s first dimension (GSK, AA 1:19). I take this to simply be Kant’s understanding of the world as “a real whole ” in which all actual things stand “in real connection ” (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:39).29 I want to point out that there is an unfortunate combination of purely metaphysical and physical notions here. In a treatise on force, his making this distinction is not a priority, and his failure to do so is indicative of his inheritance from Baumgarten and Knutzen. The problem is evident when trying to make clear whether Kant means “simultaneity” by “co-­existence,” which is a problem because the former is one of Baumgarten’s “relative predicates of being” and already appeals to notions of space, time, and extension (Baumgarten 2013, §280).30 While I do not think it is Kant’s aim to start with a purely metaphysical conception of substances, he nevertheless needs to keep these notions distinct or else the idea of the action of substances threatens to be identical to movement in space. If he were clearer that co-existence is the universal internal predicate of “connection,” and that this is conceptually primary, then we would be less likely to see the idea of being the determining ground of the consequence of modifications of other substances as being just as circular as the account that he is criticizing.31 Separating conjunction (co-existence in the merely rational idea of an order) from being part of a spatial whole (simultaneity in an external, relational system) is a common problem for Kant’s predecessors who talk of a monad posited in ordered relations of being “next to” and “after,” which is ambiguous between the rational notions of ordinality or membership and the relational notions of space and time (Baumgarten 2013, §238). But presumably conjunction in determining relations means that beings are merely “posited mutually next to or after one another” and, thus, have relative “position” as a part of the internal predicate of “order” (Baumgarten 2013, §78–85). If we are a bit more careful than Kant and stress the idea that these substances need not stand in any connection to anything and essentially consist of a principle or internal determination to propagate effects, then it will certainly be rather mysterious how they interact, have external relations, and are related to motions in the world. Baumgarten asserts that a whole of connected monads is extended in spite of the fact that they are “perfect unities” that are not, in themselves, extended and do not fill up space or place (Baumgarten 2013, §242, 230). These “absolute elements of bodes” or “atoms of nature” are “immaterial” or “incorporeal” for

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Baumgarten (Baumgarten 2013, §422). Since “place and time do not change a thing internally” (Baumgarten 2013, §325), and substances are made of internal relations (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:44), embedding the spatial and temporal notions of position into the mere concept of a connected order (ordinality) seems illegitimate. Nevertheless, insofar as Kant is simply assuming a connection between action, as a causal power of substance, and motion in order to show priority relations (a mere “derivation”) and he is not attempting a deductive proof of one from the other, then this is more confusing than it is pernicious.32 Again, Kant’s stated point is merely to avoid the circularity of calling the ground floor of force and its substantial manifestation in nature (natura naturans) a “moving force,” because it is the power to move which the philosopher wants to understand. After essentially asserting that substances exist in an interconnected whole that is at least related to the world of space, time, and motion, Kant argues that the activity of substances cannot happen all at once. This means that substantial activity must happen successively or in “the world’s second dimension” of successive change (GSK, AA 1:19). At this stage in Kant’s description, he already has co-existing substances determined to act and change the internal states of other substances. I have argued that the “first dimension” of the world amounts to a merely rational and internal predicate of belonging to the world-nexus rather than already relational, spatial predicates, although I have also shown why Kant is unclear about this. His next step is rather harshly criticized by Watkins as entirely unmotivated (Watkins 2005, pp. 105–6; 2003, p. 8). My sense is that Kant is appealing to a notion of inertial force and the conservation of force, which Watkins does not mention. The argument is that if S1 acts on S2 at t1, then at t2, as S1 continues to act, it must act on other substances (S3). This is because, he says, there is a limit to the amount of influence that S2 can undergo and, unless it changes, thereby affecting other substances, then it conserves its state and can no more suffer more influence at t2 than it could at t1. The idea here is that a change of state is preserved unless some other action takes place (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:45). Kant’s view is that it takes a certain amount of force to stimulate the sort of internal changes that lead to the vivification of force. And the amount of such stimulation that one substance needs for its vivification depends on its inertial force (mass).33 So the change to S2 at t1 is preserved. Furthermore, the amount of influence at t1 was limited by inertia which designates the quantum of force required

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for activation. If more influence could have transpired it would have, which is the same situation at t2, unless some intervening change takes place (say at t1.5). So, for S1 to act again, it must act on some other substance, S3. Kant is relying on the core idea of the sluggishness of matter that traditionally defines vim inertiae, which was a central force for Wolff, as well as the idea of the conservation of force (GSK, AA 1:27).34 The fact that this system of inertial forces is what Kant is describing in this argument has gone unnoticed.35 Watkins says that the argument is only minimally coherent only if it is considered to be a mechanistic story about “collisions between impenetrable bodies” and “impenetrability” as a “contact force” (Watkins 2005, p. 106).36 This seems to miss Kant’s point, which is that the activation of living force—as both a capacity to suffer modification from a certain quantity of force and to then enact a perpetual motion—is prior to the concept of “contact forces.” After all, it is Kant’s point that contact or moving force can be analyzed down to more basic, non-circular concepts. Furthermore, if we say that Kant is simply offering a story about the force of “collisions,” then that already presumes motion (Watkins 2005, p. 106). Such an account, besides making Kant’s argument as viciously circular as Wolff’s, perpetuates a mistaken view of Kant’s early metaphysics and philosophy of nature as being a mechanistic atomism, which I shall be showing is a mistake. In 1747, Kant only arrives at the notion of motion as change of location after recognizing that substantial interaction is a constant suffering or being affected by force, which in some cases results in the vivifying of an internal power. Once that power vivifies, a power that Kant has said is infinitely persisting and intrinsically imperishable, then substances must cause other substances to suffer change if they are to continue acting. Thus, substances must change position to operate on other substances capable of being affected (GSK, AA 1:19). I do not mean to defend this argument, as he is clearly looking ahead to the fact that vivification and inertial forces are related to spatial position and movement. While Kant passes quickly from the notion of connection to spatial co-­ existence, he does seem to recognize the difference in these predicates when giving a picture of his force-based theory of the world-nexus: “without this [active] force, there is no connection, without connection, no order, and, finally, without order, no space” (GSK, AA 1:23). At this point, Kant has only talked of active force as the alteration of the inner states of substances and as the suffering of (or affection by) force, which at certain thresholds results in or appears to us as movement. It is important

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to see that while the 1747 work is focused on the power to preserve motion, that is clearly not the whole of Kant’s picture of active force. After all, that preserving capacity cannot account for the connection of the world nexus. This means that the 1747 work is using a general notion of active force in its opening sections that is not entirely explained and which outstrips the mere notion of the power to preserve motion. There are multiple interpretative pitfalls here but the source of many is the reduction of Kant’s project into an account of mechanistic collisions and to identify the bearers of active force simply with bodies in space.37 While that is a natural and widespread reading to Kant’s project, it does not align well with the metaphysics he mentions and that we will then go on to elaborate in future works.38 In particular, I have noted that Kant seems to acknowledge the fact that there can be cells of active force that have such a small inertial mass that they theoretically may, but practically never do, vivify and perpetuate motion. These are real grounds of living force that are nevertheless too weak to interact with moving forces, which enables the ontological possibility of cells of active force distinct from bodies. I take this to be essential for making sense of what Kant does occasionally refer to as “empty space,” but which he also calls “an infinitely subtile space” that offers no impediment to movement (GSK, AA 1:29).39 It seems fairly clear that in 1747, Kant believes that space is made up of “infinitely small masses of space,” “small parts of space,” or “little molecules of space” (GSK, AA 1:29).40 This is not the language of a relationist about space. Based on the view seen so far, we must regard the “molecules of space” as being an expression of substances that manifest as a cell of active force. There is nothing else that they could be, but to see that requires a fuller account of force. This allows space to have a substantial grounding both as an expression of the inner states of monads and as a real presence rather than a void or mere relation between presences. On this view, space is not a tertiary phenomenon following behind both metaphysical substances and physical bodies—it follows the former and precedes the latter. I believe that Schönfeld is mistaken to say that Kant’s conception of space in 1747 “exhibits a slight impediment to motion” (Schönfeld 2000, p. 42). That Kant supposedly shifts to the idea of an empty, non-resistant space is a major motivation for Schönfeld’s attribution of a Newtonian shift in Kant’s thinking in 1754.41 The reason for claiming that Kant has a resistant notion of space, even though he calls it “infinitely subtile,” is that he does say that as bodies move through it, they are “perpetually pushing” these infinitely small masses of space (GSK, AA 1:29). His reasoning here

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is motivated by the counterfactual claim that if we could measure “the sum of all actions that it [a freely moving body] performs to eternity,” then we would arrive at a measure of its force (GSK, AA 1:29). But, of course, it is not possible for us to measure any of the effects of bodies on this “infinitely subtile space,” let alone to measure it for all eternity. Kant is clear that we do not see or experience “material elements ,” which are different than composite, extended, and impenetrable matter, yet it is with such fundamental elements that we are dealing with when talking about the molecules of space itself (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:43–4). Kant makes his position on the interaction of space and matter clearer in the second articulation of this doctrine much later in the text. There he appeals to Wolff’s idea of “harmless effects (effectus innocuous)” wherein “force is not used up” to explain how bodies in non-resistant space still have summable action, which would presumably be available to an infinite mind but which is entirely hidden to the human mind (GSK, AA 1:114). The motivation for these “harmless effects,” besides the fact that Kant holds a force-based materialism about space itself, is that the active force that sustains motion would be in principle unmeasurable if that perpetual motion was not conceived as an action of overcoming obstacles even if, paradoxically, such overcoming and moving of these small masses of space requires a cost that is entirely negligible. For this reason, he must think of space “not as perfectly empty, but rather as filled with an infinitely rarefied matter, which has accordingly infinitely little resistance,” that is, insufficient force to enact a change in the living force of a thing (GSK, AA 1:115). Kant clearly accepts that space is a “plenum in which bodies move freely” (GSK, AA 1:156).42 This must be a rejection of Leibnizian relationism, Schönfeld’s resistant space, and the Newtonian void.43 Although Kant’s position gets clearer and his theory of forces in nature becomes significantly more sophisticated after 1747, it is not clear to me that he wholly rejects this early work in the 1750s, at least not until he has doubts about inertia in 1758. Certainly, he quickly sees that his notion of living force and its operation was not as significant as it seemed. Having adopted the Leibnizian notion of active force as described in the Specimen Dynamicum as a power prior to extension in 1747 which, among other things, acted as an engine inside matter, Kant then arrives at the more fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion in the 1750s. An important part of the revision to his view is that he comes to more clearly distinguish the metaphysically inner states and the activity of simple substances from

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their external relations. He also more clearly distinguishes the physical forces that account for space from the force that composes matter.

Space and Matter in Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens The subtitle of Kant’s 1755 cosmology tells us that he will explore the “constitution and the mechanical origin of the universe according to Newtonian principles.” But Kant clearly overstates his adherence to Newtonian philosophy.44 I do not think that it can be said that Kant entirely “discarded Leibnizian and Cartesian approaches for the sake of Newtonian physics” and that he had been entirely “converted” to Newton (Schönfeld 2000, p. 96).45 After all, he relies upon a notion of attractive force as an inherent gravity in matter that is generated by metaphysical substances, a doctrine that Newton himself had rejected.46 In effect, the 1755 cosmology attempts an even deeper investigation of the forces of natura naturans than the mere idea of an internal power in matter that can perpetuate motion. At the very outset of the cosmology, its theological aspect, which is one of several divergences from Newton, is made clear. Kant aims to show how the universe achieves a rather marvelous level of perfection by evolving from a primitive “first state of nature” (NTH, AA 1:221). In response to the 1753 announcement of the 1755 prize-essay competition from the Prussian Royal Academy of Science, Kant had written several notes on the optimism debate.47 In them he sides with Pope over Leibniz by rejecting the notion that God is constrained by necessities (metaphysical evil) in his creation. Pope also appears throughout Kant’s 1755 cosmology (NTH, AA 1:241, 259, 318, 349, 360, 365).48 In this purportedly Newtonian work, nature retains an “essential determination to perfection” or what Buchdahl calls a “disturbing element of teleology,” which is Kant’s inheritance from Pope and is a radicalized version of Leibnizian optimism (NTH, AA 1:347; Buchdahl 1969, p. 485).49 Kant’s cosmology is based on the idea that all of nature emerges out of “infinitely small seeds” (NTH, AA 1:265). I assume the matter of the whole world to be universally dispersed and I make complete chaos out of it. I see matter form in accordance with the established laws of attraction and modify its motion through repulsion. (NTH, AA 1:225)

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It is hard not to see two distinct notions of matter at work in this quote. First, he mentions this dispersed matter of the whole world, which is ultimately constitutive of everything else and is chaotically and universally distributed. Kant sees parallels with his own view and the ancient atomists, but an essential deviation from their view is that the “infinitely small seeds” are not thought of as hard, impenetrable, indivisible atoms governed simply by mechanical law and chance.50 Second, out of that chaos a different sort of matter forms from the combinations of the forces of attraction and repulsion, one which is distinct from this original “matter of the whole world.”51 Therefore, I think it plausible to attribute to Kant the division between primary and secondary matter. However, his use of that notion is not the one found in the Leibnizian tradition, which holds “prime matter” to be an inherent resistance to motion or laziness tied to impenetrability (inertia) (Baumgarten 2013, §294–5).52 I believe that Kant rejects this Leibnizian conception of primary matter and sees it as the notion of active force in general. He thinks of inertia, as we know, in terms of this sluggishness and power to preserve motion, but he also thinks of it in teleological terms as part of the inherent, divinely created, and, therefore, good nature of matter that leads toward perfection. It is not a weakness of matter or metaphysical evil (Baumgarten 2013, §250, 396). Rather than the Leibnizian tradition of primary matter, Kant’s “Urstoff of all things” is closer to the idea of a “matter of the heavens” or quintessence, which is connected by Aristotle to eternal circular motion (NTH, AA 1:228; Aristotle 1984, 270b21). While sometimes thought of as the ether, Kant has a separate theory of the ether as the matter of light and fire, which is distinct from this theory of primary matter. Schönfeld identifies Kantian “primary matter” as a “dust,” which is to say that he is thinking of it simply as tiny bits of matter (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 114, 117).53 Kant does not use this phrase. Instead, such a description strikes me as similar to Descartes’s notion of the “matter of heaven” being a fast-­moving fluid made up of a “subtle matter” or a matter of “indefinite smallness” that is continually changing its shape to fill interstices between spherical molecules (Descartes 1982, pp. 93–5, 109–110). I think it fair to say that what Kant tries to do is take a traditional plenum or ether theory of space and replace the notion of fast-moving, tiny, fluidic matter with the notion of cells of active, attractive force alone. It should be remembered that in the Opticks Newton advocated for the ether doctrine and said that this “medium” offered “so small a resistance” that it makes no “sensible alteration” in cosmology (Newton 1952, p. 352). Kant surely saw himself with

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the broad range of experimental and speculative natural scientists inspired by Newton. This ether doctrine quite divides the Newtonians, and one can find a rejection of it in favor of a pure, immaterial, absolute space or void in the Principia and in the work of Newtonians such as Musschenbroek and s’ Gravesande (Van Musschenbroek 1744, p. 42; s’ Gravesande 1747, p. 26).54 Schönfeld argues that Kant undergoes a full conversion to Newtonian physics in 1754  in the Spin Cycle essay, accepting Newton’s “universal account of physical nature” and his idea that “space is empty” (Schönfeld 2000, pp.  79–80; also Baker 1935, pp.  273–5). While Kant rejects the idea of space being filled with a resistant matter, which he also rejected in 1747, he nevertheless continues to hold that it is not empty. It is filled with “a substance of infinitely small resistance,” which he sees as compatible with Newtonian philosophy (UFE, AA 1:186). Schönfeld implausibly tries to ignore Kant’s explicit assertion that space is made up of something, by claiming that, although what Kant says is literally the same exact thing he said in 1747, it is a “greatly different” view articulated with “old words,” because space is no longer “dynamically relevant” in the 1750s (Schönfeld 2000, p. 80).55 Because Kant always held that these harmless effects are too small to be dynamically relevant, I see no reason to attribute a fundamental change in Kant’s views on the basis of the Spin Cycle essay. The Aging Earth Essay casts doubt on any orthodox acceptance of Newtonian philosophy by endorsing a naturalized version of the idea of a “general ‘world spirit’, an imperceptible but universally active principle, as the secret driving force of nature, whose subtle matter is continually consumed through incessant generation” (FEV, AA 1:203).56 The ever-effective power, which, as it were, constitutes the life of nature, and which, although imperceptible to the eye, is active in all generation and the economy of all three realms of nature. … Those who assume the existence of a general world spirit in this sense do not understand by it some non-material power … but a subtle though universally active matter which, in the products of nature, constitutes the active principle and, as a true Proteus, is able to assume all shapes and forms. (FEV, AA 1:211)57

This active force is a part of nature (natura naturans) that is prior to and is “consumed” in order to generate bodies (natura naturata). This challenges the idea that “the fabric of the universe consists of extended bodies that are in space” and nothing else (Schönfeld 2000, p. 168). This subtle

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matter and world spirit are the “force of attraction” in his 1755 cosmology, which he describes in non-Newtonian terms as an “essential part of matter,” the “first cause of motion,” and the “first stirring of nature” (FEV, AA 1:340).58 I maintain that is also what makes space itself. Recognizing that his notion of the secret driving force of nature is somewhat occult, he asserts in the Aging Earth essay that it is “not so opposed to sound natural science and observation as one might think” (FEV, AA 1:211). Newton rejected the idea of gravity being “essential and inherent to matter,” which is the reason why he explicitly rejects the sort of cosmology that Kant provides (Newton 2004, pp.  100, 94; Newton 1999, p. 940). Indeed, Kant’s entire cosmology is predicated on a rather non-­ Newtonian demand for a story about the genesis of the agreement in the planetary orbits via one “material cause” (rather than divine fiat) that has pervasive systematic influence through “the entire space of the system” by putting everything in motion (NTH, AA 1:261–2). Kant admits that Newton dismisses the possibility that there might be such a unifying material cause simply because no such cause is found presently in space.59 In order to see that this account of active force is at the heart of Kant’s pre-Critical theory of space, we need to better understand what he envisions as the initial state of the universe and how matter and space both evolved into what we presently observe. He views the universe as an infinite process of creation that begins with what he calls a “silent night of matter,” before evolving into our present universe, and then, very likely, aging and degrading back into a state of chaos before being born again (NTH, AA 1:321).60 He is clear that the “matter” that was distributed throughout all creation and that is the “natural cause” of all heavenly bodies “cannot be the same matter as that which now fills the space of the heavens” in the form of planets, stars, and comets (NTH, AA 1:339).61 Initially, what “filled these spaces” and, thereby, constituted space itself was a “dispersed material of universal matter” (primary matter) of differing intensities that is then “cleared” from “the spaces that we now see as empty” and combined into the heavenly bodies (NTH, AA 1:339).62 This early state of space would not have allowed the sort of free movement that we now see. Kant suggests that straight line motion toward the centers of attraction was not possible in the early universe and, instead, the “fine material of dispersed elements” was “deflected by the diversity of the attraction points” (NTH, AA 1:340). So Kant has a notion of a protean matter as he calls it, which consists of “attraction points”—although we need not think of them as non-extended geometric points rather than

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extremely small corpuscles—that have no shape, no barrier of impenetrability, and cannot be given determinate location in space, as that would require being able to distinguish its position and, thus, to be a body. These elements do not have, as I will discuss when we turn to the 1756 Physical Monadology, circumscriptive ubeity. A space made of such force-cells would be consistent with the mathematical description of space as infinitely divisible, which he will give in 1756. This silent night of matter is not “dead.” The dispersed proto-matter is what he called the world-spirit that generates the rest of nature. In that process, those attraction points are “consumed” in the sense that they combine into secondary, composite matter (bodies). This leaves a rarified space made up of the weakest of attraction points. Presumably, this final, perfected state of space refers us back to his 1747 conception of cells of active force with such infinitely small mass (i.e. inertial force) that they could never perpetuate motion. It seems clear that the initial state of this Grundstoff or Urstoff that he calls the “elementary basic material at the beginning of all things” was simply the existence of space: there was no “shape that derives from the equilibrium of the assembled matter”—so there were no bodies or impenetrable material extension (NTH, AA 1:263). Although there were no aggregated bodies, this was not a void. This state of nature […] appears to be the simplest that could follow upon nothingness. At that time, nothing had formed yet. […] Nature as it bordered directly on creation, was as raw, as unformed as possible. However, even in the essential properties of the elements that make up chaos, the characteristic of that perfection can be felt that they have from their origin, in that their essence is a consequence of the eternal idea of divine reason. […] [M]atter, which seems to be merely passive and in need of forms and arrangement, has, in its simplest state, an endeavor to form itself into a more perfect state by a natural development. (NTH, AA 1:263)63

The essence of these elements, here stated in explicitly Platonic terms, is a law instilled in metaphysical substances by God so that they form “attraction points” that vary by the strength of the “essential force” but are harmonized such that their force creates three-dimensional space (NTH, AA 1:264). Kant does need to account for “difference in the kinds of elements,” which he does by appeal to “specific density and attractive force” (NTH, AA 1:263–4). At this point, we can see the two functions that Kant has attributed to “active force” being combined. In 1747, active or

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living force was thought of as the capacity to sustain motion and seems to be identified in 1756 with inertia or, contrary to his 1747 protestations, “moving force” (MonPh, AA 1:485). In 1755, the primary active force of matter is thought of as attraction and the power to initiate motion, although clearly the power to perpetuate the motion caused by these early attractive forces is still part of Kant’s theory. Both forces are tied to the teleological striving for perfection within matter and can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. Lightness and density refer to the degree of the susceptibility to attractive force, whereas strength and weakness refers to the degree of power to initiate attraction.64 After putting themselves in motion, simple cells of attraction begin to create the rest of nature: its forces, its bodies, and, ultimately, the rarified space consisting of the remnants of that initial state (NTH, AA 1:264). Perhaps recognizing that this notion of inherent, attractive force was not strictly Newtonian, in the 1791 edition of the 1755 cosmology, Kant looks to the forces associated with heat, electromagnetism, and chemical reactions to justify his thoughts about this original attractive force in all matter. He remarks that the initial attraction between these points of Urstoff takes place “initially slowly (through chemical attraction)” and only later do strictly mechanical Newtonian forces emerge (Gensichen 1791, p. 173).65 Kant’s investigation of natura naturans in 1755 consists of two main forces, with the force of inertia appearing as a derivative force. The first is the force of the attraction found initially in the protean matter, which he describes as a “sinking” force otherwise known as “the centripetal force or also gravity” that draws matter together (NTH, AA 1:243).66 But “nature […] has other forces in store,” namely a “repulsive force” or “shooting force” (NTH, AA 1:264–5, 1:243).67 The repulsive force is undertheorized in 1755. Initially, it seems mechanical and particle-based, that is, little more than the reception of a “blow” to the falling object that modifies the trajectory of its gravitational fall (NTH, AA 1:245). Kant likens this to the “swerve” or “clinamen” of the atomists by which attractive, sinking force is halted. One of the results of this force is that the initial motion of the matter that concentrates to make the heavenly bodies is directed away from the center of the solar system, thus resulting in a circular motion or directional orientation that is preserved to this day (NTH, AA 1:226). Despite calling it a “blow,” Kant also gives a metaphysical, non-mechanical description of repulsion that leads me to think that modeling it on contact was somewhat metaphorical. He explains that matter “naturally strives” to lessen its mechanical conflict, and so it moves into a

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state of “as little hindrance to the other as possible” (NTH, AA 1:265–6).68 In other words, all matter does not collapse to a point and circular orbits appear, because matter moves itself or distances itself from other bits of matter, thereby counteracting its own attractive forces.69 It seems to me that Kant’s constant appeal to this aim of perfection within the universe and the fact that these forces are external manifestations of simple substances demands that the repulsive force not be the dead force of collision but is a feature of the activity of the material universe. That active teleology of force relations develops as attraction puts the dark material field of Urstoff on the path toward forming the nearly empty space populated by heavenly bodies that we see today. In 1755, Kant does not make the generation of these forces from the inner principles of substances explicit, but their striving toward a certain equilibrium or perfection indicates the metaphysical foundation and theological optimism that differentiates Kant from materialists and atomists. To further explain repulsive force, he points not to collisions but to “the elasticity of vapors, in the emission of strong-­smelling bodies, and in the dispersion of all spirituous matter,” because he believes that these phenomena show arrested collapse into solid bodies and the tendency of matter to keep itself separate (NTH, AA 1:235, 265).70 These same phenomenon were used in 1754 to point to the active, self-creating spirit of nature, because they reveal a sort of active resistance and energy that stems from an equilibrium of active and repulsive forces in the thing (FEV, AA 1:211–12). While both forces seem part of the programming of active nature itself (natura naturans), it is clear that repulsion arrives on the scene later. As it emerges, so also do extended bodies: the force of impenetrability emerges as an equilibrium or a sort of freezing of attractive and repulsive dynamics. Part of this story involves the ether, which is tied to repulsion, and is distinct from space and attraction. In the 1740s Euler was advocating for a theory of space as subtle matter, which was “completely different from what makes up bodies that have weight” but which causes weight, although for the sake of the mathematics of his mechanics he began with the construct of the void (Euler 1746, pp. 13–14).71 He rejected the void in favor of a plenum theory of space in which a “fluid matter that is elastic and very subtle” occupies all the empty pores of bodies (Euler 1746, p.  6). Euler calls this the ether, which he believes constitutes empty space. Kant will agree with Euler that the matter of empty space is not the same as the matter of light and fire. He believes that the initial “night of matter” was infinite space without body and, therefore, without the formation of light-producing bodies. However,

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contrary to Euler, Kant does think of the matter of light and heat as the ether. He regards the ether as a sort of interstitial, elastic matter that is trapped in bodies. It is the “matter of fire” and “matter of light,” which “holds together the elements of bodies with which it is intermixed” (Di, AA 1:376). Thus, this matter is not the matter of space itself, for the latter is so weak as to not have an effect on bodies, whereas the “particles of bodies everywhere collide with the matter of light” (Di, AA 1:377).72 We know, for example, that Kant believes that the matter of light (ether) interacts with the atmosphere of planets and, thus, slows down. Yet Kant does not think that the ether is a Cartesian “fine powder” either (Di, AA 1:372). In a rarely noticed remark, Kant tells us that attractive force and the repellent force create an equilibrium that makes up a body and that the repellent force “arises from the undulatory motion of heat,” which is then trapped in the body (Di, AA 1:380).73 Kant’s full story appears to be that points of attractive force draw toward one another and eventually create waves of heat through repulsive forces, which are a secondary expression of matter’s teleological, self-ordering principles. The waves of heat are the by-product of repulsive force as it keeps attraction from being complete, which is why exothermic phenomena and vapors interest Kant so much.74 This repulsive force has the effect of minimizing conflict, solidifying matter, and harmoniously turning all emerging motion in the same direction. The two forces reach an equilibrium in which an impenetrable body forms by locking the forces together in a standstill of molar spherical particles. When this happens, the heat waves are trapped and form an elastic fluid in the interstices of bodies.75 Obviously, Kant does not make it unambiguous that space is made up of “attraction points” that are so weak that they are physically indistinguishable from empty space. Instead, he often just refers to the “now empty heavenly space” (NTH, AA 1:340) and will sometimes call it “completely empty and completely deprived of any matter that might bring about a community of influence” on the heavenly bodies that pass through it (NTH, AA 1:262). Yet, “matter that cannot bring about influence” is not the same “absolutely empty of any matter.” Thus, he clarifies that by “empty” all he means is that “all matter that might be encountered in this space is far too powerless to have any influence on the moved masses at issue” (NTH, AA 1:262).76 The two are synonymous when he says that “the space of the heavens is … empty or at least filled with infinitely thin matter that therefore has been unable to produce any means of impressing common motions into the heavenly bodies” (NTH, AA 1:338). This

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non-resistant but material space is, I believe, made up of “elements” or particles of the “elementary basic material” that are among the “lighter types,” whereas those with the “greatest specific density and attractive force” are responsible for the formation of composite, secondary matter (NTH, AA 1:264). Although the stronger of the material elements are initially “a source of life for themselves,” I do not believe that an attraction point in isolation would move itself.77 This is not entirely clear in the cosmology. However, once we recognize that the metaphysical theory of coordination of the internal states of substances is what acts as the ground of the forces that make up nature, then it becomes clearer that attraction points are themselves relational and, thus, would not exist outside of a world-nexus. Remarkably, in the 1755 cosmology, Kant offers a story of how attractive force (gravitation) works. He says that it is “earlier than all motion” and that it “requires no external causes and cannot be held up by any impediment, because it acts on what is innermost in matter without any impact even in a universal stasis of nature” (NTH, AA 1:309). So to explain attractive force, Kant makes an appeal to his metaphysics, to the communication and change of state made by the “inner most” of matter.78 We are given a picture of action at a distance in which the activation of attractive and repulsive forces is the other side of the coin of a harmonious (reciprocally dependent) inner activity among the metaphysical substances that underlie matter. What is innermost in matter are metaphysical substances, which manage to act on each other and to change each other’s state by coordinating their powers in response to the information given to them by their representation of the world. This picture of reciprocal determination will be elaborated in his metaphysical works of the 1750s. Yet, we get glimpses of it in the Universal Natural History. Kant states that the laws and teleology that govern nature is implanted in “the essential determinations of the eternal natures … by the highest understanding” so that the “design of the arrangement of the universe” unfolds out of those eternal natures “in a manner proper to the most perfect order” (NTH, AA 1:332). So God implanted in “essences” the causal powers “by which they produce much beauty, much order in the state of activity if left to themselves” (NTH, AA 1:332). Nature itself and its very possibility as transcribed in the eternal essences of simple substances derive from “a being of all beings, an infinite understanding and self-sufficient wisdom” (NTH, AA 1:334). Attraction itself, as the engine and first physical origin of all of nature, including space itself, is said to flow from these essences (NTH, AA

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1:335). Yet, these essences are also thought of as having an ideational existence as “the individual natures of things in the field of eternal truths” and as constituting a perfect system through the “eternal ideas of the divine understanding,” which then “relates to” or has an affinity with the natural order (NTH, AA 1:364).79 It is clear that Kant does not intend to combine these two orders of explanation, the one Platonic and the other force-based, into a single one and acknowledges that his movement between them is through an analogy between two distinct orders or types of being. In the description from the cosmology, Kant only tells us that space and attraction are coextensive and that attraction adheres to matter in all its forms. Attraction is without doubt a quality of matter that is just as pervasive as the coexistence that makes space, in that it combines substances by reciprocal dependence, or, to put it more accurately, attraction is precisely that universal relationship that unites the parts of nature in one space: it therefore extends to the entire expanse of space into all the reaches of its infinity. (NTH, AA 1:308)

This account of attraction shows us an universal relationship that unites nature into one space; yet, it is one that has both a metaphysical and a physical component.80 The former will be outlined in the New Elucidation, which is examined in the next chapter. The physical conception of space that we receive here is of attraction as sort of magnetic connection that links all matter into a system whereby all action results in equal and opposite reactions. Based on the details of Kant’s theory, it would seem that this attractive, interconnected order grows as the universe orders itself and as the harmonized pull of the center of the universe radiates out and connects all matter (both primary and secondary) into a unified field. As matter evolves out of the dark night of the first state of the universe and toward a state of perfection, space itself evolves into its present form. Between these two visions of space—the primitive chaos and the refined present—Kant also envisions an “intermediate space” characterized by its “thinness,” in which the coalescing prime matter is spread out in vast distances but unified into clouds that have only a “few hindrances” to free motion as opposed to the more resistant early space (NTH, AA 1:275). This intermediate space of dispersed but coalescing attractive matter would “permit all freedom of motion to the hovering particles almost as

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though there were in empty space” (NTH, AA 1:276, my emphasis). Kant cannot abide this process operating by chance collisions. Even his conception of chaos is lawful and good (Blumenberg 1987, p. 584). The teleological striving toward perfection is a decidedly non-Newtonian aspect of this account. Undoubtedly, Kant’s vision of a sort of creation ex nihilo differs dramatically from the idea that a divine hand simply posits the world into existence as is. Yet a theological aspect of Kant’s conception of space is not entirely absent. When Kant turns to “creation in the entire extent of its infinity both in space and time,” he initially refers to this “empty space”— which we know to actually be empty of bodies but constituted by the proto-matter of attraction points—as the “infinite extent of divine presence” (NTH, AA 1:306).81 While this appears akin to Newton’s view of absolute space as “emanative effect of the divine existence” (Friedman 2009, p. 37), there is good reason to think that Kant believed that nature abhors a vacuum (horror vacui) and that he is not accepting the standard Newtonian notion of space.82 Kant states his view to be that “only the basic matter itself, the properties and forces of which underlie all changes, is a direct consequence of the divine existence” (NTH, AA 1:310). This identification of the basic matter with the inner properties, which “underlie all change” and of which God is directly the ground, tells us explicitly that it is not the ordinary matter of bodies that is at the foundation of nature. The metaphysical substances that underlie all nature manifest as simple elements or cells of attraction (natura naturans), and it is only these—and in fact only that aspect which is metaphysically inner—which can be thought of as present to God (NTH, AA 1:310, 332).83 Identifying primary matter with space via divine omnipresence itself shows us quite clearly what his early view of space is, and it is not relational.84 Kant’s discussion of the “unending field of the almighty” as the field of creation is, I think, hard to reconcile with the idea of space as a true void or as an insubstantial set of relations. He asks us to consider the infinite space of the divine presence, where the store of all possible formations of nature can be found, [and which, at the start of the universe] lies buried in a silent night full of matter to serve as the material for worlds to be generated in the future, and of the driving force to set them in motion, that, with a slight movement, will begin those motions with which the infinitude of those empty spaces is to be brought to life in the future. (NTH, AA 1:321)

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This infinite space is filled with an “infinity of substances and matter”—the former being the ground of the latter, which constitutes the “spaces of the presence of God” (NTH, AA 1:314). The early universe of proto-matter is both conceivable as “a silent night full of matter” and as “empty space” to be brought to life. What that suggests is that the space of microphysical attraction corpuscles is being considered both metaphysically as simple substances and physically as a space made of the force that generates bodies. Kant’s reference to “empty space” is equivalent to it being filled with “materials for new formations” (NTH, AA 1:321). All of nature seems to be the living activity and creative unfolding of divine omnipotence (NTH, AA 1:317). Despite these theological claims about space, we should hesitate to simply describe this as a Newtonian view. We know from the introduction to cosmology that Kant was utterly opposed to the way Newton directly inserted God into nature. It is the creative power of attractive force which constitutes space that motivates Kant to call it God’s extent.

Conclusion I have offered numerous textual, conceptual, and historical reasons why Kant must be thinking of space as a plenum of cells of force that are prior to bodies. Scholars have long been puzzled about Kant’s pre-Critical notion of space and wondered why he did not say clearly whether space was constituted by “principles, or relations, or things” (Baker 1935, p. 277). But if we look more closely at his concept of force and the evolution of the universe, then we can see that the space in our part of the universe is made up of weak attraction points that do not fall and, therefore, are not drawn in by the attractive force of strong gravitational centers. But how can we say that these weak attraction points make up one unified and continuous space? Space’s continuity presumably comes from being made up of the numerous, contiguous, weak cells of force that are without determinate shape or position and are close to nothingness in a physical sense.85 They are not mathematical points, but are microfields of the original entelechial, attractive force of substances and, thus, are potential sites of creation in the field of the Almighty. Kant tells us that the physical unity of space comes from the attractive force of the massive, gravitational center of the universe reaching out to infinity.86 That influence presumably reaches not only to all bodies, but to all matter, including the primary matter of space. We know that Kant can license this sort of “harmless effect” between bodies, their forces, and space itself. Ultimately,

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the unity of space (i.e. that all things are in one space) will have to be explained by a connection between the metaphysical substances that Kant has yet to elaborate. But there are clear signs of unity, such as the fact that all matter and all cells of space must share directional rotation. We know that the particles of space have such features. The first organization given to the elementary particles by the stronger ones is that they all, eventually, are “moving in the same direction” (NTH, AA 1:266). The basic material of the universe has “a general motion” and “curve” that goes “from west to east” (NTH, AA 1:285, 306). Given that directional rotation of the planets comes about by the repulsive force, it also seems likely that the uniformity of this micro- and macrophysical rotation is a result of interaction with the wave-like energy of heat and light, which can turn the primary matter with no effect (only a harmless one) on the ether (i.e. it does not slow down in space alone). Another anti-Newtonian aspect is that absolute rest and motion are never a concern for Kant, and the idea that the frame of space itself as well as what were once thought of as the fixed stars are all in motion is completely acceptable to him.87 As these weakest of elements cannot attract and combine to form matter or perpetuate motion through inertial force, I do not think that they orbit around the sun, other heavenly bodies, or the center of the universe. Instead, I believe that they rotate (dead motion) in response to the powerful gravity and heat waves of the fiery centers of solar systems and of the universe itself that slip past them. But their sharing in the left–right directionality of the center of the universe gives a significant asymmetrical qualitative feature to space itself. I believe that this is essential for understanding Kant’s argument for absolute space in 1768.88

Notes 1. One commentator who asserts this is Friedrich Kaulbach. “Der Raum ist viel eher ein Wirkungsfeld der Kraft und die Materie ein erscheinendes Ergebnis der Anwesenheit dieser Kraft” (Kaulbach 1965, p. 70). 2. It has been argued that Kant simply had “no solution to the problem of space” but seems to have “favored the Newtonian conception” (Werkmeister 1980, p. 32). 3. The view in the Kantian literature that is often called relationist and Leibnizian is easily traced to Leibniz’s remarks in the Clarke correspondence that space is a “certain order of things” (Leibniz 1956, p. 39). A more sophisticated and metaphysical account of Leibniz’s theory of space

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has been offered by De Risi, which has important similarities to Kant’s actual view as I understand it. He argues that Leibniz has both a conception of ideal, absolute space as “all possible situations,” which is the idea that grounds geometric knowledge a priori, and a real space of “existing situations” (De Risi 2007, p. 561). He claims that “this order of situations that is called space can be understood as the isomorphic image of a set of substances, i.e., all in all, as the phenomenon of a noumenal world” (De Risi 2007, p.  551). See also Martin (1955, pp.  14–6) and Jauernig (2008, p. 60). 4. Edwards argues that this idea of “universal dynamical plenum” remains a material condition on experience in the Critical-era (Edwards 2000, p. 1). See also Westphal (2004, Chapter 3). 5. The relationist view typically holds that “space is not any real continuum, but only an imaginary one,” language which Kant never uses (Boscovich 1966, p. 60). 6. Melnick offers a detailed criticism of the relational viewpoint (Melnick 1973, pp. 14–30). The classic debate between relationist and absolute view is given in detail in Sklar (1974, pp. 161–181). 7. This is similar to Beck who says that “space is not ontologically primitive” but is the “ontologically real” consequence of “the actual” interactions of substances (Beck 1969, p. 447). 8. The ontological weakening that infects relationist views leads Garnett to claim that Kant was forced to hold that space was a contingent feature of bodies (1939, p. 103). Garnett believes Kant moves toward absolutism in the 1760s  and holds space to be a ground “outside the nature of substances” (1939, p. 103). 9. More akin to my own view, Heimsoeth explains that Kant “devalued space to a phenomenon in a quite definite sense. Space is expers substantialis and is itself affected only through relations of force of psychical (non-spatial) elementary substances” (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 182). 10. While we and God are clearly representing beings, what of those “simple elements of matter,” that give rise to bodies? Kant claims, even in 1766, such simple elements should be thought of as having a “faculty of obscure representations” (TG, AA 2:328). “But now monads must have, as simple substances without relations, posited alone , an inner state: but what [other than] representations can one suppose as the basic inner powers of another being; thus the simple substances have a power that represents the universe ” (V-Met/ Herder, AA 28:44) 11. Corpuscle is here taken in the sense that Baumgarten gives it, as the primitive component of bodies that are too small to be observed, but which are not indivisible atoms (Baumgarten 2013, §424–6).

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12. On the influence of Descartes’s Principles on Kant, see Shea (1986, pp. 105–108, 117); Massimi and De Bianchi (2013); and Ferrini (2018). 13. I take this to be what Butts calls “the Double Government Methodology of Leibniz” (Butts 1984, pp. 67, 9). 14. I shall be demonstrating in the next chapter why there is no need to attribute to Kant such a contradictory notion. The mistake here is to believe that Kant simply “called on forces to explain how the soul is present in space,” which leads to thinking that the “soul is impenetrable and thus an object of sensation” (Laywine 1993, p. 83). 15. The relational view runs into the following problem which Slowik mentions was raised by a reviewer of his article. “If force is prior to space,” then what sense can be made of the notion of distance that is inherent to attraction (Slowik 2016, p. 343)? This is not a problem for my view because I do not hold that space is simply the relations between bodies or substances. Force is not prior to space. It is space. 16. See Kuehn (2001, p. 24). 17. On the connection between Kant’s 1747 view and the notion of inertia, as well as his Critical-era rejection of both notions, see Brittan (1978, pp.  159–62). Watkins is correct to say that Newton’s law of inertia and change is rejected by Kant in 1747, but this does not exclude the possibility that he retains a notion of inertia that is more Leibnizian (GSK, AA 1:155; Watkins 2013, p.  431). See also Pollok on Kant’s 1756 view of inertia (2002, pp. 75–6). Kant’s view in 1747 certainly appears similar to Euler’s notion of inertia as a power of preservation rather than a dead force (Euler 2009, pp. 189–19). 18. Kant thus ends up calling the inertial force to preserve motion a body’s “moving force,” which is precisely the terminology that he is resisting in 1747 by criticizing Wolffian philosophy (MonPh, AA 1:485; GSK, AA 1:18). 19. This “ontological isolationism” (Edwards 2000, p. 74) often leads scholars to think that this means that space is a sort of accident of bodies, defining their situation and not their intrinsic properties. But the (divine) superaddition of a relational nature to metaphysically simple substances cannot be thought of as a purely extrinsic (relational) feature of those substances. It is a superaddition to their essence and powers. 20. For a relationist reading that explicitly takes substances to be bodies, see Buroker (1981, p. 39). 21. Because the 1747 treatise is focused on this force of self-sustaining motion, Buroker argues that Kant cannot be regarded as accepting Leibniz’s dynamical physics (Buroker 1972, p. 158). She also argues that he does not offer a dynamical theory of matter, but the theory of propagation (at GSK, AA 1:24) seems to be such a theory. She also argues that Kant’s

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arrives at a dynamical theory in 1756 and that he does not have one in the 1755 ­dissertation on the ether, but this seems simply to ignore the fact that he does have dynamical (i.e. force-based as opposed to dead atomism) theory of matter in the cosmology. Contrary to Buroker, see Calinger (1979, p. 350). 22. Caruso and Xavier (2015) argue that Kant does not establish the three-­ dimensionality of space but only of extension, but their argument depends on Kant being a relationist. 23. A variety of outlines of this argument have been given, such as Carpenter (2001), Butts (1984, pp. 99–102), Shell (1996, pp. 12–13), and Watkins (2005, pp. 104–6). 24. Friedman describes this as importing “Newton’s second law of motion into the very heart of the monadology” (Friedman 1992, p. 5). While this suggests a connection between Kant’s living force and inertia, it is important to note that Kant has a quite distinct, metaphysical notion of force at work here. 25. Kant’s extremely uncharitable reading of pre-established harmony comes directly from his teacher, Knutzen (2009, p. 55). 26. This empirical aspect of the argument is noted by Edwards (2000, p. 79). 27. See Massimi and De Bianchi (2013, pp. 487–8). 28. On Wolff’s view see, Stan (2009, p. 33). 29. In the Herder lectures on metaphysics from the 1760s, Kant is clearer that we cannot think of the connection of substances in a world as being spatial until we think of “material elements” (impenetrable extension) (V-­Met/ Herder, AA 28:44). 30. On the influence of Baumgarten on this early work, see Kuehn (2001, pp.  25–6) and Baumgarten (2013, pp.  22–33). Beyond the esteem that Kant seemed to always have for Baumgarten and the fact that he used his works as his textbooks in several of his lectures, I find that often what is assumed and, thus, obscure in Kant’s metaphysics is often made clearer by turning to those distinctions as they appear in Baumgarten’s Metaphysics. 31. For an important account of the movement from logical notions to being via the notion of connection in Baumgarten, see Nuzzo (2018). 32. As Edwards notes, Kant “supposes that the knower is faced with the cognizable facticity or actuality of the reciprocal connection of all substances” (Edwards 2000, p. 79). It is “empirically manifest.” 33. The notion of “receiving” force is a bad translation. Kant’s word is erdulden, which means to simply undergo or to suffer. The notion is from Baumgarten (2013, §139). 34. In the 1760s, Kant comes to deny the notion of a power of inertia (vim inertiae) and merely accepts a simple notion of inertial force (inertiam), because he thinks of the power of inertia as meaning that an object might

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move itself (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:46). My sense is that even in the 1755 Universal Natural History there are moments where this power to move remains, which conflicts with Newton’s laws, as Kant comes to see in his lectures. 35. For example, see Edwards (2000, p. 75). 36. Watkins recognizes that Kant’s view of force is simply of something “essentially active,” but he does not seem to grant that this derivation may be working with a notion of forces other than motion (Watkins 2003, p. 7). 37. We should be careful when Kant says that souls are in a location (GSK, AA 1:20–1). In the metaphysical writings, it is clear that substances are virtually present in space via their effects. For example, Shell takes the soul to be in space as an actual presence, rather than a mere virtual one (Shell 1996, p. 21). On being in but not filling space as part of Kant’s inheritance from Descartes, see Ferrini (2018, p. 19). In the 1755 cosmology, Kant says that an “infinite distance” exists between “the capacity to think and the motion of matter, between the reasoning mind and the body” (NTH, AA 1:355). 38. The fact that Kant asserts that motions are merely “external triggers” and that the true acting force of substances comes from a “source in the body’s inner natural force itself” strikes some as an utter collapse and a slide back into pre-established harmony (GSK, AA 1:148; Schönfeld 2000, p. 54). 39. Nowhere does Kant explicitly accept the relational view of space from Knutzen that simply defines space as “the order of coexistent things” (Knutzen 2009, p. 61). Given how widespread such a view was (see Wolff 2009, p.  38), that Kant did not avail himself of it openly suggests he is employing a different conception. 40. Newton too had spoken of “particles of space,” which exist “always,” although it is not clear what to make of such an idea within his ontology (Newton 1999, p. 941). 41. Schönfeld argues that Kant gives an “explication of Leibniz’s dynamic plenum” in which the “presence” of force reaches outward through “an absence or emptiness,” thereby transforming “void into space” (Schönfeld 2006a, p. 38). Schönfeld aligns this idea with a modern scientific vision of “cosmic expansion” in a “void as quantum energy vacuum” (Schönfeld 2006a, p.  38). He then says that “the placing of force within the field curdles the presence into parts” and then draws upon the Physical Monadology’s account of the formation of composite matter to explain this (Schönfeld 2006a, p.  39). The problem here is that Schönfeld seems to have six different conceptions of space at work: (1) void, (2) original expansion of force, (3) “dynamic spacelets,” (4) the “smallest bubbles of matter,” (5) “geometric points, indivisible and non-extended,” and (6) the formal principle of three dimensionality that governs “the rate of the flow from the well into the field” (Schönfeld 2006a, p. 39). On my view, space

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is only number three. Both one, two, and five are inventions of Schönfeld with no textual evidence. Number four requires repulsive force and is part of his theory of composite bodies. The sixth notion is not space but is the law of space in monads and in the divine mind. 42. Although Kant does not call space a fluid, his view is surely related to the fluid plenum theories of space of Leibniz and Huygens (Massimi 2011). 43. Schönfeld attempts to defend his thesis when he interprets the idea of resistance being infinitely small to mean that it “would be nil,” which he attempts to make a contradiction because Kant has said it is in principle measurable (Schönfeld 2000, p. 43). But of course, infinitely small does not mean “nil.” 44. Calinger (1979) reads the 1755 cosmology as an entirely mechanical-­ mathematical, Newtonian endeavor. See also Orr (2016, pp.  525–6), Findlay (1981, pp.  70–1), and Gardner (1999, p.  14). Friedman sees Kant’s cosmology as relying entirely on “Newtonian forces of attraction and repulsion” (Friedman 1992, pp. 13–4). The non-Newtonian nature of Kant’s notions of force (attraction and repulsion) is discussed by Warren (2010), Massimi (2011), Massimi and de Bianchi (2013), and Smith (2013). Theological differences between Kant and Newton are elaborated by Watkins (2013) and Kanterian (2018, pp. 97, 100–106). 45. Schönfeld clearly sees some unorthodox aspects of Kant’s view in 1755 and his “quasi-Leibnizian, metaphysical understanding of force,” so I do not see the value of arguing in favor of a major conversion to Newtonianism (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 97, 111). 46. The relation of these sorts of fluid or ether accounts of space and Newton is discussed in Grant (1981, pp. 240–247). 47. An overview of Kant’s views on theodicy and optimism in the pre-­Critical and Critical era is found in Rukgaber (2019). 48. On Kant’s use of Pope, see Werkmeister (1980, pp. 10–11). On this optimism in Baumgarten, see Look (2018, p. 19) 49. Although Watkins points out some of Kant’s divergences from Newton, particularly theological ones, I find his characterization of the cosmological project as “fundamentally Newtonian” and “purely mechanistic” misleading (Watkins 2013, p. 433). See also Orr (2016, p. 525). 50. On the influence of the atomists on Kant, see Shea (1986, pp. 116–118). 51. “(Coherence) in the power of impenetrability is (definition) the power of repulsion” (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:46). Wilson associates repulsion with “lighter particles” because Kant illustrates repulsion through vapors, but that those phenomena illustrate repulsion and that repulsion is tied to the ether (the matter of light and heat) does not mean that it is found in one set of particles (atoms or bodies)  and not another, heavier type (Wilson 2017, p. 260).

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52. For Leibniz on this subject, see Duarte (2015). 53. Schönfeld says that Kant’s chaos of “points” are “filling space” and that they are “particles” with “inertial and gravitational forces” that act on “mass” and result in collisions (Schönfeld 2006b, p. 52). 54. See Van der Wall (2004). 55. Massimi (2011) seems to agree on this being a shift from a Leibnizian, resistant plenum in 1747 to a Newtonian non-resistant ether in 1755. 56. Schönfeld recognizes this vision of the “world soul” at work in the cosmology, but it is awkwardly combined with a mechanistic description of the workings of nature (Schönfeld 2006b, p. 56). 57. On Kant and the notion of the World-Soul, see Tonelli (1969). For details of this tradition of thinking in Kant and his predecessors, see Vassányi (2011). The connection between our soul and God is stated in a poetic moment in the 1755 cosmology: “The whole of nature, which has a universal harmonious relationship with the pleasure of the divinity, cannot fill that reasonable creature that is at one with this original source of all perfection with anything other than everlasting satisfaction” (NTH, AA 1:322). 58. Polonoff reads it as the ether or quintessence (Polonoff 1973, p. 134). 59. Although Massimi points to 1763s Only Possible Argument as “one of the earliest texts where Kant put forward seminal ideas about the lawfulness of nature,” it seems to me that the location of the necessity of the laws of nature in the inherent (albeit created and thus contingent) nature of material reality is already at the core of the 1755 cosmology (Massimi 2014, p. 491) . 60. As Blumenberg puts it, creation and deterioration both spread in concentric waves (Blumenberg 1987, pp. 585–9). 61. Blumenberg calls it a “homogenous material medium” but does not clearly distinguish it from ordinary matter (Blumenberg 1987, p. 588). He does see that the expanse of the universe is “productive force” and at times this notion of a “medium” seems distinct from bodies with “mass” (Blumenberg 1987, p. 592) 62. Earman thinks that Kant’s arguments in 1786 even refer to a “material space consisting of … some sort of subtle matter” (Earman 1989, p. 78). 63. Although the 1791 edition this paragraph is heavily edited and modified, it retains the idea that the Grundstoff has a teleological endeavor: “hat die Materie eine Bestrebung, such durch eine naturliche Entwicklung zu einer vollkonnern Verfassung zu bilden” (Gensichen 1791, pp. 170–2). 64. Kant does seem to identify greater strength in force with that strong force spreading out and occupying greater space than weaker cells of force (NTH, AA 1:264). I think Polonoff is wrong to think of such occupation as impenetrability as opposed to simply the reach of attractive force (Polonoff 1973, p. 125).

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65. “Anfänglich langsam (durch die chemische Ansiehung), darauf aber in schellen Graden (durch die so genannte Newtonische) fortwächset, aber in eben dem Verhältniss, als diese Masse sich vermehrt, auch mit starkerer Kraft die umgebenden Theile zu seiner Vereinigung bewegt.” On this shift, see Ferrini (2004). On some of the differences between the 1755 work and Genischen’s 1791 “Authentic Summary,” see Blumenberg (1987, pp. 579–586). Kant himself states in a footnote in 1755 that “Newtonian attraction alone” is insufficient to explain the initial interactions of “small particles of such exceptional fineness” and weakness (NTH, AA 1:267). 66. On the reception of both in Germany, see Ahnert (2004). Polonoff likens Kant’s notion of attractive force to the “specific attractive virtue of the Alchemists and the Cambridge Neo-Platonists” (Polonoff 1973, p. 117). 67. This temporal priority is noted by Polonoff (1973, p. 127). 68. Massimi (2011) describes the repulsive force in the cosmology in mechanical terms, in terms of contact (impenetrability) and resisting space. 69. Ferrini (2000) argues that Kant moves in the 1760s toward a concept of force inspired by “chemical affinity” and away from a more mechanistic one in the 1755 cosmology. Obviously, I think that there are elements of such a chemical affinity approach already in 1755. 70. See Massimi (2011) for the significance of these phenomena in theories of matter following Newton. 71. Kant sent his 1747 treatise to Euler. See Kant’s 1749 letter to Euler in his correspondence (Br pp. 45–6). 72. Edwards and Schönfeld argue for the prominence of the ether theory in Kant’s later work (Edwards and Schönfeld 2006, p. 114). Kant seems to have first begun to give the ether a more central role in his natural philosophy in notes from the 1770s, where he claims that the ether is foundation of the connection of all things and that it gives birth to all bodies (AA 14:295, 336). In The Only Possible Argument from 1763, he still sees the ether as a special “operative matter” of heat, light, electrical energy and magnetism that seems to radiate through “all of space” (BDG, AA 2:113). 73. I have not stressed the importance of the notion of the continuous or flowing quantity of the natural world, which Kaulbach sees as a concern even in Kant’s early works (Kaulbach 1965, p. 73). It strikes me as something that becomes more prominent later in Kant’s thinking. 74. The idea that forces manifest as undulating waves or “vibrations” is an alternative to particle and body-based conceptions of Kant’s theory of nature. See Kaulbach (1965, p. 74). 75. I agree with Massimi (2011) that Kant’s view is a combination of the material theory found in Descartes (i.e. a dynamical ether acting on passive corpuscles) and a mechanical one (i.e. all forces are found in dynamical corpuscles) more associated with Newtonian thought. Massimi falsely attri-

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butes to Kant a resurrection of the “material ether” as a response to the rejection of absolute space. Space is not made by the ether (heat, light). Attraction precedes the ether. The ether emerges from repulsive force. 76. Edwards claims that Kant’s cosmology “contains a proof of empty space,” but then admits that it may not be “entirely devoid of matter” (Edwards 2000, pp. 115–6). 77. Rather than seeing the elementary particles as bodies, Kaulbach identifies them as “eine Quelle des Lebens” out of which matter qua body is built (Kaulbach 1965, p. 72). 78. On the duality of this account, see Polonoff (1973, p. 126). 79. Kanterian (2018, p. 129) is one of the few writers in English who notes these and similar remarks by Kant (Kanterian 2018, p.  129). While Kanterian is right to see theology and the conception of God as central to Kant’s pre-­Critical picture, the importance of a “two-worlds” ontology is not recognized, which is unfortunate as it would greatly support Kanterian’s own account by showing its rational foundations. 80. Kanterian’s account of the relationship of space, gravity, and matter is a bit puzzling. He remarks that “co-existence characterizes space, while gravity characterizes matter” (Kanterian 2018, p. 99). Space is not the co-­existence of bodies in space. Space is the product of the co-existence of metaphysical substances. Gravity or attractive force characterizes primary matter but is only half the story of secondary matter. Gravity is also characterized as the phenomenal appearance of the workings of what is “inner” (i.e. representational) within the objects of the world. 81. Friedman points to such passages as Kant’s assertion of “the Newtonian doctrine of divine omnipresence,” which is what allows him to say that space is “phenomenal” but “real” and not “ideal” (Friedman 1992, p. 7). But this does not solve the problem of whether space is ideal or real given that God’s creative and sustaining presence is only to metaphysical substances themselves (i.e. to what is inner), at least on Kant’s view as stated in the New Elucidation. 82. The Hamburg account of Thomas Wright’s work which inspired Kant’s cosmology states this abhorrence of emptiness in both space and time as a certainty (Kant 1969, p. 175). See Grant (1981, pp. 67–100). 83. Heimsoeth argues that “space and everything spatial are only a sequence, only the outer phenomenon and secondary but nonetheless real product of the community of substances constituted by God’s virtual omnipresence (that is, the presence of force in all monads). In this way the spatial world presents itself here as the phenomenon of divine omnipresence” (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 182). While this is largely correct, God is not present to monads as the power of force. God’s preserving power relates to substances as non-­spatial, representational entities and not as spatial ones.

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Therefore, Heimsoeth is wrong to think that the critical theory of space is motivated by the difficulties of making sense of God’s omnipresence to a world of space and force (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 183). 84. See Heimsoeth on the idea of space as an attribute of God, a doctrine associated with Henry More, Newton, and Spinoza, as well as Leibniz’s rejection of such an idea (Heimsoeth 1956, pp. 102–112). Heimsoeth stresses that Kant opposed the “pantheistic” tendencies of More, Newton, and Spinoza, and simply accepted “Leibnizian pluralism,” but he at least accepted a metaphorical use of concepts such as the world-soul and omnipresence to describe natura naturans (Heimsoeth 1956, p. 116). 85. Kaulbach (1965, p. 71). 86. Kant clearly borrows the idea from Wright, who identifies the gravitational center of the universe with the seat of God (Kant 1969, p. 180). 87. Whether he was a close reader of Newton or not, he surely knew these arguments from Euler (Euler 1967, p. 123). 88. I think it also possible that there may be an up-down directionality to space itself as well, because there is “a common plane […], which has to be thought of as extending through the entire heavens” (NTH, AA 1:231).

References Ahnert, Thomas. 2004. Newtonianism in Early Enlightenment Germany, c. 1720 to 1750: Metaphysics and the Critique of Dogmatic Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35: 471–491. Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Baker, John Tull. 1935. Some Pre-critical Developments of Kant’s Theory of Space and Time. The Philosophical Review 44: 267–282. Baumgarten, Alexander. 2013. Metaphysics. Trans. C.  Fugate and J.  Hymers. London: Bloomsbury. Beck, Lewis White. 1969. Early German Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1987. The Genesis of the Copernican World. Cambridge: MIT Press. Boscovich, Roger Joseph. 1966. A Theory of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brittan, Gordon. 1978. Kant’s Theory of Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Buchdahl, Gerd. 1969. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins Descartes to Kant. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Buroker, Jill Vance. 1972. Kant, the Dynamical Tradition, and the Role of Matter in Explanation. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 153–164.

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———. 1981. Space and Incongruence: The Origins of Kant’s Idealism. Dordrecht: D. Riedel. ———. 1991. The role of Incongruent Counterparts in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. James Van Cleve and Robert Frederick, 315–340. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Butts, Robert. 1984. Kant and the Double Government Methodology. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Calinger, Ronald. 1979. Kant and Newtonian Science: The Pre-critical Period. Isis 70: 348–362. Carpenter, Andrew. 2001. Kant’s First Solution to the Mind/Body Problem. In Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX.  Internationalen Kant-­ Kongressess, Band II: Sektionen I-V, 3–12. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Carrier, Martin. 1992. Kant’s Relational Theory of Absolute Space. Kant-Studien 83: 399–416. Caruso, Francisco, and R. Moreira Xavier. 2015. On Kant’s First Insight into the Problem of Space Dimensionality and Its Physical Foundations. Kant-Studien 106: 547–560. De Risi, Vicenzo. 2007. Geometry and Monadology: Leibniz’s Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space. Basel: Birkhäuser. Descartes, René. 1982. Principles of Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Duarte, Shane. 2015. Leibniz and Prime Matter. Journal of the History of Philosophy 53: 435–460. Earman, John. 1989. World Enough and Space-Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1991. Kant, Incongruous Counterparts, and the Nature of Space and Space-Time. In The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. James Van Cleve and Robert Frederick, 131–150. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Edwards, Jeffery. 2000. Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge: On Kant’s Philosophy of Material Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edwards, Jeffery, and Martin Schönfeld. 2006. Kant’s Material Dynamics and the Field View of Physical Reality. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33: 109–123. Euler, Leonhard. 1746. Physical Investigations on the Nature of the Smallest Parts of Matter. http://eulerarchive.maa.org/docs/translations/E091en.pdf ———. 1967. On Absolute Space and Time. In The Changeless Order; The Physics of Space, Time and Motion, ed. Arnold Koslow, 115–125. New York: George Braziller. ———. 2009. Letters to a German Princess. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials, ed. Eric Watkins, 180–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrini, Cinzia. 2000. Testing the Limits of Mechanical Explanation in Kant’s Pre-­ critical Writings. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 82: 297–331.

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———. 2004. Heavenly Bodies, Crystals and Organisms: The Key Role of Chemical Affinity in Kant’s Critical Cosmogony. In Eredità kantiane (1804–2004): Questioni emergenti e problemi irrisolti, ed. Cinzia Ferrini, 277–317. Napoli: Bibliopolis. ———. 2018. Descartes’s Legacy in Kant’s Notions of Physical Influx and Space-­ Filling: ‘True Estimation’ and ‘Physical Monadology. Kant-Studien 109: 9–46. Findlay, J.N. 1981. Kant and the Transcendental Object. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Friedman, Michael. 1992. Kant and the Exact Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. Newton and Kant on Absolute Space: From Theology to Transcendental Philosophy. In Constituting Objectivity, ed. Michel Bitbol, Pierre Kerszberg, and Jean Petitot, 35–50. Dordrecht: Springer. Gardner, Sebastian. 1999. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. London: Routledge. Garnett, Christopher, Jr. 1939. The Kantian Philosophy of Space. Port Washington: Kennikat Press. Gensichen, Johann Friedrich. 1791. William Herschel über den Bau des Himmels. Köningsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius. Grant, Edward. 1981. Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatfield, Gary. 1990. The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2006. Kant on the Perception of Space (and Time). In The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer, 61–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1956. Studien zur Philosophie Immanuel Kants: Metaphysische Ursprünge und Ontologische Grundlagen. Köln: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag. ———. 1967. Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism. In Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke Gram, 158–199. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Jauernig, Anja. 2008. Kant’s Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy: Contra the Leibnizians, but Pro Leibniz. In Kant and the Early Moderns, ed. Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse, 41–63. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1969. Universal Natural History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1992. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Lectures on Metaphysics. Trans. and ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Correspondence. Trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2012. Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kanterian, Edward. 2018. Kant, God and Metaphysics: The Secret Thorn. London/ New York: Routledge. Kaulbach, Friedrich. 1965. Der Philosophische Begriff der Bewegung: Studien zu Aristoteles, Leibniz und Kant. Köln und Graz: Böhlau Verlag. Knutzen, Martin. 2009. System of Efficient Causes. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials, ed. Eric Watkins, 54–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuehn, Manfred. 2001. Kant’s Teachers in the Exact Sciences. In Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins, 11–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laywine, Allison. 1993. Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy. Atascadero: Ridgeview. Leibniz, G.W. 1956. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Look, Brandon. 2018. Baumgarten’s Rationalism. In Baumgarten and Kant on Metaphysics, ed. C.  Fugate and J.  Hymers, 10–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Gottfried. 1955. Kant’s Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Trans. P.G. Lucas. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Massimi, Michela. 2011. Kant’s Dynamical Theory of Matter in 1755, and Its Debt to Speculative Newtonian Experimentalism. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 42: 525–543. ———. 2014. Prescribing Laws to Nature. Part 1. Newton, the Pre-critical Kant, and the Problems About the Lawfulness of Nature. Kant-Studien 105: 491–508. Massimi, Michela, and Silvia De Bianchi. 2013. Cartesian Echoes in Kant’s Philosophy of Nature. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 44: 481–492. Melnick, Arthur. 1973. Kant’s Analogies of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newton, Isaac. 1952. Opticks. New York: Dover. ———. 1999. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Trans. I. Cohen and A. Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004. Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2018. Determination, Determinability, and the Structure of Ens: Baumgarten’s Ontology and Beyond. In Baumgarten and Kant on Metaphysics, ed. C. Fugate and J. Hymers, 23–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orr, James. 2016. Teleology as a Theological Problem in Kant’s Pre-critical Thought. Modern Theology 32: 522–543. Parsons, Charles. 1992. The Transcendental Aesthetic. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, 62–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pollok, Konstantin. 2002. “Fabricating a World in Accordance with Mere Fantasy…”? The Origins of Kant’s Critical Theory of Matter. Review of Metaphysics 56: 61–97. Polonoff, Irving. 1973. Force, Cosmos, Monads and Other Themes of Kant’s Early Thought, KantStudien Erganzungshefte 107. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann. Rukgaber, Matthew. 2019. The Implied Theodicy of Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: Love as a Response to Radical Evil. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 85: 213–233. s’ Gravesande, W.J. 1747. Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy. 6th ed. London: Printed for W. Innys, et al. Schönfeld, Martin. 2000. The Philosophy of Young Kant: The Precritical Project. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006a. Kant’s Early Dynamics. In A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird, 33–46. Malden: Blackwell. ———. 2006b. Kant’s Early Cosmology. In A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird, 47–62. Malden: Blackwell. Shea, William. 1986. Filled with Wonder: Kant’s Cosmological Essay, The Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In Kant’s Philosophy of Physical Science, ed. Robert Butts, 95–124. Dordrecht: D. Riedel. Shell, Susan. 1996. Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sklar, Lawrence. 1974. Space, Time, and Spacetime. Berkeley: University of California Press. Slowik, Edward. 2016. Situating Kant’s Pre-critical Monadology: Leibnizian Ubeity, Monadic Activity and Idealist Unity. Early Science and Medicine 21: 332–349. Smith, Sheldon. 2013. Does Kant Have a Pre-Newtonian Picture of Force in the Balance Argument? An Account of How the Balance Argument Works. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44: 470–480. Stan, Marius. 2009. Kant’s Early Theory of Motion: Metaphysical Dynamics and Relativity. Leibniz Review 19: 29–61. Tonelli, Giorgio. 1969. Divinae Particula Aurae: Genial Ideas, Organism, and Freedom: A Note on Kant’s Reflection N. 938. Journal of the History of Philosophy 7: 192–198. Van der Wall, Ernestine. 2004. Newtonianism and Religion in the Netherlands. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 35: 493–514. Van Musschenbroek, Peter. 1744. The Elements of Natural Philosophy. Vol. 1. London: J. Nourse. Vassányi, Miklós. 2011. Anima Mundi: The Rise of the World Soul Theory in Modern German Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Warren, Daniel. 2010. Kant on Attractive and Repulsive Force: The Balancing Argument. In Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and the Philosophy of Science, 193–241. Chicago: Open Court. Watkins, Eric. 2003. Forces and Causes in Kant’s Early Pre-critical Writings. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34: 5–27. ———. 2005. Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. Kant’s (Anti-) Newtonianism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44: 429–437. Werkmeister, William Henry. 1980. Kant: The Architectonic and Development of his Philosophy. Lasalle: Open Court. Westphal, Kenneth. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Catherine. 2017. The Building Force of Nature and Kant’s Teleology of the Living. In Kant and the Laws of Nature, ed. Michela Massimi and Angel Breitenbach, 256–274. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, Christian. 2009. Rational Thoughts on God, the World and the Soul of Human Beings, also All Things in General. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials, ed. E.  Watkins, 7–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Substances, Space, and Causality in the Early Metaphysical Writings

Interpreting the New Elucidation and the Physical Monadology Kant’s metaphysics in the two Latin dissertations from 1755 and 1756 will be the focus of the following chapter. These central texts of Kant’s pre-­ Critical thought will be shown to support and deepen the accounts of space, substance, and matter that I have advanced so far. With the picture of his physics from the previous chapter and the metaphysics from the present one, a fairly complete picture of Kant’s early worldview will be on display. Ultimately, I believe that Kant’s views about space and time remain fairly continuous up to and including the 1768 article on space. Showing such continuity in Kant’s pre-Critical thought (as opposed to a patchwork theory filled with fits and starts) is the aim of these chapters. The two works discussed in the present chapter have been the backbone of many previous interpretations. While they do not say much about space, they do give an idealistic conception of reality—where that implies a division between phenomena and noumena—that has not been adequately recognized in the secondary literature. I will be rejecting readings of the New Elucidation that attempt to find within it a grand unification of Newtonian and Leibnizian worldviews.1 I will argue, in fact, that we find a strict division between those worlds. These two worlds share a “universal harmony” (PND, AA 1:415). Actions in one of those worlds do issue in real effects in the other, but this is a

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connection made via representation. This gap between forces and representations is not fully explained, nor is there a reduction of one set of entities (substances and their internal processes) to the other (bodies and their external forces). Kant’s goals in the New Elucidation are to provide a criticism of the purely logical uses of the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason, a sketch of his onto-theological argument for the existence of God from the notion of possibility, a basic statement of compatibilism about freewill, and an attempt to argue that the causal nexus that binds all things into a world makes three principles of metaphysical cognition inescapable. Those principles concern the conservation of all reality (proposition X), the dependency of change internal to substances on external connection among substances (proposition XII), and the dependency of the unity by which substances make up a world on the divine understanding, which constitutes a second proof of the existence of God (proposition XIII). While this work is often read as advocating for a rather Newtonian conception of the natural universe and its causal nexus, with some nonNewtonian theological elements, I will show that the ontological picture that we receive is rather more complex than that.2 Ultimately, Kant’s supposed Newtonization of substances and their interactions ignores the fact that the inner states of simple substances are modeled on representational states and that the causal nexus connecting those inner states to an outer world takes place through a dual (metaphysical and physical) process.3 Substances are not windowless and, thus, have some receptivity to the world external to them. They act through their own power, changing their state but only in response to changes in the world and in a way that is coordinated by an inherent representation of the world instilled in them by God. That is to say, the changes in representational states of substances take place because they respond to the altering situation via the rules that give them their own innate representation of the world. This vision should be familiar to readers of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, for one can see within it the notion of an agency that has both receptivity and the power to act. This allows it to respond both to its situation and to, what we might call, its a priori map of the world. Of the few scholars of the early works, it is Heimsoeth who has clearly seen that the “dualism between receptivity and spontaneity” is essential to all of Kant’s thinking, whereas many scholars focus on this as a definitive feature only of the Critical turn (1967, p. 160). All substances from “dynamic substances, whose result is matter” to the “cognitive and volitional human being … must have a receptive side in addition to the spontaneity that essentially characterizes

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them as substances” (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 161). This is to say that they have representations of the world. The broadly Newtonian picture of Kant’s pre-Critical ontology is reinforced, according to many scholars, by the Physical Monadology of 1756. Yet, I will claim that contrary to what one might expect based on the title alone, this work does not simply convert monads into physical atoms. Instead, the simplicity of ultimate substances is a feature of their metaphysically “inner” properties. The presence of force and, ultimately, of material atoms in the world is the “virtual presence” of metaphysical substances. The monad is only physical in its external presence and cannot be thought of as a point in space or as having circumscriptive ubeity, which is the way both points and bodies are in space. This constitutes a rather significant deviation from standard interpretations of Kant’s ideas, but it aligns with both his metaphysics and physics from 1755. It also shows how the idealistic division between things-in-themselves and things as they appear is a permanent fixture of Kant’s thinking and how the physicality of monads is attributable only to the latter.

The Metaphysics of the Causal Nexus in the New Elucidation It would be rather shocking if Kant’s 1755 New Elucidation presented us with a fundamentally different conception of substance and space than was found in the natural scientific writings. Not only has very little time elapsed in Kant’s development, but the work itself does not elaborate his theory of space or matter in any detail. Kant’s aim in this work is to “throw some light … on the first principles of our cognition” by clarifying the principles of contradiction, identity, sufficient reason, succession, and co-existence (PND, AA 1:387). I am going to pass quickly over section one the New Elucidation which concerns the principle of contradiction, which he calls the principle of identity. Quite simply, Kant takes this principle to be equivalent to positive and negative forms of analytic truths, which underlie the argument “A is B. B. Therefore, A.” and “A is Not B. B. Therefore, Not A.”4 Kant is clear that this principle lacks “fruitfulness in generating corollaries” and is merely a basic notion that underlies analytic truth claims regarding a subject and its predicates (PND, AA 1:391).5 It is rather odd then that Schönfeld believes that Kant draws ontological conclusions from the principle of identity (contradiction), such as the claim that the world

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has a “consistent structure” (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 136–7). He is drawing on an interpretation by Reuscher that the “intelligible elements” in every subject and predicate have existence (realia) by being the (material) ground of possibility of these ideas (Reuscher 1977, pp.  20–22).6 It is important to mention this because Schönfeld uses this idea to argue for interpreting the pre-Critical project as an attempt to establish a “one-­ world” ontology. This demand for “consistent structure” supposedly means that Kant cannot be a metaphysical dualist, when in fact he surely is. God is a metaphysically distinct sort of substance; simple substances cannot be thought of as composite, material bodies; and there are substances that “cannot constitute a matter” called souls (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:47). Therefore, I am rejecting Schönfeld’s most general characterization of the pre-Critical project as attempting to establish a metaphysically realistic “model of nature” that synthesizes conflicting notions between metaphysics (simple substance, freedom) and experience (bodies, physics) without resorting to “dualism” (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 135–7). While I do not want to belabor this point, I do want to note that pushing the pre-­ Critical Kant toward a deductivist metaphysics seems to run counter to the clearly anti-Wolffian approach that is a constant feature of his works.7 In order to combat the rationalist and transcendental realist reading of the New Elucidation, it helps to see how Kant divides the principle of sufficient reason into an epistemic principle (consequentially determining ground) and an ontological one (antecedently determining ground). Ultimately, this is a significant step in the development of his metaphysical method because it forces most truth claims about the world to be attached to (antecedently determining) causal grounds.8 The consequentially determining ground is said to be “the ground that, or the ground of knowing” (PND, AA 1:392). Kant explains this as follows: “the satellites of Jupiter” only “determine this truth” of the velocity of light “consequentially.”9 This is because they are the reason why we know the velocity of light, but they are not the reason why light has the velocity it does.10 An antecedently determining ground is “the reason why, or the ground of being or becoming” (PND, AA 1:392). So the causal explanation of why “the motion of light involves a specifiable expenditure of time” is the antecedently determining ground, in this case the “elasticity of the elastic globules” of the atmosphere which slow down light (PND, AA 1:393).11 Thus, there is a causal reason (atmospheric globules) why the predicate of a measurable velocity is found in light and why the opposite predicate of being instantaneous is excluded. These are not analytic claims about light:

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being both instantaneous and non-instantaneous seem predicable of light at different times and so neither follow from its logical essence. I see no evidence that what is at issue here is that Kant is accepting that there is a “unified law of causality” called “determining-by-a-reason” that gives rise to both “efficient and spontaneous causation” as “two corresponding ontological subprinciples” (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 139, 148).12 To impose such a reading on the New Elucidation is to force these early, almost Humean sections that criticize deductive rationalist procedure into an attempted groundwork for a metaphysically realistic “one-world” ontology. But this is in conflict with rather substantial textual evidence that Kant supports an idealistic “two-world” ontology, including two different forms of causation. We can begin to see that idealism when Kant goes on to apply this division between epistemic and ontological determining grounds to the sorts of reasoning at the heart of traditional metaphysics. While the doctrine that “nothing is true without a determining ground” does not distinguish between the types of grounds, it is clear that everything that “exists contingently” depends on antecedently determining grounds (causality). To know whether and why such beings are the way they are requires us to investigate them (PND, AA 1:396). Can it be that pure analytic knowledge about subjects and predicates, like triangles and three-sidedness, can allow us to conclude “whatever is real in the concept exists” (PND, AA 1:396)? Kant’s answer is that one can only believe that insofar as we think of all truths as being essentially analytic and existing “in God, the source of all reality” (PND, AA 1:396). But this is not what Kant actually means when he says that “whatever is real in every possible concept exists” and does so “in a single being” (PND, AA 1:395).13 We must distinguish different understandings of what it is that is “real” in every possible concept. Some scholars take this to mean that Kant is simply saying that the content of every positive predicate must exist in God, but this would mean that many entirely relational (and un-Godlike) predicates might be said belong to God. However, in Kant’s lectures, he says that the concept of the ens realissimum is the concept of a thing that consists of “pure realities”—possibility, existence, or “whatever kind of existence flows from this concept,” necessity, substance, unity, simplicity, infinity, duration, presence, and “others as well”—which he also calls pure “ontological predicates,” as well as “psychological predicates” (understanding, will), but not all predicates (AA 28:1020).14 So presumably the “universal internal predicates of a being” and the “internal disjunctive predicates of a being” as outlined by

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Baumgarten are “the real” in every concept. It is only in the case of God that these universal predicates can establish the existence of a being without appeal to antecedently determining grounds.15 So Kant’s position seems to be that the definition of a triangle, although analytically true, cannot establish the existence of having sides, enclosing space, being of a certain length, and so on, and is merely the assertion of the principle of identity, from which no existential corollaries follow (PND, AA 1:395). It is only in the case of God that “existence is prior to, or, if you prefer, identical with possibility” (PND, AA 1:396).16 Kant is clear that the identity that exists between some subject and its predicates is sufficient to establish some logical truths, but regarding “the case of existing things, it is necessary to search for the antecedently determining ground” or efficient cause, with the obvious exception of God (PND, AA 1:396). This brings Kant into conflict with Crusius who held that the actuality of freedom is its own determining cause (PND, AA 1:397). Kant is clear that he believes that freewill exists, which would seem to exclude determination in a preexisting ground, but he is no indeterminist like Crusius. Yet, Kant does not attempt to avoid the complete determination of all things as part of a necessary chain of causality. Instead, just as God’s action is necessary and stems from his nature, so also is human action necessary as an extension of how we are presently constituted internally (morally and psychologically). It is “called forth by nothing other than motives of the understanding applied to the will” (PND, AA 1:400).17 This is enough to affirm that both our actions and God’s have the “characteristic mark of freedom” (PND, AA 1:400). Schönfeld argues that Kant has two notions of causation (efficient and spontaneous), and though they differ in “their manner of determination,” they must be unified under a single notion of causation by a reason (Schönfeld 2000, p.  156). Of course, if “causation by a reason” is just a formal category that says that these are both types of causality, then of course this is true but is not in any way a unified account. While this discussion of freedom may seem like a diversion from my larger concern with space, time, and substance, what it shows us is that Kant is clearly considering the action of the mind and will being a different order of causation. Kant says that spontaneity of the will is simply necessitated action that is caused by “the representation of what is best” (PND, AA 1:402). It is no less determined than external action, albeit by a different type of antecedently determining grounds. Schönfeld attempts to argue that the will is not necessitated and that “the will inclines itself,” but this is simply not

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Kant’s view (Schönfeld 2000, p. 158). Kant argues that the pleasure that Caius feels (the motive) necessitates his action in such a way that it was “bound to happen” given that pleasure is his “representation of what is best” (PND, AA 1:402). This still counts as freedom, because it is wrong to say that the action was unavoidable, because many different motives via different representations of what is best are in principle available to Caius, who admits this in the lively dialogue about freedom. Schönfeld believes that Kant ends up “dangerously close to Crusius’s proposal” in which freedom is mere indifference, which Kant himself proclaims to go against all “sound reason” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  158; PND, AA 1:403; see also Kanterian 2018, pp. 134–5).18 But it only appears this way if one misunderstands Kant’s view, which is that a being acting consciously on its desires is free, even though it is clear that those desires, in conjunction with a representation of what is good, cause (or necessitate) the action. Schönfeld’s reading of “spontaneity” tends toward a notion of being uncaused and entirely self-determined. But Kant unequivocally says that “the certainty of all events, both physical occurrences and free actions, is determined” (PND, AA 1:403). In other words, our free actions are “determined by a fixed law and in a connection which is most certain,” but rather than a story of physical forces outside of us, the law here is a representation of what is good, and the forces at work are our desires and inclinations (PND, AA 1:400). Kant’s articulation of a compatibilist position shows that he was not attempting to marry a metaphysical conception of causation with a physical one and to arrive at a “reconciliation of the efficient causation of physical processes with the altogether different causal structure of freedom” (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 131, 160). Besides a proof for God based on the metaphysical claims about the material ground of all possibility, Kant’s New Elucidation is initially a rather restrained affair. Both its metaphysical and epistemic claims are committed to articulating the fundamental role of causality, even in his account of freedom. To establish the actual predicates of things, we must look to antecedently determining grounds, whether those are physical or psychological. Kant’s goal seems to be to simply clear up confusion regarding certain logical, epistemic, ontological, and causal principles that have been seen as central in metaphysics. But he becomes rather more ambitious near the end of the paper, claiming that the principle of determining ground leads to (1) the principle of conservation of the “quantity of absolute reality in the world,” (2) the principle of succession concerning the dependency of the change of the state of substances on the previous

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actions of other substances, and (3) the principle of co-existence that says that substances are connected by a common principle sustained by the divine understanding. Kant’s principle of determining ground (the causal principle of the ground of being) leads to the corollaries that “there is nothing in that which is grounded which was not in the ground” and that “there is no more in that which is grounded than there is in the ground” (PND, AA 1:406–7). What these principles amount to is the claim that there is an “immutable quantity of absolute reality in the universe” and that “everything happens in accordance with the order of nature” (PND, AA 1:408). Ultimately, the nexus of ground-grounded relations that make up the world are established in the inner nature of substantial realities that support the world and the laws governing them. While these corollaries are not typically discussed in the literature or seen as integral to the concluding sections on succession and co-existence, I believe that they are. In order to explicate this principle, Kant draws the following parallel: if we think of the mind containing an “infinite perception of the entire universe, which is always internally present to the soul,” then the formal element of the mind (the application of attention) may change as it illuminates different parts of that vision, but the material element (the infinite perception) does not (PND, AA 1:408). This absolute reality of the mind remains the same. While we are likely to think of that infinite perception as “the form” of the mind, he calls it the “material element of all ideas, which derives from connection with the universe” (indeed, with God), because it is what is most real (PND, AA 1:408). Reversing this form/ matter distinction will be crucial to the Critical turn. But in 1755, this model is used to show how modification among the relational appearances in nature is also not a change in the quantity of the underlying reality. So, in the case of force, motions are “not realities but appearances,” and while they may change, the underlying reality of force does not fundamentally alter and is governed by an “inner principle of action” (PND, AA 1:408). This means that we ought to say that the change of force relations in the interaction of two bodies in motion is entirely “relative,” because the sum total of effects can be viewed as essentially cancelling each other out from the perspective of absolute reality (PND, AA 1:407). Ultimately, it seems to me that we cannot really make sense of Kant’s concluding sections without taking this cosmic picture of how all reality exists as a whole of possibility in the inner principles of things, which he calls their material principle of reality. That idea seems to be that the

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material ground of the world is the mapping of all possibility, which is a function of the inner principles that guide metaphysical substances, much like the ultimate reality and material ground of the mind is an infinite vision of the universe. All change in the world (either in the empirical mind or by bodies) is an appearance whose underlying reality does not change. The world’s alterations are relational (in this context “formal”) appearances of a reality whose essence or “transcendental matter” remains fundamentally unaltered. If we fail to grasp the unchangeableness of the quantity of ultimate reality in the world and, thus, fail to understand what this means for his theory of substance, then we will not fully grasp what Heimsoeth called the central issue of “ontology” for Kant, that is, “the fact of connection” and “the combining functions by which substances which are in themselves isolated are bound to a world” (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 171). We know that all substances share the same degree of necessitation and their reality does not change, whether their inner worlds are governed by a conception of what is best (for substances that are minds with wills) or by “inner principles of action” directing force, which underlie bodies. The inner changes of state in substances are necessitated by previous internal states and determined by rules that govern those changes relative to an internally present, infinite, but obscure conception of the universe. It is this ideational possession that is the unchanging reality of all substance. Whether we consider the changing dynamics of motion or the shifting awareness of thought, these are both appearances that partially realize an aspect of that full reality. We can see the division between sensible and intelligible worlds is already well established in Kant’s thinking. His modified form of the doctrine of physical influence, which we might call a doctrine of “metaphysical influxus realis,” does not attempt to overcome, explain away, or unify these two worlds (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 162).19 Essentially, this idea of an absolute quantity of reality really only makes sense as a claim about substances, which he defined in 1747 as containing within themselves the complete source of all their determinations and as not needing to “stand in any connection with other things” (GSK, AA 1:22). Kant’s next two principles only make sense if we recognize this picture of ultimate reality, thought of as substances whose connection to the universe (and specifically to God) provides them with the “material element” of their existence as a set of principles or an infinite representation of the full scope of possibility.20

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The Principle of Succession: Physical Influence or Pre-established Harmony? According to Kant, his own demonstration of the principle of succession is “patently obvious,” although that does not stop him from giving three versions of it (PND, AA 1:411). His aim is to argue against the Wolffian– Leibnizian idea that “a simple substance is subject to constant change in virtue of an inner principle of activity” (PND, AA 1:411). This then is used to overturn pre-established harmony, although there are shared features between Kant’s view and the Leibnizian tradition that are too often overlooked.21 We will miss such connections if we reduce Kant’s theory of connection simply to an account of bodies in motion. Kant begins with the notion of a substance as an essence or the determining ground of the predicates of the being, which are all entirely, simultaneously present in the sense of the full material reality of the previous section (PND, AA 1:411). This is simply a function of what it is to be a simple being: a simple substance cannot, in effect, contain the grounds of its own opposite or any indeterminacy without losing its simplicity. While composite beings can contain relational properties and, thus, the grounds of opposite properties, simple beings possess their full essence and do not contain such relational predicates. Kant is right that his conclusion is patently obvious based on the definitions he offers. Change is a “succession of determinations,” whereby “the being is determined to the opposite of a certain determination which belongs to it” (PND, AA 1:411). If the inner principle of the being is the full reality of its possibility, like the infinite conception of the universe in a mind, then change of its determinations by its own inner power must be initiated by a reason from without. It is important to note that it is the Leibnizian position that change is solely in virtue of the substance’s own power which is rejected.22 Kant does not reject that the idea that the active power of the change of an internal state in a substance is the substance’s own.23 His view is that the causal (antecedently determining) ground of change still remains within the inner power of the substance, but the reason for this inner change is brought about by epistemic (consequently determining) grounds in which the contingent modes of the being alters. This change in situation then results in the substance acting and changing its state. It is not that substances would not have the power to change their states if they were disconnected from everything external. It is that they would not have a reason to do so. If this account is true, then the ontological problem of the interconnection of substances

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must be, at the same time, an explanation of the receptivity of consequently determining grounds (representation) as a fundamental power of substances. As Watkins notes, Kant is operating within a Wolffian framework in order to show how the changes of state and, thus, of the determinations of simple substances must come from the actions of external substances (Watkins 2005, pp. 114–125).24 We might say that he is undermining the Wolffian conclusions from within, although we must also recognize that a fundamentally empirical datum grounds Kant’s thinking: “all the things in the universe are found to be reciprocally connected with each other” (PND, AA 1:413, my emphasis). Now what many scholars fail to grasp is that the consequently determining ground of real force-based changes in the world (appearances) corresponds to a change of state or representation in substances. The mistake to be avoided here is to take Kant simply to be offering a “causal schema of a physical process” and the “ontological explication” of Newton’s laws of motion as the “mechanical patterns of bodies in nature” (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 149–50). Quite the opposite is the case. Kant is offering an account of the internal alterations of substances. He is not considering change merely to be of “bodies in motion” (Watkins 2005, p. 130; also Kanterian 2018, p. 140). Kant admits that change in external relation or connection between substances appears as motion, but what takes place internal to substances is an activation of the “inherent force,” resulting in a response by “an inner principle of action” or a change of state that is merely “directed by” the external relations (PND, AA 1:408). Without this inner–outer distinction, it may appear that he is attempting “to explain change in determinations [of substances] by appealing to the contingent and mutable relations between substances” (Watkins 2005, p. 134).25 But these contingent and mutable relations do not explain the change in substances. That can only be done through an account of how substances alter their own inner state according to their own inner principles and in response to both outer perceptions of the state of the world and a shared representation of that world. Kant’s picture is that substances change themselves according to their own principles and powers. Because those changes are a response to representational information about the state of the world and other substances, then those changes can be said to be grounded in the actions and states of affairs outside the substance.26 Throughout the New Elucidation, the story concerning substances and their determinations applies equally to the substances that compose minds

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and those that compose bodies, which is to say that his discussion cannot be simply reduced to an account of bodies in motion. If that were at the heart of the account, there would be no reason for him to argue that all substances are attached to an “organic body” for he would be simply talking about organic bodies from the start (PND, AA 1:412). The picture that we receive of what inner states and modifications of substances actually are is through the recognition that “the soul is subject (in virtue of inner sense) to inner changes,” which is to say that inner representational states are caused by the substance’s own previous representational states (PND, AA 1:411). But because Kant has argued that these changes of state require determining grounds outside of the soul and that the soul in isolation would not change, then there must be something with which its co-exists in “reciprocal connection”—namely, the body (PND, AA 1:411). We can say that all simple substances need bodies to act as the medium by which they receive representational information about the external world. According to Kant, the changes in representational state are “in conformity with external motion,” but the inner nature of the substance is not actually moved and is, instead, caused by other representational states in the substance and by the inner principle of action that is being directed by and harmonized with the representational information gathered by the body (PND, AA 1:412). Souls and the simple substances of matter are “bound by a law” that is “striving to produce representations,” and are united with a striving of the substances of the body “to produce a certain external motion” (PND, AA 1:412). This is not to say that the substances that make up matter are souls qua intellects or qua wills. We can think of the elements of matter as computational machines which have informational states.27 Kant’s picture is that the outer phenomenon of moving force merely triggers the inner, active forces that then act in determinate, lawful ways as a response to the external causes. Watkins maintains that these final sections are intended to establish the theory of physical influx, where I take that to mean not only that there is “causation between finite substances” but also that metaphysically simple substances exist in direct causal interconnection with bodies, motions, and other external phenomena (Watkins 2005, pp.  113, 8). However, as Baumgarten explains it, what separates advocates of the system of “universal physical influence” from advocates of the “system of universal pre-­ established harmony” is that the former deny that a substance “acts when it suffers from another substance of this world;” it does not “act through its own power in any of its harmonic alterations” and so all action is

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external and comes from other substances (collisions) (Baumgarten 2013, §451). Baumgarten rejects the idea that substances do not act or only act through external, imposed forces, because it implies that substances “would not be powers” (Baumgarten 2013, §451). Kant therefore agrees with Baumgarten and calls his own position “somewhat superior to the popular system of physical influence” (PND, AA 1:416).28 For Baumgarten, that difference regarding the power of substances to act is what separates the two views. Both views agree, he claims, that the alterations of mundane substances are “due to their community among one another” and have a “sufficient ground in the power of other substances of the world” (Baumgarten 2013, §448). While Kant does think that the application of his principle of succession does overturn pre-established harmony, it is important to note on what basis this is done. In Kant’s mind, pre-­ established harmony means that simple substances would still harmonize even if “free from real connection with external things” and, thus, free from bodies, which he believes that he shows to be false (PND, AA 1:412).29 In other words, Kant is taking pre-established harmony to be a phenomenalism that turns the physical relations of the world into something unnecessary and illusory. But Kant’s own view is indistinguishable from Baumgarten’s actual account of pre-established harmony, which accepts “a faculty and receptivity for transuent actions” and holds that mind and body “mutually influence each other in this world” (Baumgarten 2013, §449). In the cosmology, Kant fully admits that “infinite distance” exists between “the capacity to think and the motion of matter, between the reasoning mind and the body” (NTH, AA 1:355). His argument against pre-established harmony is to reject it as an “internal impossibility” that mundane substances change their states entirely on their own and to hold, instead, that they undergo change only through a community with other substances and via an “organic body” (PND, AA 1:412). His own explanation for why there must be bodies is that there must be an “interaction with the soul,” which induces “in it a representation corresponding” to things external to it (PND, AA 1:412). But as long as it is the substance itself acting in response to that representation, then from Baumgarten’s perspective, one has rejected universal physical influence and ended up with some form of pre-established harmony. So it is false to say that what these final sections on succession and co-existence offer is an account of “physical processes” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  149). I think it is fair to call Kant’s view a metaphysical interactionism. It amounts to the idea that

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metaphysical substances, such as the soul, have an internal “striving to produce representations”—although they cannot produce such changes in a representational state on their own (i.e. disconnected from a body), and those same substances are, at the same time, “united with a striving … to produce a certain external motion” (PND, AA 1:412). The body, as something external, relational, and receptive, is needed for both of these tasks.30 Yet the system of interaction is not sustained simply by there being bodies connected to substances. There must also be “a third substance, from which they are all produced,” because then “their principles are grounded all on one principle” (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:213). Ironically, Kant’s view is a denial of materialism, but most scholars take him to be merely offering a mechanics. Kant does say in language identical to Baumgarten (2013, §449) that his view of interconnected substances makes it “possible to understand the universal action of spirits on bodies and of bodies on spirits” (PND, AA 1:415). Of course, what Kant means is that his view makes possible dualistic  interactivity, whereas standard physical influence views see everything as motion. Kant’s notion of reciprocal dependence ultimately appears to be a sort of pre-established harmony. It is what Baumgarten calls “the mutual ideal influence of the many substances of the world posited in interaction,” which results in “a greater nexus” being actualized than through “physical influence alone” (Baumgarten 2013, §459). For in physical influence, the suffering of the substance that really suffers does not have a sufficient ground in its own powers. In pre-established harmony, the suffering of the suffering substance has a sufficient ground (1) in its own powers and (2) in the substance ideally influencing [it]. Hence, in pre-established harmony, the influencing substance is equally as fecund as in physical influence, while the suffering substance is however more fecund than in physical influence. (Baumgarten 2013, §459)

Attributing such a view to Kant only faces a single problem: Baumgarten calls this sort of reciprocal determination “ideal,” whereas Kant calls it “real” (Baumgarten 2013, §463, 212). It is easy to misunderstand Baumgarten. He calls these “ideal” relations only because the suffering substance responds or acts through its own power, but that does not mean that it is an enclosed, isolated monad that could change its state without external connection. Baumgarten is not a phenomenalist and what he means by the substance ideally influencing another is that it is influencing

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it through representation or informationally. Kant seems to think, by establishing that substances actually act in response to the changes of the world through receptivity and via organic bodies, that he has established that these interactions are real rather than ideal. But at least on Baumgarten’s understanding of pre-established harmony, Kant’s view is just such an ideal theory. One of the strangest aspects of Kant’s early metaphysics is that he does not offer much argument for the acceptance of a monadology and the existence of simple substances. The clearest picture that we get of what Kant ultimately regarded as the best rational support for simple substances is when he looks back at the doctrine from the Critical philosophy in 1781. Substances in general must have something inner, which is therefore free of all outer relations, consequently also of composition. The simple is therefore the foundation of the inner in things in themselves. But that which is inner in their state cannot consist in place, shape, contact, or motion (which determinations are all outer relations), and we can therefore attribute to the substances no other inner state than that through which we internally determine our sense itself, namely the state of representations. This completes the monads, which are to constitute the fundamental matter of the entire universe, the active power of which, however, consists merely in representations, through which they are properly efficacious merely within themselves. (KrV A274/B330)

We have no reason to think that the pre-Critical Kant disagreed with this account,  although he wedded to it a means for the efficacy of monadic representation to also alter bodies and forces, but looking back on it in 1781, he sees that such a conception of substances renders the doctrine of physical influence impossible and requires some form of pre-established harmony (KrV A275/B331). He recognizes that his own account of substantial interaction—as an attempt to salvage a metaphysically respectable form of physical influence—has failed. The account that he then gives of pre-established harmony in 1781 is actually the doctrine that he advances in the 1750s. He states that the community of substances must be established not through direct “efficacious connection” between substances but by “some third cause influencing all of them” and making it so that “their states correspond to one another” (KrV A275/B331). This is the  view of harmonization from the 1750s, which is  brought about by “the unity of the idea of one cause valid for all, from which, in accordance

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with general laws, they must all together acquire their existence and persistence, thus also their reciprocal correspondence with each other” (KrV A275/B331). This third thing is the subject of the next section: God. From this Critical-era reflection, we can draw the following conclusions. Firstly, Kant’s pre-Critical solution is much closer to pre-established harmony than his adoption of the terminology of physical influence makes it seem. Secondly, once the Critical turn takes place, he sees that such a view is identical to pre-established harmony. Looking back on it, he sees that positing God’s preserving power as the cause of all these representational beings and as instilling in them the laws that construct an external world, means that one is not be able to make any connection between that nexus of substances and the spatio-temporal world of our experience. As he says, one could only postulate such a world using purely rational concept of the “order of ground and consequences,” and if one attempted to call that world a spatial and temporal one, one would be making these  sensible notions into entirely “intellectual” ones, that is, the “intelligible form of the connections of things (substances and their states) in themselves” (KrV A275/B331). It seems fairly clear, in spite of the amount of ink spilled on how Kant’s comments in this section of the Critique relate to Leibniz, that he is actually criticizing his own earlier view. Here we are anticipating the fundamental shift that we will see take place in the 1770 Dissertation.

The Principle of Co-existence: God’s Presence to Substances The final section of the New Elucidation concerns the co-existence of substances and, in particular, the theological grounds of their harmonization into a nexus. Kant begins by reminding us that substances by definition have a form of existence in which they are independent of all other substances and so can be considered in the absence of all relations whatsoever (PND, AA 1:413).31 If we consider a substance merely in terms of its essential determinations, then all “relative determinations” are excluded by definition (PND, AA 1:413). The fact that such non-relational beings are “reciprocally connected” in a way that appears to us as the world of space and motion is a result of their “communality of cause” or their creation by God, but how that is so is not immediately clear (PND, AA 1:413). We do know that substances are connected to bodies, which offer up information about their situation and, thus, initiate the powers within substances to

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enact changes in response. Is this not enough to result in reciprocal interconnection? Why must there also be “a certain community of origin and, arising therefrom, a harmonious dependence” (PND, AA 1:413)? If Kant were simply giving an account of bodies in motion, then it is especially unclear why interconnection and reciprocal dependence would not take place if God had created substances A, B, C, and “so on to infinity,” because these are all presumably three-dimensional impenetrable beings emitting forces in one space (PND, AA 1:413).32 In other words, it is not clear that such a view can even recognize the problem that motivates Kant to claim that the “self-same scheme of the divine understanding,” which “gives existence” also establishes the “relations of things to each other” (PND, AA 1:413). How can it be and why is it even required that the ultimate cause of the “universal interaction of all things” is this “divine idea,” which is not a single cause but an “enduring act” or preservation (PND, AA 1:413, 414)? Watkins has argued that the function of God here is to explain why the forces by which substances bring about “joint production of a reciprocal change” are of the same type and are capable of interacting in the first place (Watkins 2005, p. 155). In other words, Kant is being read as merely offering a theory of physical interaction among bodies. But there are several problems here. Firstly, as I just argued, if we are simply thinking of substances as bodies, then, as relational, spatio-temporal, force-based beings, their mere creation as co-­existing would seem to be enough to establish their connection. Secondly, the notion of reciprocal dependence is being understood merely in terms of the ability of one substance to causally interact with another.33 But if the question is simply how do substances with external force relations act in harmony with each other, then one need only appeal to their simple, immediate creation by God to so act. There would be no need to appeal to a preserving power of ideas in the divine understanding. Scholars seem to think Kant is merely establishing original “influence,” but he says that there is more to interaction, namely “reciprocal influence” in which they are all grounded on one principle and, thus, “make a whole” (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:214). The inclusion of a significant role for God in ensuring the interconnection of the world and its substances tells us that Kant is holding that our world has “the greatest nexus of things which are possible in a world,” the greatest harmony and agreement of all things (Baumgarten 2013, §445, 441). This actually helps us to understand a motivation for Kant’s fusion of views and terminology. His intense commitment to the perfection of the universe of God’s creation means that he is very likely intentionally

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combining different forms of explaining the nexus of the world in order to hold that it has what Baumgarten calls the greatest fecundity and greatest harmony of relations of ground and consequence. The story that Kant gives of how God insures the reciprocal interaction and unity of all substances in a world is that “they are conceived as related in God’s intelligence” and, thus, their determinations are “in conformity with this idea” (PND, AA 1:414). What this means is that the changes internal to substances, which we know happen in response to representations of external states of affairs and which are powered by the activity of substances themselves, happen in a coordinated way by acting in response to a representation of the world as a coordinated whole. It must be that this idea of a coordinated whole in God’s mind is also a preserving idea within each substance. Simple substances possess this metaphysically “material” ground of possibility or “infinite perception of the entire universe, which is always internally present to the soul,” and so when they act based on their limited receptivity of external information about the inner states of other substances as given to them by representations of changes in external states of affairs, then they can be perfectly coordinated (PND, AA 1:408).34 The reception of information about the states of the world gives only a fragment of a picture of the world-whole. That bit of information would lack significance and the substance’s actions would not be reciprocally coordinated without a world picture, which defines the “material” possibilities of all determinations of the substance. So when Kant claims that the persisting reality of representational beings is the “material element of all ideas, which derives from connection with the universe,” I take this to mean that each being has its own representation of the world, conceivable as a set of principles that define the full scope of its operations, and that this is the substance’s fundamental reality that does not change and that underlies all its changes of state (PND, AA 1:408). This interpretation not only makes sense of Kant’s text and shows the influence of Baumgarten, but it is the only interpretation that makes an effort to explain how an idea in God’s understanding can be the basis for why substances “act and react,” which is importantly different from but related to their having “a certain external state” (PND, AA 1:414). Kant’s ideas here are startling and bear repeating. Substances are monads with windows that also have some version of an infinite universal representation within them. They act and react according to laws that essentially reflect that infinite representation. They act in response to the given, external states of affairs that illuminate different aspects of that

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representation. If change in the determinations of substances and their actions are responses to the perceptually unfolding representation of the world, then the “universal interaction of all things is to be ascribed to the concept alone of this divine idea,” because it is only by framing what is received against such an idea can the responses be perfectly harmonized to everything else in the world (PND, AA 1:413). Reciprocal dependence of the internal states of substances requires, essentially, a shared map of the universe and their own possibilities that they can act in response to and, thus, in coordination with all other beings. This universal perception of the universe is what Kant calls in the lectures the mediating “third substance” and “one principle” that must be the shared ground of interacting substances (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:213–4; V-Meta/Herder, AA 28:51). While this may sound strange to attribute to the simple monadic substances that give rise to the basic corpuscles of force and that construct material bodies, it is clear that Kant believes the two types of contingent substances (souls and simple elements of matter) have some similarities. This representation of the universal interaction of all things is obviously a superaddition that must be preserved by God’s presence to substances themselves. We can now see why, when Kant turns to the applications of the principle of co-existence, he turns to the notion of space and understands it as part of the “effective representation of the divine intellect, a scheme conceived of in terms of relations” (PND, AA 1:414).35 Yet, we should not simply equate space with the idea of the possibility of substantial relations in the mind of God. While that idea is an effective one in substances, it must be materialized through the expression of attractive force in the world. We can now fully see the dangers of misreading Kant and believing him to be merely saying that substances have reciprocal dependence because God merely gives them coordinated forces that can interact with each other.36 As Watkins points out, this runs into a problem: only actual causal interaction that occurs between substances would be coordinated and so “there must also be possible interactions, which are what are responsible for the real connection between substances that unites them into a single world” (Watkins 2005, p. 174). According to Watkins, Kant has no account of that in the 1750s, and so the shift toward the talk of the “form” of a world is regarded as a central innovation of the 1770 Dissertation. But it is apparent now that the a priori presence of the form of the world was a part of Kant’s thought in 1755. He simply thought of it as the preserving power of an idea of a coordinated whole in the divine

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understanding, which is both God’s inner presence to substances and the way in which substances form into a reciprocally dependent unity.37 Failing to recognize this contributes to the mistaken interpretation that Kant holds a relational theory of space. When Kant turns to application 1 of the principle of co-existence, he discusses the relation of this theory to space in a paragraph consisting of two convoluted sentences. He intends to argue for two separate but interconnected conclusions. The first is that “if you posit a number of substances, you do not at the same time and as a result, determine place, position, and space, this last being compounded of all these relations” (PND, AA 1:414). This, he claims, is obvious. The first thing to note about this conclusion is that it is actually not a relational theory. On a relational theory, assuming the relata are spatial entities, then when you posit a number of substances, then you do in fact determine place, position, and space as the mere compound of such relations. Kant’s first conclusion, in other words, is that by the mere existence of substances, you do not arrive at any view of space, let alone a view that thinks of space as an imaginary, unreal, or accidental set of the relations that hold between spatial bodies. This is simply a definitional matter as the mere existence of substances (as simple beings whose essence is simultaneously expressed in all its determinate properties) is not also the existence of a scheme of interconnection. Substances only have “external states” in addition to their “inner states,” “act and react” with each other, and so are internally and externally in a state of harmony with other substances by the addition of a power given to them by the intuitive intellect of God and by that source alone (PND, AA 1:413–4). If we now turn to the statement that “place, position, and space are relations of substances, in virtue of which substances, by means of their reciprocal determinations, relate to other substances which are really distinct from one another and are in this way connected together in an external connection,” we see it also to be distinct from the relational view (PND, AA 1:414).38 But, of course, external states of substances (i.e. the force relations that constitute bodies and space itself) are only part of the picture of how the inner states of substances exist in reciprocal determination. That sensible component depends on the schema of relational existence in the divine understanding, which is given by God’s preserving and creative power to each substance and which gives substances the power to manifest as force. So, while place, position, and space are, in the divine understanding as a “scheme conceived in terms of relations,” space’s reality is more than mere relations

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among entities. Kant’s second conclusion is simply that it is a matter of choice for God whether substances exist in a connected nexus or not. While space is a mere scheme of relations when it is an idea that is internal to God and substances, Kant is clear that the reciprocal determination of substances as they change their states in response to alterations of the states of other substances has the appearance of action at a distance or the force of attraction. As he argued in the cosmology, this action taking place between “what is innermost in matter without any impact” is coordinated by an inherent teleology directed toward harmonious formation of the material world, first by attraction and then by repulsion (NTH, AA 1:309). In order for substances to be able to respond to alterations in the external states of affairs, then they need to receive information about those alterations and then to alter themselves according to the laws of order and the shared representation of the world that those laws prescribe. Attractive force is the external appearance of and the means of communicating changes of state. Space is the form of this communication of substances and is not a causally inert void, which is to say that space is a force emanation. It follows that the concept of space is constituted by the interconnected actions of substances, reaction always being of necessity conjoined with such interconnected actions. If the external appearances of this universal action and reaction throughout the whole realm of the space in which bodies stand in relation to one another consists in their reciprocally drawing closer together, it is called attraction. Since it is brought about by co-presence alone, it reaches to all distances whatever, and is Newtonian attraction or universal gravity. It is, accordingly, probable that this attraction is brought about by the same connection of substances, by virtue of which they determine space. (PND, AA 1:415)

To hold that space is the “external appearance of this universal action and reaction” and that it exists ontologically as the force of gravity that stretches through all possible points of space is very far from a relational view of space (PND, AA 1:415). While scholars tend to picture this as a story of bodies and the forces between them, the picture in 1755 is far more complex. The inner life of substances is a series of changes of state based on the reception of information, which is also the activation of external powers which create space, attractive force, and eventually bodies. We have every reason to think that Kant thinks of substances as representational beings or, more simply, beings with internal states of intensive

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quality. Thus, the appearance of the activity by which the inner lives of substance undergo change is the primitive attractive force that is prior to all bodies. Interpreters must explain why it is required that the “same indivisible act” of God’s creation not only “brings substances into existence” but also “sustains them in existence” and thereby “procures their reciprocal and universe dependence” (PND, AA 1:415). If one’s picture is that God merely creates in substances the same fundamental type of forces so that they can interact and that is sufficient, then there is no need to appeal to this sustaining power. We might say that Kant radically overdetermines the reality of relations by not only placing them in the powers of substances but also by propping them up with the divine. This suggests that Langton is wrong that Kant’s argues for the irreducibility of relations. In other words, Langton hold that Kant denies that “all the relations between things … are reducible to—i.e. supervene on—the intrinsic properties of their relata” (Langton 1998, p.  88). Kant’s supposed argument against irreducibility, based on the definition of substance as an “independent thing” that is intelligible in itself and without reference to an “ordinary relational properties,” is said to fail. In Langton’s technical language, Kant does not see that the relations that exist between substances are “bilaterally reducible” ones. The ordinary relational property of “being taller than” is bilaterally reducible to the property of X of being six feet tall and the property of Y of being five feet tall, which would imply that no special act or superaddition is needed for substances to relate (Langton 1998, pp.  112–4). In bilateral reducibility or  supervenience, you have to take the relata and their intrinsic properties as a set (collectively), in order to have all the relational properties as well. These relations (e.g. being taller than) are ones that supervene on and reduce to the intrinsic properties of relata, taken collectively, and they are not like relations that supervene on the relata “taken distributively” (Langton 1998, pp. 85, 87). In distributive supervenience, if you took one member of the set, then you could essentially read off the entirety of the relational properties of all the members. They are unilaterally reducible. In essence, you could know that X is taller than or shorter than A, B, C, and so on, even if they did not exist. Langton’s examples are strange because they are spatial, which makes sense as she believes that substances are being conceived of fundamentally as “unextended centers of fields of force” or atoms, rather than representational entities (Langton 1998, p. 99). This is important because Langton’s example of a bilaterally reducible spatial property is clearly something that a spatial body could have in isolation, but it is not

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something simple substances can have considered as metaphysically isolated (as a world unto itself) to the essential rather than relative predicates of being.39 Langton is only thinking of a substance as a body in isolation in a spatial and existential sense, but this is not the metaphysical sense of substance and its isolation that Kant is considering as he considers them as non-spatial when unconnected from the community of substances. Besides the fact that Kant’s notion of metaphysical isolation rules out the possibility of taking multiple objects as a set (collectively), there is a more fundamental problem with Langton’s approach.40 Langton argues that Kant holds that external relations have a reality that is irreducible to internal properties of substances. But this conflicts with Kant’s principle that “there is nothing in that which is grounded which was not in the ground itself” (PND, AA 1:407). Kant believes that the entire set of possibilities for substances, even their relational appearances, must be grounded in their being. This suggests that what Kant wants to show is not that there are “purely extrinsic denominations” that do not supervene on “intrinsic ones” as Langton argues (Langton 1998, p. 112). Instead, Kant wants to show that the Leibnizian is committed, by virtue of accepting the temporality and alterability of intensive, representational states of substances, to granting reality to the relational properties and grounding them also within substances. What that means, in Langton’s terms, is that Kant believes it must be shown how it is possible for there to be a unilateral reduction of relational reality to an intrinsic property that can be taken distributively in a way that does not simply deny ontological status to those properties and make them phenomenal. In order that that the external, relational order not be unreal, imaginary, or a sensory confusion, Kant believes that God grants a distributive property had by each of the substances, such that if we consider this substance with this property alone, we could read off the whole of the universe from the relational possibilities now inherent to the substance by the creatively sustaining power of God. This doctrine can be found in Baumgarten. Every monad of every composite world, and hence of this composite world, is a power for representing its own universe (they are active mirrors of their universe, indivisible, microcosms, abbreviated worlds, and concentrations of their own worlds, or they have a power, they are endowed with a power for representing their own universe). (Baumgarten 2013, §400)

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The implication of such a view, which Kant certainly seems to hold, is that “all the alterations of a mundane substance can be sufficiently known from the power of any other given monad belonging to the same world” (Baumgarten 2013, §451). That is precisely the idea that Langton describes (and ridicules) as the unilateral reduction of supervening relations to a distributed property of individual metaphysical substances. By asserting the superaddition by God of the power of substances to be reciprocally determining in a world-nexus, Kant is attempting to understand reciprocal determination as a feature grounded in monadic, simple substances. In other words, Kant’s argument that this interconnection is superadded to the intrinsic nature of substances by the preserving scheme in the divine understanding is an explanation of how relations can be both real and unilaterally reducible to simple substances. Such a view only makes sense if Kant accepts a two-world metaphysics in which the internal relation of all substances (their possession of a world-map granted to them by God and the power to navigate that map according to laws) is “one world” and the world of appearances, bodies, motion, and force is another. We should not ignore the larger metaphysical and theological motivations at work here. Firstly, Kant is starting from a Leibnizian conception of substances and a strong commitment to the fundamental perfection of the universe and the fecundity of its harmonious interconnections. Secondly, he shows how internal changes of substances are a product of responses to changes external to the substance, for otherwise it would have no reason to act. Thirdly, he shows that such action by substances implies a superior proof of God’s existence as the being that implants and preserves an infinite idea (containing the laws of the world) within simple, finite, contingent substances. This latter idea is what underlies Kant’s remarks in the 1755 cosmology that “the whole of nature” and “the whole sum of creatures” have a “necessary harmony with the approval of the highest being,” which is actually a God-like vision of the universe that we will see with clarity after death and that will constitute our eternal happiness or beatitude with God (NTH, AA 1:322, 367).41 So it is no wonder that this requires the sustaining power of God. This vision brings to light the justification for the dualism of Kant’s theory of substantial connection and the impossibility of reducing it to a theory of physical influence. One is equally justified both in saying that external changes may be produced in this way by means of efficient causes, and also in saying that the

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changes which occur within the substances are ascribed to an internal force of the substance, although the natural power of this force to produce an effect rests, no less than the foundation of the external relations just mentioned, on divine support. (PND, AA 1:415)

Watkins cites the sentence that precedes this quote to try to prove that Kant simply accepts a doctrine of physical influence based on physical forces between substances, and, in so doing, he divorces the quote from the context in which Kant is saying that there are dual descriptions of the world and of the causes of action (Watkins 2005, p. 150). But by offering only one half of the picture, Watkins is really only giving that “threadbare system of efficient causes [that] could not be further from the truth” (PND, AA 1:416). Unsurprisingly, when Kant says that his view excludes and is superior to “the popular system of physical influence,” Watkins exclaims that this is “not what one would have expected, given what Kant has argued for at length” (PND, AA 1:416; Watkins 2005, p. 156). Given the interpretation I have provided, it is exactly what one ought to expect. Kant’s view is not simply that God “enables relational properties such as mutual interaction between substances,” that is, the outer relations of space, motion, and force effects are allowed by God to be shared by all substances, resulting in their inner changes being directly caused by impressed motions and collisions (Watkins 2005, p. 151). Instead, Kant’s view is that alterations in the world external to the inner life of substances result in inner modifications that can be thought of in two different ways. Firstly, these outer relations can be thought of as efficient causality resulting in inner changes of state because those responses are true reactions to the representation of the changes caused by external forces in the world. Secondly, these changes are in fact the result of the inner power of substances to act in response to a representation of their surroundings and, thus, in a coordinated way with all other substances who share, as it were, an a priori representation of the world.

Space and Bodies in the Physical Monadology The previous sections establish that Kant has the sort of non-reducible two-world metaphysics that is commonly associated with pre-established harmony. Simple substances and their change of state via representations make up a system of universal harmony due to the divine superaddition of an active, infinite representation of the world that preserves the substances

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in both their existence and their community with one another. In order that those substances can truly act reciprocally, rather than being a mere clockwork, they must be able to receive representations of states of affairs outside themselves and change their state accordingly. These monads with their internal predicates are also given powers that are relational determinations that create attractive force (gravity) in the world, which is at the same time the creation of space. Add to this the picture from the previous chapter, and we have a fairly complete picture of Kant’s early metaphysics, excluding a number of arguments about rational theology. But does his third Latin dissertation, the Physical Monadology, overcome this metaphysical dualism by employing metaphysics in natural philosophy, which is a task that he compares to mating “griffins and horses” (MonPh, AA 1:475)? His stated concern in this work is to mediate the debate between the Newtonians who asserted “the infinite division of real space” and who “had an absolute horror of monads” and the Leibnizians who held that “the properties of geometrical space were imaginary” because of their support of simple, monadic substances (MonPh, AA 1:480). Metaphysics allows one to investigate the “origin and causes” of the laws of nature and the “nature itself of bodies” (MonPh, AA 1:475). Thus, metaphysics remains the “only support” for physics (MonPh, AA 1:475). This seems less like a unification project and more like an attempt to show how Newtonians are unable to do without monads. According to Kant, both sides of the debate agree that “an element, which is absolutely simple in respect of its substance, cannot fill a space without losing its simplicity,” although they draw radically different conclusions from this claim (MonPh, AA 1:480). Kant actually believes that this idea is false, which causes a serious conflict within his text. Once he denies that a simple substance forfeits its simplicity in space, he has no reason to say that the Newtonian picture of an infinitely divisible manifold conflicts with the idea of simple substances. But this disrupts his reason to assert that bodies must consist of a determinate number of simple elements, which is of central importance to his account. One simply cannot infer much of anything from the fact that space, force, activity, and matter are all mathematically divisible to infinity. By so disengaging the notion of simplicity from spatio-temporal division, Kant also has little reason to infer that composition of bodies cannot be done with parts that “admit infinite division,” which is the ground of his inference that bodies must “consist of a determinate number of simple elements” (MonPh, AA 1:479). The implications of Kant’s actual argument seem to be that nothing given in

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appearance is ever actually simple, that simplicity is an entirely metaphysical notion, and that metaphysical simplicity is not incompatible with physical complexity. While we might see the beginnings of Kant’s Critical-era mathematical antinomies here, in 1756, Kant continues to argue for the grounding of bodies on “simple elements,” which is often ambiguous between simple physical parts and metaphysical substances. The major interpretive question that divides scholars regarding this work concerns the way in which the “simple elements of a body” are in space (MonPh, AA 1:480). One reading of Kant’s picture is that monads are “fundamentally point-like but as interacting via forces even when the point-centers of force are at a distance from each other” (Smith 2013, p.  102).42 Although Kant had referred to the sources of attraction and space as “attraction points” in his natural scientific works, it was fairly clear that as a mere emanation of force lacking the shape formed from interactive repulsive forces, he was thinking of these sources as indeterminately small and indefinitely divisible. Heimsoeth calls them “non-spatial centers of force,” which are “at the foundation of corporeal things,” while recognizing that “neither physical nor mental forces are the substance itself in its essence or principle but are only the activities of substances” (Heimsoeth 1967, pp. 164, 162). So when Kant says in the Physical Monadology that “all forces whatever spread out into space from a determinate point,” he means to say that there is an origin of force but not that the simple monad that underlies this emanation is simply a physical point (MonPh, AA 1:487, 483). Points are geometric designations, and while they may be ontological entities for some, it is unlikely that they ever were for Kant. Thus, the “point-particle” view of Kant’s “physical monadology” offered by Smith (2013) begins from a mistaken conception of its solution. Simplicity is not retained by reference to points. This view is also stated by Schönfeld who says that “monads are pointal entities, they have zero size, and thus there is an important sense in which monads do not fill space” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  170).43 Kant warns readers not to “take monads to be the infinitely small particles of a body”—whether he means the infinitely small to be a pointal entity with zero size is unclear but reasonable—and holds that monads qua elements of bodies (by which he means the external appearance of monads) do fill space (MonPh, AA 1:479). While Kant’s entire ontology in this short work is not made fully explicit, he certainly does not help his readers when he says that he will focus on “the primitive parts of bodies,” which he does not entirely do, and then openly admits to using the following terms “as if they were synonymous: simple substances,

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monads, elements of matter, and fundamental parts of body” (MonPh, AA 1:477). If one thinks that these simple substances and the parts of bodies are the same, then one will think that Kant’s entire theory of substance is merely a theory of how forces construct and relate to bodies. Thus, if one asks where the substances are in space and in the parts of bodies, one naturally concludes that they are pointal entities at the very center of the extended force-shells that compose bodies. Everything is simply in space like water is in a glass. But Kant does distinguish between “occupying space” and “filling space” in proposition V (MonPh, AA 1:480).44 This should not surprise us because we have already seen that there are ways of being in space that are not equal to the filling of space like an impenetrable body does. Kant’s view seems quite indebted to Baumgarten’s corpuscular philosophy of bodies and their simple elements with quantitative magnitude (Baumgarten 2013, §420–429). These simple elements are “extended beings” or aggregates with the power of inertia and capable of exerting “motive power” (Baumgarten 2013, §418). “Monadata” are “in this world,” and they “produce a motive power, matter, and physical bodies,” while also having the “power of representing,” by which they alter place through movement (Baumgarten 2013, §418). While there are clear connections between this account and Kant’s own, there are also differences. Besides altering the conception of force, Kant must have been quite aware of the difficulty of Baumgarten’s identification of the simple elements of an extended being with “points” (Baumgarten 2013, §286). Baumgarten seems to be conflicted, saying that monads are both “immaterial,” points, and quantitative magnitudes.45 Kant conspicuously avoids calling monads either points or immaterial beings, and yet aims to agree with Baumgarten that the presence of a monad is “indefinitely divisible” in that “no parts can be observed by us except those that are further divisible” (Baumgarten 2013, §428). Many scholars take Kant’s view to be rather similar to Boscovich (Carrier 1990, p.  179; Sarmiento 2005, p.  18; Holden 2004; Watkins 2005, p, 109).46 My own view is that Kant is adopting a view that Boscovich repudiates: the doctrine of virtual presence, which, if one accepts it, means there is no reason to consider monads as points at the centers of fields of force. Boscovich discusses virtual presence as an attempt to grant simple, non-composite elements a way of being “extended through divisible space” rather than being “non-extended” points (Boscovich 1966, p. 44). This doctrine appears with regard to the three specific objects at the core

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of Kant’s metaphysics: atoms of bodies, the soul, and God (Boscovich 1966, p. 200). Kant does not explicitly use the term “virtual presence” until the 1770 Dissertation, but what he says there regarding God (MSI, AA 2:408, 414) and what he says about the soul’s relation to the body in 1766 (TG, AA 2:324–5) are consistent with beliefs that he holds in the 1750s. They also align with Boscovich’s description of virtual presence as attempting to claim that the spatial extension of these entities does not impugn their simplicity, the exact doctrine of the Physical Monadology. Boscovich argues that the view is based on “an analogy between space and time” (Boscovich 1966, p. 44). For, just as rest is a conjunction with a continuous series of all the instants in the interval of time during which the rest endures; so also this virtual extension is a conjunction of one instance of time with a continuous series of all the points of space throughout which this one-fold entity extends virtually. Hence, just as rest is believed to exist in Nature, so also are we bound to admit virtual extension; and if this is admitted, then it will be possible for the primary elements of matter to be simple, and yet not absolutely non-­ extended. (Boscovich 1966, p. 44)

Boscovich thinks that this doctrine is false for inductive reasons: everything that has so far been found in space is divisible into parts, so we should assume the same of any type of extension or substance. In other words, any virtual presence must be actual presence. Boscovich’s analogy—that rest is to time as virtual presence is to space—imagines that a single point at rest would be extended in time but not in space. Likewise, the doctrine of virtual presence imagines a single instant spread across space, which captures the idea of the whole of a thing being simultaneously in all the spatial parts of a region. But for Boscovich, there is no absolute rest, as there is always some agitation, and so there is no simple moment in time. Thus, the analogy fails, and we have no basis on which to understand such simplicity in space. Boscovich holds that the only way to understand the notion of a temporally continuous expanse is through motion, which is obviously not simple and consists of a continuously changing set of relations (Boscovich 1966, pp.  198, 199). Therefore, there is nothing simple to be found here, except in the idea of points. On Boscovich’s account of the idea of a virtual presence, sense must be made of an enduring, simple presence in time as something which is lasting but otherwise not changing. This mistaken idea, Boscovich claims, is then

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transferred to the notion of a spatially extended but simple virtual presence in space, which we have even less reason to accept. Boscovich’s criticism of the doctrine is aimed at the difficulty of actually making sense of the notion of the simplicity of substances, which he believes can only be done through the notion of a non-extended point rather than through the notion of rest. Yet, Kant’s notion of simplicity is neither empirical nor mathematical. It does not appeal to simplicity in time, space, or motion. It is metaphysical. Kant’s phrase of being “absolutely simple in respect of its substance” refers ultimately to the “unity” of a substance itself (MonPh, AA 1:480). That internal identity is the unity of a principle of action in contrast to the “external relations” of space and time (MonPh, AA 1:480). It is the unity of being a single causal source of force in the world. He identifies this in the preliminary considerations as the “principle of all internal actions” which results in the force “inherent in the elements” (MonPh, AA 1:476).47 This illustrates the confusion that Kant creates by running together the notion of substance, as that which bears this principle of all internal (and external) actions, and the notion of simple elements of bodies, which are the external expression (or appearance) of that principle as force. It is that division that allows the doctrine of virtual presence to emerge, and so his terminological sloppiness is rather inexcusable, even if it is intentional in order to frame the traditional conflict between the geometers and the metaphysicians. Kant asks whether to divide the “space” that a substance fills with its activity is to divide the substance and then responds: I answer: this space itself is the orbit of the external presence of its element. Accordingly, if one divides space, one divides the extensive quality of its presence. But, in addition to external presence, that is to say, in addition to the relational determinations of substance, there are other, internal determinations; if the latter did not exist, the former would have no subject in which to inhere. But the internal determinations are not in space, precisely because they are internal. Accordingly, they are not themselves divided by the division of the external determinations. And therefore the subject itself, that is to say, the substance, is not divided in this way. (MonPh, AA 1:481)

Here we have the doctrine of virtual presence clearly stated.48 It is even illustrated with an example of the virtual presence of God. Substances are in space in a virtual way similar to how God is present to “all created things” internally and “by the act of preservation” but not locally (MonPh,

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AA 1:481). To divide created things is not to divide God or “the orbit of His presence” (MonPh, AA 1:481).49 The notion of virtual extension (extensio virtualis) has long been used to describe the sort of extension of a “simple thing” (res simplex) which has no parts, is in a place “by its substance so that the whole corresponds indivisibly to the whole extension of the place,” and is distinguished from “formally extended” beings whose parts “lie outside one another” (Grant 1981, pp. 176–7, quoting Maignan). This notion of virtual presence has also been linked to the idea of ubi definitivum—a “somewhere” or “whereabouts” that is merely definitive but not entirely determinate (Grant 1981, pp. 177, 223).50 Definitive ubeity contrasts to ubi circumscriptivum, that is, the circumscribed and fully determinate whereabouts of physical bodies or what was called being “formally extended” above. While the former was attributed to angels or created souls and the latter to physical bodies, these both were contrasted to ubi repletivum or the repletive ubeity of God, which was thought of in terms of God being everywhere and filling completely. But virtual extension is not identical to the notion of ubi definitivum and refers to the general idea of the extension of a power. For Aquinas, virtual extension was a way of being in space through a thing’s (an angel’s or soul’s) power to “touch” one “determined thing,” as opposed to the “dimensive quantity” of bodies (Aquinas 1952, I:Q52,A1). The universal power of God to “touch” all things is also a type of virtual extension (Aquinas 1952, I:Q52,A1-2). The dimensive-virtual distinction can be thought of in terms of two different ways of touching. In dimensive quantity, the continuous extension of the thing fills a space or touches space point for point, whereas the “incorporeal substance contains the thing with which it comes into contact” so that one can say that the soul “virtually contains” the body (Aquinas 1952, I:Q52,A1). In this way, we might say that each part of the body is touched by the whole of the soul or that the soul contains the body. What is important for Aquinas in the dimensive-virtual extension distinction is that it is the power or operation of the soul or angel that is in space rather than the thing itself. It seems to me incorrect to argue, as Slowik does, that Kant is adopting as his fundamental model ubi repletivum from Leibniz (Slowik 2016, p. 345). Slowik chooses to make the repletive-definitive distinction to be about the nature of the inhabitation of space and not whether that inhabitation is finite or infinite, although the latter is crucially what is at stake in the distinction traditionally (Slowik 2016, p. 336). This leads him to take the notion “extension of power,” which is at the core of the

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virtual-­dimensive distinction, to be identical with repletive ubeity (Slowik 2016, p. 339). He claims that it is Leibniz’s own idiosyncratic approach, but it does not appear that way to me. Slowik believes that Leibniz equates the very idea of being present by “essence” or by “operation” alone with the notion repletive ubeity, but this “extension of power” doctrine clearly also applies to definitive ubeity for Leibniz (Slowik 2016, pp.  338–9). After all, Leibniz explicitly endorses Aquinas’s view of souls and angels being in a place through their operations, although he rejects that this is immediate and is instead a “matter of the pre-established harmony” (Leibniz 1996, p. 222). In other words, definitive ubeity is also an extension of power and a type of virtual presence even for Leibniz. The immediacy of repletive ubeity is made possible for Leibniz because God “is the source of possibilities and of existents alike, the one by his essence the other by his will” (Leibniz 1996, p. 222). But this makes repletive ubeity appear to be non-­spatial. While Leibniz’s views of God’s presence are challenging, it is clear that for Kant, God has no ubeity.51 So the definitive ubeity of substances is equal to the extension of power and virtual presence, while God’s presence to substances is more immediate, it is not clear that it is spatial or has any particular whereabouts.52 If one does not recognize this doctrine of virtual presence as Kant’s view, one is left with identifying substances with the mathematical “pointal entity” at the “center” of a field of force. Given that there is little textual basis for identifying monads with mathematical points, then the reality of substances becomes the field of force itself, which results in the fact that the substance and its “extensive magnitude” are in fact a space of forces that are divisible “despite Kant’s remarks to the contrary” (Schönfeld 2000, p. 171).53 Kant’s attempt to retain simplicity by saying that the field of activity that a substance creates is not a “literal part nor an essential property” of the substance begs the question, according to Schönfeld, because the monad that fills space and is an actual presence is “naturally divisible” (Schönfeld 2000, p.  171).54 But this shows a failure to grasp how the substance is not a natural being that is actually (circumscriptively) present. It is neither a part of the activity of force nor even the geometric point of its center.55 While it does not beg the question of whether substances are divisible to simply place them, qua simples, outside of the natural world of force and to identify only their power as virtually present in space, it does place Kant more in the metaphysical and, thus, idealist tradition than the realistic, mathematical one. Yet, it should be clear that this

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was Kant’s view from the preliminary considerations. His marriage of metaphysics and physics is not a marriage of equals. It should be noted that the metaphysical notion of a simple substance and the physical notion of a simple element of matter have pulled both Kant and his interpreters in different directions.56 This conflict can be easily illustrated. When Kant gives an account of “primitive elements of matter” (and calls them “monads”), it turns out that a physical line is made of a finite number of these elements that are generally impenetrable, although that force can be “penetrated” by a stronger force up to a certain limit near the center of the element where the repulsive force is “infinite” (MonPh, AA 1:487). Yet if this is so, then Kant’s actual proof of infinite divisibility (proposition III) fails. In that proof, Kant says that he does not want to distinguish between geometric and natural space, and believes that his argument applies to “physical space” (MonPh, AA 1:478). He imagines that the physical line of a triangle, being made up of a “number of simple particles,” could have physical lines drawn to divide it to infinity (MonPh, AA 1:479). But this is not true if those lines are indeed physical and have the properties that Kant goes on to elucidate in the later propositions. Therefore, Kant’s proof of infinite divisibility seems to rely, contrary to his assertion, on a merely mathematical notion of division.57 He does not want to say that space is ideal or imaginary given that he is committed to its material presence as force. Of course, it is not clear within the Physical Monadology alone that Kant is actually committed to the non-ideal status of space. Thus, scholars such as Schönfeld, who largely base their account of Kant’s early metaphysics on the atomism of composite bodies from this work, have difficulty in understanding why Kant is not simply an idealist about space (Schönfeld 2000, p. 167). If monads are simply material particles, then space is not “the appearance of the external relation of substances”—it is the external relations (MonPh, AA 1:480, my stress). Schönfeld does correctly point to “the force of attraction” as constituting space, but all that seems to mean for him is that there are “dynamic relations among substances” qua things in space (Schönfeld 2000, p. 167). If we do not recognize that there is anything in Kant’s rational physics but bodies and relations of efficient causality, then, while he may avoid calling space a sensory confusion, it is not at all clear why it is not an insubstantial void or accidental relations of bodies rather than the well-founded appearance of the external relations of metaphysical substances. Schönfeld says that Kant’s view is that space is merely “a relational network” and, bizarrely, says that its ontological status is such that its

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“existence is independent of the existence of the substances” (Schönfeld 2000, p. 167).58 Both of these claims are false. Space is not merely a relational network. A relational network is either the set of existing relations between relata or it is the system of all possible relations between possible relata. If it is the former, then it has no ontological status absent the relata and so it has no existence apart from substances. If it is the latter, then it is either an ideal-mathematical space or it is a Newtonian absolute space grounded directly on God. The latter seems to be Schönfeld’s view, but there is no evidence that this is Kant’s view. He is very clear that God’s presence is to the non-spatial essence of substances and not to insubstantial mathematical points of absolute space.59 While God may give to those substances the form and principle of interaction that essentially maps all possible spatial relations, that divine deliverance is the ideal form of space and is not space in actuality.60 Thus, if space is to have reality, it must have a substantial underpinning that manifests as force, even if, in our current space, that force is too small to offer resistance. I cannot see any evidence that Kant accepts “a geometric space that can exist independently of matter, such that gravitational force may act through a void” (Schönfeld 2000, p. 187).61 If by matter, Schönfeld means either force or substance, both of these claims are false. There is no indication that Kant believed that space was a true void and that gravity acted through it. Instead, attractive force (gravity) makes up the material field of space itself, as I have argued. What this means is that there is a way for substances to be in the world that we must call being virtually present and that does not amount to being an impenetrable material element.62 While the Physical Monadology is focused on the simples of physical compounds (bodies), we know from the previous chapter that Kant has an account of uncompounded attractive force. As I concluded from the earlier natural scientific writings, he can call such a field of force “material” and  claim that it has simple substances underlying it, that it is empty of and non-resistant to bodies, and that it can be infinitely divided. Thus, it does not consist of “simple parts” or impenetrable atoms as bodies do, and it is only in that very specific sense that it is “entirely free from substantiality,” that is, free from “substantial subjects of composition” (MonPh, AA 1:479, my stress).63 Here again, we see how Kant’s haphazard use of the notion of “substance” to indicate both metaphysical substances and most basic elements of bodies leads to confusion. I take it as proven that there is a third way of being in space for Kant (virtual presence). This is clear in proposition five of the Physical Monadology. Kant says there that to divide the “part of space” that the

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simple element occupies is “not the separation of things, of which one is set apart from another and has a self-sufficient existence of its own” (MonPh, AA 1:480). Like the division of space itself, the division of the simple elements of bodies is the demonstration of “a certain plurality or quantity in an external relation” (MonPh, AA 1:480). What this tells us is that there can be fields that consist entirely of a plurality of external relations, that are infinitely divisible, and yet they are the external expression of a substance that retains its simplicity (MonPh, AA 1:480). To call them insubstantial is misleading, although Kant seems to mean that it is not made up of the elements of material composites. The elements of bodies have both attractive and repulsive forces active, not just the former. So, Kant has offered a description of the division of both space itself and the space filled by the simple element of matter, and they are both essentially descriptions of the division of a virtual presence (definitive ubeity). Neither are the separation of things into parts that are “set apart from another,” which is circumscriptive ubeity. If the only thing that is “opposed to the simplicity of the monad” is its having “a plurality of substantial parts,” defined as a multiplicity of things with self-sufficient existence, then it would seem that nothing empirical can either have or undermine substantial simplicity (MonPh, AA 1:480, my stress). Everything that makes up the empirical world will either be a composite and, thus, have a plurality of parts qua impenetrable material components or it will be an orbit of activity, which is a mathematically divisible vector space, although there may be a limit to physical division by other forces. Neither beings of circumscriptive ubeity nor the virtual presence of monads (spaces of definitive ubeity) are simple in the metaphysical sense. Thus, Kant has already arrived at an idealist conception of the empirical world, including “space” itself, as “a certain appearance of the external relation of substances” (MonPh, AA 1:480). In some sense, we can never engage in “real division which destroys simplicity” (MonPh, AA 1:480). But, as I said at the outset, this undermines the very intuition that informs Kant’s inference to a determinate number of simple substances composing bodies. After all, he claims that if something admits of infinite division, then it would be so constituted that no matter how many were added together, “they would not constitute particles of matter” (MonPh, AA 1:479). But by his own account, this is false. The activity of substances can be infinitely divided, mathematically speaking, and yet when they are combined together, they do constitute particles of matter as the repulsive force generates impenetrability. It is clear that Kant believes that physical

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division of the circumscriptive ubeity of bodies ends at the definitive ubeity of simple force corpuscles, but there is little reason to halt the division there and proclaim that one has reached the simple elements of matter, for they are only simple in a natural sense and neither in a mathematical nor a metaphysical sense. Because the filling of space or the creation of a determinate shape requires the interaction of substances and, thus, the interplay of attractive and repulsive forces, it seems misleading to say that the “monad, when posited on its own, fills a space” (MonPh, AA 1:481). Notice that when Kant clarifies this remark we see that the “ground for the filled space is not to be sought in the mere positing of a substance but it its relation with respect to substances external to it” (MonPh, AA 1:481). This idea appears again when he says that “the mere positing of a substance” only suggests that it occupies “a place” or position relative to other substances and does not say that it fills a space, which requires that there “will be something else present in the substance” that determines proximity to other elements and prevents them from moving closer (i.e. repulsive force) (MonPh, AA 1:483). Thus, a monad on its own would not fill space, which is the opposite of what he just said. While Kant does think of attractive and repulsive forces as both being innate or “inherent forces,” he is not clear in the Physical Monadology if the repulsive force expresses itself and forms the spherical shape of a basic element of matter regardless of whether there is something attempting to penetrate the sphere of attractive force or not. While the attractive and repulsive forces of an element do decrease at different rates and, thus, define a sphere of impenetrability, whether substances in isolation naturally form a “limit of impenetrability” or “orbit of external contact” even when there is actually nothing contacting them is not stated (MonPh, AA 1:485). Obviously, given that I am claiming that space is made up of substantial emanations of attractive force, undefined by repulsive forces, then I must hold that attraction can exist without expressions of repulsion. As Kant says in the preliminary considerations, if there is only attractive force, we can imagine the “conjunction” of all things in space, but we cannot think of the formation of any determinate extension or filled space (MonPh, AA 1:476).

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Conclusion At the end of the Physical Monadology and looking back at all the works prior to it, we may very well agree with Heimsoeth that Kant has not offered much of a solution to the problems of metaphysics that trouble him: What does the inner nature of spiritual existences have to do with an external existence that is spatial? At what place or point of space is my soul? … In the context of these questions it is a certain alleviation, but not a solution, when space is regarded as an objective phenomenon resulting from the forces exerted by substances. (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 189)

But this lack of a solution is perhaps an advantage, given the sort of advances in philosophical method that Kant would make in the 1760s and in the Critical period. That is to say, Kant’s pre-Critical solutions tend to show only how incompatible ideas need not conflict rather than the more ambitious task of showing how they are actually unified and well understood. His solutions leave intact the gap within our understanding, our “learned ignorance.” Kant’s lack of a solution is beneficial for lessening the divide between the pre-Critical and Critical works. The metaphysical works from 1755 to 1756 have been interpreted by a great many as simply translating Leibnizian monadology and its phenomenalism into a realistic vision of physical substances in space that act according to Newtonian laws of motion. I have shown that such a system of physical influences is unable to account for the metaphysical internality of substances, their simplicity, their presence in space, or the need for the power of God’s sustaining idea to institute and preserve a system of reciprocal determinations. Kant’s system is focused on the problems of harmony, coordination, and reciprocal dependence among the internal states of substances, which is clearly a metaphysical project and not simply a proof of the Newtonian world picture. It is a project that I have argued has significant connections to pre-established harmony. By holding that substances are altering their internal states according to laws and in connection with the divine idea of the universe that is given to them and that preserves their connectedness, he is at least supporting a view that we can call metaphysical established harmony. Not only does this picture best fit with Kant’s pre-Critical texts of the 1750s and 1760s, but also it shows that components of the Critical-era conception of the essence of what it is to be a representational being are already present. After all, substances

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contain within themselves an a priori representation of the form of the natural, relational world. Our (human) access to that form via a priori intuition and the fact that this representation has a metaphysical function to play will be central to my account of the Critical theories of space and time. By failing to recognize the idealism and dualism that remains fundamental to the works of the 1750s, scholars have largely believed that Kant’s pre-Critical works simply advocated for transcendental realism, which he defines in 1781 as the idea that “outer appearances” are considered as “things in themselves” or that “objects of the sense … must have their existence in themselves” (KrV A369).64 But the pre-Critical Kant does not think that “outer appearances” (materially extended objects) are things-in-themselves. He clearly holds that they are external expressions of substances. Yet, his pre-Critical thought does need to grant to appearances their independence from “us and our sensibility,” at least in the sense that material bodies and forces are independent of human existence and sensibility (KrV A369). But we should note that there is a way in which “outer appearances” (i.e. the relational, natural scientific world) are not independent of the representational form of those relations even for the pre-Critical Kant. This is because bodies and their external relations are a function of a shared representation of the universe had by all substances. Thus, Kant’s early views are not so easily labeled transcendental realism and dismissed as irrelevant for his more mature views. The story of the relation between the pre-Critical and Critical philosophies is much more complex than that.

Notes 1. “Kant’s overall pre-critical project pursued a synthesizing system of philosophy that aimed to integrate the claims of mathematical natural philosophy into a correct, but still purely conceptual, metaphysics” (Anderson 2015, p. 149). 2. Jauernig mentions that the Newtonian influence in the pre-Critical works is exaggerated and that the major motivations come from metaphysical problems that derive from the Leibnizian tradition (Jauernig 2008, pp. 42–4). 3. “Now since the monads are also simple like the soul, they can also have powers of representation and their influence can be merely the modification of powers of representations . … Accordingly, the monads have power of representation of all parts of the world through which they are affected. But because they are not alone, but rather are always connected with other

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monads, they are hindered by this in their power of representation, and therefore have obscure representations, are slumbering monads. Thereby they are distinguished from the soul” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:929). 4. This is the start of mathematics according to Mendelssohn in the 1760s (Mendelssohn 1997, p. 257). 5. Kant reiterates these ideas in the Inquiry from 1764 (UD, AA 2:294–5). 6. Reuscher’s argument depends on importing ideas from the section on the principle of sufficient reason into the first section. He argues that because Kant believes that the predicates of possible things have ontological status (through God), then that means that analytic truth claims are existential in nature and, thus, are describing the ultimate nature of reality (Reuscher 1977, pp. 20–1). Yet, Kant is clear that it is only in the case of God that one can move from the mere idea to its existence (PND, AA 1:396). Reuscher attempts to argue that Kant holds the Leibnizian view that all truth is analytic, when all that Kant says is that truth requires “determination” that a subject has a predicate (not that it has it essentially) (Reuscher 1977, p. 20). He also attempts to argue that the principle of contradiction remains central to Kant’s conception of truth because a subject that has a predicate necessarily excludes its logical opposite. But Kant argues that what excludes a predicate from a subject is not the logical principle of contradiction but “the determining ground” (PND, AA 1:393). 7. Buchdahl also describes this work as a deductive analysis rooted in the principles of sufficient reason and contradiction (Buchdahl 1969, p. 472). 8. On the importance of causation for knowledge in the early Kant, see Heimsoeth (1967, pp. 162, 171). 9. On this example, see Polonoff (1973, pp. 140–1). 10. If one considers Kant to be establishing a deductively rational system of metaphysical truths, in which ontological claims about reality follow from the progressive specification of the principles of pure reason, then this introduction of a subjective, epistemological principle will appear as a “misfit” and the work will appear a patchwork (Reuscher 1977, pp. 25, 27). 11. Clearly Kant thinks that light is instantaneous throughout the expanse of its reach in space regardless of the distance (PND, AA 1:393). 12. Reuscher even points out that these two principles are not simply subtypes of a general type of Ratio Determinans (Reuscher 1977, p. 25). 13. Anderson points to PND, AA 1:289, 391, 396–7, 398 as evidence for Kant’s acceptance of the Leibnizian notion of truth, but I do not see that there is any attempt by Kant to reduce metaphysics to purely analytic truth claims or to derive them from the principle of identity (Anderson 2015, p. 149). Anderson admits that Kant can make an “epistemic” difference between types of truths but that difference, he says, “does not go all the way to logical fundamentals” (Anderson 2015, p. 155). He also points to

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UD, AA 2:294 as proof of the “predicate-in-subject” theory of truth ­containment (Anderson 2015, p. 156). But there Kant says that these are merely the formal conditions on truth and that there are a number of indemonstrable, material propositions that provide the primary data of metaphysics (UD, AA 2:296). These material principles work as mediating concepts that can connect subject and predicate. The only standard that he gives for them is that they “obvious to every human understanding” (UD, AA 2:295). Anderson believes Kant holds that all truths reduce to analytic judgments of identity and there are only subjective difference in how we access them. I would argue that the mediating, indemonstrable, material concepts that connect subject and predicate (in either metaphysics or mathematics) and are universal to human understanding are not simply analytic. The notion of being compound is not contained in the notion of a body analytically. A body is just the notion of impenetrable material extension. Anderson seems to see this, but is so committed to the “predicate-in-subject principle” of truth that he says Kant is confused and unable to accept a distinction that he actually seems to make (Anderson 2015, pp. 157–8). 14. Translated in Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion. See Kant (1996). On the obvious idea that some positive predicates are not in God, see BDG, AA 2:85 and Heimsoeth (1967, p. 180). 15. Kant’s view thus seems close to the one articulated by Mendelssohn in the 1760s who argues that we can only move from possibility to actuality, even in the case of mathematics, via “the testimony of the senses,” with the exception of God (Mendelssohn 1997, p. 266). 16. So I do not believe that Kant rejects “ontotheism” in 1755 as Stang argues (Stang 2016, p. 28). He defines “ontotheism” as the idea God exists in virtue of his essence, and also argues that the rejection of that idea is also the rejection of “possibilism” or that there are “merely possible but non-­ existent objects” (Stang 2016, pp. 13–4). Stang believes that Kant holds this position because he sees it as an implication of the “existence is not a predicate” objection to some forms of the ontological argument. My present work is not focused on Kant’s rational theology and the development of his arguments for the existence of God, but I have discussed these elsewhere (Rukgaber 2014). In effect, my view is that Stang overstates what this objection is doing for Kant. I hold that it is being used to point out a circularity problem with the classic Cartesian ontological argument from the definition of God (Rukgaber 2014, pp. 97–8). I agree that Kant’s ultimate position in the Critical-era is the denial of ontotheism and possibilism, but I argue that is a unique development in the Critique of Pure Reason.

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17. Motivated by a force-based account of Kant’s entire early ontology, some scholars argue that he overlooks the fact that the mind can cause its own states in this way (Caranti 2004, pp. 287–8). 18. Findlay notes Kant’s fundamental opposition to Crusius’s position but does so by seeing the New Elucidation as essentially Leibnizian and as offering nothing of “great consequence” (Findlay 1981, pp. 71–2). 19. Rather than a pre-established harmony, Kant seems to call his own view an established harmony. “Thus all predicates must be produced by one’s own power, but since an external power is also required externally: then a third must have willed this harmony (established harmony )” (V-Meta/Herder, AA 28:52–3). 20. Kanterian appears puzzled by these claims about ultimate reality and wonders how anything new could emerge (Kanterian 2018, pp. 137–8). But Kant’s point is that the realm of appearances and the natural world still have everything that we think of as “change.” 21. For more details on these sections as a criticism of pre-established harmony, see Kaehler (1985). One of the few scholars who adequately characterizes the fine line between physical influence and pre-established harmony that Kant is treading is Shell (1996, pp. 44–5). 22. As Kant phrases it, change happens only “in virtue of an inner principle of activity” and not through an external connection to other substances alone (PND, AA 1:411). Kant’s idea is that change does happen through inner reason, but those inner reasons are not given by the substance, but as a result of representations that result from the substance’s connection to other beings. 23. “If a substance suffers, then it must contain in itself by its own power the ground of the inherence of the accident, because otherwise the accident would not inhere in it. But the ground of this must also be in the efficient power of the substance, because otherwise it would not act” (V-Meta/ Herder, AA 28:51–2). 24. Hahmann sees the fundamental difference here between Kant and Wolff to be whether determinations (predicates) or powers are primary for substances, which suggests the influence of Baumgarten on Kant (Hahmann 2009, pp. 46–7). 25. The problems with standard interpretations are clear when, for example, Watkins wonders how to characterize the mutual interaction of substances and concludes that we should interpret it through “the collision of two bodies” (Watkins 2005, p. 137). It is mistaken that “Kant is thinking primarily of the case of bodies in developing his metaphysical account of causality” (Watkins 2005, p. 137). Instead, the changes of the inner states of substances are thought of as responses of inherent powers that change in

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relation to representational information concerning external states of affairs. 26. Kant never makes it particularly clear why we are still allowed to say that a being with changing states is simple. He must hold that this is so and explains it in the 1770 Dissertation. “Modifications are not parts of a subject; they are what are determined by a ground” (MSI, AA 2:389). 27. To be clear, I am using a modern notion of a machine and not the one that Baumgarten and Kant have. For Baumgarten, machines are “composite beings” that only move (Baumgarten 2013, §433). In other words, they are simply bodies and they are thought of as dead, as opposed to monads. So for Kant a machine is thought of simply as a turnspit or a watch (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:268). Machines do not have informational or representational capacities for Kant and Baumgarten. But following Simondon, we can say that the early conception of a machine as automaton has been overturned by increasing levels of indeterminacy and openness to information in machines and their states. 28. In the lectures, he distinguishes between crude physical influence as an “original interaction ” versus a “derivative interaction ” in which interaction relies on a “third ground” (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28: 213–4). Original interaction only applies to God, so the crude view of influence simply being a result of the existence of objects in space is a mistake. This seems to be the mistake within Kanterian’s account (Kanterian 2018, p. 143). 29. On the similarities between Kant’s view and pre-established harmony in 1747, see Kuehn (2001, pp. 25–6). In the lectures, he explains that he is thinking of pre-established harmony and occasionalism as being “hyperphysical influence ” in which the acting power is the “third thing” itself, which is God for occasionalism or is an “automatic harmony ” in which objects are mere dead clockworks on pre-established harmony (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:215). 30. Garnett argues that “if the action of the affecting substance is merely the occasion of the changes in the substance affected, the latter may be said to be the source of all its inner determinations. But in this case, there is no interaction” (Garnett 1939, p. 95). For Kant, I think it is a question of the nature of the occasion. If it is occasioned in substances who are receptive to states of affairs external to it, then even if the power to change state comes from the substance’s inner life, it counts as a sort of interaction that Kant thinks is different from pre-established harmony. 31. This core idea of Kant’s metaphysics appears as incoherent to many. For example, Kanterian thinks of a cat as a substance and argues that it is incoherent to try and consider this substance “in abstraction from these spatio-­

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temporal relations” (Kanterian 2018, p. 141). But that is not what Kant means by a substance. 32. Kant is clear that “interaction is thus possible not through space, but rather only through this, that they all are through One and depend on One” (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:214). Kanterian tries to say that the connection of substances happens simply through “space,” although Kant is clear that space and motion are merely appearances of this connection (Kanterian 2018, p. 141). In fact, Kanterian sees this remark of a divine schema or idea connecting substances and creating them as essentially saying that God himself cannot think of substances as anything but spatial and temporal (Kanterian 2018, p. 141). 33. Laywine offers a similarly mistaken account of substantial interaction. She argues that Kant intends for a system of “real interaction” through “repulsion” and “acceleration” (Laywine 1993, pp. 4–5). She even applies this notion of “impressed force” to the soul (Laywine 1993, p. 5). There simply is no textual evidence to support the idea that the inner states of substances are mere physical force relations caused by pressure, collision, and repulsion. 34. This idea is also found, for example, in Mendelssohn: “[1] The soul never ceases implicitly to represent to itself the entire world whole explicitly representing to itself only the world relative to the position of its body in it, [2] that sensuous impressions are merely the occasions and opportunities for the representations of the soul to unfold themselves and be perceived, and [3] that this unfolding of concepts in the soul perfectly harmonizes with the unfolding of concepts outside it” (Mendelssohn 1997, p. 260). 35. In the lectures dated the mid-1770s, Kant explains how this picture relates to space. “As phenomenon, space is the infinite connection of substances with each other. Through the understanding we comprehend only their connection, to the extent they all lie in the divine. This is the only ground for comprehending the connection of substances through the understanding, to the extent we intuit the substances as though they lay generally in the divine. If we imagine this connection sensibly, then it happens through space. Thus, space is the highest condition of the possibility of the connection” (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:214). 36. Although Langton argues that Kant’s view of space is only “partly Leibnizian” and that space “supervenes upon” the “dynamical relations between substances,” she still essentially holds the standard view (Langton 1998, p.  98). For Langton, the whole of what transpires between substances is attraction and repulsion and so this is what connects them and is not contained in their mere existence (Langton 1998, p. 99). But Kant’s view is clearly that what God adds to substances is the power to reciprocally

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determine themselves vis-à-vis the states of other substances through a coordinating idea. 37. Although it lacks details, Shell’s account at least sees the generative power of God’s idea (Shell 1996, pp. 3–4). 38. “Somit ist dieser nur ein relationaler, kein absoluter Raum” (Hahmann 2009, p. 51). 39. Following Van Cleve we can say that Kant is thinking of intrinsic properties as “monadic,” whereas Langton is thinking of them as merely “nonrelational” (Van Cleve 1988, p. 234). For a criticism of Langton’s notion of the intrinsic, see Allais (2006). 40. Hahmann also finds Langton’s approach to the pre-Critical Kant questionable (Hahmann 2009, pp. 45–6). 41. Kanterian talks of beatitude and revelation in these early works as quasi-­ mystical and enthusiastic (Kanterian 2018, p. 117). For example, he refers to Kant’s faith as “unwarranted” and a generalization based on mere local or empirical harmony in nature (Kanterian 2018, p.  119). But it is the underlying conception of substances and their connection of God which makes this neither empirically-based nor an act of faith as opposed to an act of reason. 42. This idea is the basis for Langton’s exposition, which claims that Kant’s view is similar to Boscovich’s and that the monads are “unextended points” at the center of a field of force (Langton 1998, pp. 98–9). She uses the analogy of a planet and its gravitational field (the same analogy appears in Kanterian 2018, p. 171). The problem is that the monad qua simple substance or thing-in-itself is not present in space either like a point or like a planet. Langton does not seem to see that the unextended point reading is incompatible with the idea that “the physical world is the virtual and not the actual presence of monads,” which is Kant’s view (Langton 1998, p. 99). Laywine also thinks of the monad as a “point particle ideally situated at the center of this sphere of activity” (Laywine 1993, p. 6). 43. See also Calinger (1979, p. 354). 44. On the possibility of material expressions of monads being in space without filling it, see Heimsoeth (1956, p. 117). 45. Pollok sees Kant as accepting Baumgarten’s notion of physical points (Pollok 2002, p. 67). 46. Although Smith argues that a point-based Boscovichian reading runs into problems with passages that suggest a “deformable continuum” view, he believes that Kant is holding multiple views, shifting to a pointal view when considering simplicity and to a continuum view when discussing the composition of bodies (Smith 2013, p. 104).

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47. So contrary to Pollok’s claim, Kant’s solution in this work does not “remain within the field of geometry” and does venture “into the realm of metaphysics” (Pollok 2002, p. 70). 48. Ferrini argues that Kant’s view is Cartesian, which is roughly a version of the doctrine of virtual presence: a substance’s essence is not affected by the “sphere of activity” and manifests due to the substance’s power to act upon bodies (Ferrini 2018, p. 44). Thus, there is a difference between being in place versus filling it in Descartes that seems close to Kant’s own view (Ferrini 2018, p. 26). Heimsoeth also attributes to Kant the doctrine of virtual presence (1956, p. 118). 49. If one does not recognize this doctrine of virtual presence, then one must conclude that Kant only means to speak of monads as “physical substances” and to exclude minds within his monadology or to be a materialist with regard to them (Pollok 2002, p. 66). Because Pollok makes monads (simple substances) physically and actually present rather than virtually so, he is pulled in different directions, claiming that “the phenomena of force and matter in motion” are “mere accidents of material substance” and yet, paradoxically, forces are “constituents of things in themselves” (Pollok 2002, p. 64; MonPh, AA 1:482 on “accidents”). The problem here is that the notion of “accident” in Kant’s text refers to what we might call the fundamental contingency of a thing vis-à-vis God’s ability to superadd powers to a substance without changing its essential nature. Those powers are of course not “accidental” from our perspective or in the way of secondary qualities are. On this issue, see Buchdahl, in which the notion of what is “accidental” is said to require an additional teleological and theological explanation (Buchdahl 1969, pp. 490–1). 50. Grant, following Henry More, who criticizes the doctrine, refers to this as Holenmerism or as the idea of the whole (of a spirit) being in every place, calling it a “truly incomprehensible explanation” (Grant 1981, p.  223). But Kant’s notion of virtual presence is not the idea that the whole of the spirit is in every part of the space. 51. See Watkins (2013, p. 430). Kant’s view is akin to the one Slowik mentions in a footnote as suggested by a referee of his paper. God does not “act in space per se” but rather on “non-spatial monads” (Slowik 2016, p. 339). 52. Heimsoeth tends to speak of “God’s virtual omnipresence” more in terms of a spatio-temporal extension of power, making God present in a way similar to how simple elements of matter are definitively present (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 182). He also thinks of the doctrine of divine omnipresence continuing into the Critical era. But his evidence for that is largely based on Reflexionen and lectures. 53. Watkins offers a similar criticism based on the idea that the monad is actually (circumscriptively) in space via its force (Watkins 2005, p. 111).

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54. Whether virtual presence is a viable doctrine or not, one must recognize such a view is Kant’s aim or else his view just seems ambiguous between pointal and deformable continuum views (Smith 2013, p. 104; Kanterian 2018, p. 171). 55. Thus, the doctrine of the Physical Monadology does not cast doubt on the idea that substances, as having metaphysically inner relations, might be thought of on the model of representational states of a mind. Watkins holds that it does (Watkins 2005, p. 177). 56. Heβbrüggen-Walter seems to hold that until the 1760s that Kant basically accepted Knutzen’s view that the soul is locally, circumscriptively in space (Heβbrüggen-Walter 2014, p. 33). The argument here shows that is not true. I see Kant as holding the “virtual localism” that Heβbrüggen-­Walter attributes to the Cartesians (Heβbrüggen-Walter 2014, pp. 29, 36). 57. Some take the infinite divisibility of space argument to mean that he rejects “simple points” (Pollok 2002, p. 88). But the infinite progress of division does not conceptually rule out points that can never be reached. Nevertheless, Kant is not committed to the metaphysics of points because he retains simplicity through the metaphysically inner nature of substances. Yet, pointalism seems to remain for Pollok who continues to think of the monad as an actual presence at the center of the emanations of force (Pollok 2002, p. 89). 58. More traditionally, scholars have just said that Kant’s view of space is relational or an accident that “has reality only in conjunction with corporeal elements” and is the “form of the appearance of outer relations of substances,” where the latter are thought of as physical (Pollok 2002, p. 67). 59. Hahmann argues that Kant did not accept Newtonian absolute, empty space and sees space as a phenomenon even in 1756 (Hahmann 2009, pp. 54–6). 60. This idea that there is a formal conception of space qua mathematical, divine idea is certainly related to Leibniz’s anti-Newtonian conception of absolute space. Gueroult describes four different conceptions of space in Leibniz corresponding to different levels of abstraction. He calls the present notion the most abstract notion of space as “an innate idea expressing the intellectual order of possibles (coexistents)” (Gueroult 1982, p. 284). See also Kaulbach (1965, p. 76) and De Risi (2007, p. 551). 61. Schönfeld cites MonPh, AA 1:475 as if it were evidence of Kant endorsing such a view, but he is there clearly merely asserting what “geometry contends.” 62. Ferrini suggests that this distinction continues in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science also and that there “space is prior to matter, and its emptiness is not conceived as a total lack or inactivity of matter” (Ferrini 2018, p. 41).

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63. Carrier uses this claim that space is not made of substantial subjects of composition to mean it is a relational theory (Carrier 1990, p. 173). 64. I must admit that I find many accounts of Kant’s Critical metaphysics to be transcendentally realistic. For example, Allais states that “all ‘one-world’ interpretations” believe that “the very same things that appear to us as being a certain way have a certain way they are in themselves, which is unknown to us” (Allais 2004, p. 657). That strikes me as identical to what Kant is here calling (and rejecting) transcendental realism.

References Allais, Lucy. 2004. Kant’s One World: Interpreting ‘Transcendental Idealism’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12: 655–684. ———. 2006. Intrinsic Natures: A Critique of Langton on Kant. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73: 143–169. Anderson, R.  Lanier. 2015. The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant’s Analytic/ Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aquinas, Saint Thomas. 1952. Summa Theologica, 2 volumes. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Incorporated. Baumgarten, Alexander. 2013. Metaphysics. Trans. C.  Fugate and J.  Hymers. London: Bloomsbury. Boscovich, Roger Joseph. 1966. A Theory of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Buchdahl, Gerd. 1969. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins Descartes to Kant. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Calinger, Ronald. 1979. Kant and Newtonian Science: The Pre-critical Period. Isis 70: 348–362. Caranti, Lugi. 2004. The Problem of Idealism in Kant’s Pre-critical Period. Kant-­ Studien 95: 283–303. Carrier, Martin. 1990. Kants Theorie der Materie und ihr Wirkung auf due zeigenössische Chemie. Kant-Studien 81: 170–210. De Risi, Vicenzo. 2007. Geometry and Monadology: Leibniz’s Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space. Basel: Birkhäuser. Ferrini, Cinzia. 2018. Descartes’s Legacy in Kant’s Notions of Physical Influx and Space-Filling: ‘True Estimation’ and ‘Physical Monadology’. Kant-Studien 109: 9–46. Findlay, J.N. 1981. Kant and the Transcendental Object. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Garnett, Christopher, Jr. 1939. The Kantian Philosophy of Space. Port Washington: Kennikat.

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Grant, Edward. 1981. Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gueroult, Martial. 1982. Space, Point, and Void in Leibniz’s Philosophy. In Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays, ed. Michael Hooker, 284–301. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hahmann, Andree. 2009. Kritische Metaphysik der Substanz: Kant im Widerspruch zu Leibniz. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1956. Studien zur Philosophie Immanuel Kants: Metaphysische Ursprünge und Ontologische Grundlagen. Köln: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1967. Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism. In Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke Gram, 158–199. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Heβbrüggen-Walter, Stefan. 2014. Putting Our Soul in Place. Kant Yearbook 6: 1–21. Holden, Thomas. 2004. The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant. Oxford: Oxford University. Jauernig, Anja. 2008. Kant’s Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy: Contra the Leibnizians, but Pro Leibniz. In Kant and the Early Moderns, ed. Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse, 41–63. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaehler, Klaus Erich. 1985. Kants frühe Kritik an der Lehre von der “prästabilierten Harmonie” und ihr Verhältnis zu Leibniz. Kant-Studien 76: 405–419. Kant, Immanuel. 1992. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Religion and Rational Theology. Trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Lectures on Metaphysics. Trans. and ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kanterian, Edward. 2018. Kant, God and Metaphysics: The Secret Thorn. London/ New York: Routledge. Kaulbach, Friedrich. 1965. Der Philosophische Begriff der Bewegung: Studien zu Aristoteles, Leibniz und Kant. Köln/Graz: Böhlau Verlag. Kuehn, Manfred. 2001. Kant’s Teachers in the Exact Sciences. In Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins, 11–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langton, Rae. 1998. Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laywine, Allison. 1993. Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy. Atascadero: Ridgeview.

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Leibniz, G.W. 1996. New Essays on Human Understanding. Trans. P.  Remnant and J. Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendelssohn, Moses. 1997. Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pollok, Konstantin. 2002. “Fabricating a World in Accordance with Mere Fantasy…”? The Origins of Kant’s Critical Theory of Matter. Review of Metaphysics 56: 61–97. Polonoff, Irving. 1973. Force, Cosmos, Monads and Other Themes of Kant’s Early Thought, KantStudien Erganzungshefte 107. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann. Reuscher, John. 1977. A Clarification and Critique of Kant’s Principiorum Primorum Cognitionis Metaphysicae Nova Dilucidatio. Kant-Studien 68: 18–32. Rukgaber, Matthew. 2014. Kant’s Criticisms of the Ontological and Onto-­ Theological Arguments for the Existence of God. Kant Yearbook 6: 87–114. Sarmiento, Gustavo. 2005. On Kant’s Definition of the Monad in the Monadologia physica of 1756. Kant-Studien 96: 1–19. Schönfeld, Martin. 2000. The Philosophy of Young Kant: The Precritical Project. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shell, Susan. 1996. Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slowik, Edward. 2016. Situating Kant’s Pre-critical Monadology: Leibnizian Ubeity, Monadic Activity and Idealist Unity. Early Science and Medicine 21: 332–349. Smith, Sheldon. 2013. Kant’s picture of monads in the Physical Monadology. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44: 102–111. Stang, Nicholas. 2016. Kant’s Modal Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Cleve, James. 1988. Inner States and Outer Relations: Kant and the Case for Monadism. In Doing Philosophy Historically, ed. Peter Hare, 231–247. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. Watkins, Eric. 2005. Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. Kant’s (Anti-) Newtonianism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44: 429–437.

CHAPTER 4

The Development of Kant’s Pre-Critical Metaphysics from 1758 to 1766

The Steady Separation of Sense and Reason While there are a number of different places where scholars have tried to mark the fundamental shift in Kant’s pre-Critical thinking that sets him on the path toward the Critical philosophy, most are convinced that the works of the 1760s are nails in the coffin of the so-called pre-Critical project.1 I will be arguing that the works from the 1760s do not show Kant fundamentally altering or rejecting his metaphysics, even as they clarify his philosophical methodology. That goes even for 1766’s Dreams of a Spirit Seer, which many see as a total rejection of metaphysics. Even though scholars overestimate how revolutionary the alterations in Kant’s thinking are during these years, they are not entirely wrong that a refinement in his conception of the human understanding initiates a shift that will eventually lead to the Critical philosophy. I believe that the specific shift that takes place is phenomenological in nature, and it is first expressed in 1758 in the New Doctrine of Motion and Rest. There we see Kant turning to our first-­ person experience of motion, rest, and continuity. While this does not initiate a full-scale phenomenological revolution in his thinking, what happens is that mathematical-intuitive concepts emerge as having the same indemonstrable certainty as certain fundamental rational concepts. Rather than mathematical concepts needing to appeal to a metaphysical foundation, as is Kant’s procedure in the Physical Monadology, one finds Kant drawing from both reason and intuition to arrive at fundamental principles

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of metaphysical cognition in the 1760s. While this may sound revolutionary, we have already seen how Kant separates epistemic and ontological senses of the principle of sufficient reason. His rejection of purely rational theories of force, space, and pre-established harmony also show how his early metaphysics was already strongly committed to the importance of philosophizing with mathematical-intuitive concepts.2 Of course, his appeals to the world as intuitively given were seen as directing us toward metaphysical sources of the phenomena that mathematics merely describes. Until 1770, I find little reason to attribute a significant turn against such a project rather than a clarificatory development.3 In fact, it is only in 1781 (or at some point in the silent decade of the 1770s) that Kant will complete the Critical turn in which rational inquiry into that metaphysical realm is shifted to a set of principles that are merely regulative and hopeful of certain rational unities. While the works of the 1760s say very little about space, substance, and force, with the exception of the 1768 article that is the subject of the next chapter, they do substantially develop Kant’s rational theology and argue for its secure foundations in pure reason. While that is not a subject that I will discuss at much length, the methodological developments that allow Kant to make the rational proof structure of his rational theology clearer also allow him to outline an impure metaphysical project—one which he eventually calls “general phenomenology”—that analyzes knowledge down to its irreducible, mathematical-intuitive elements (Br, AA 10:98). While Kant retains a notion of simple metaphysical substances during these works and continually refers to his past doctrines in order to illustrate proper metaphysical method, the motivation for his commitment to those simple substances is the weakest point in his theorizing, which, we have already seen, causes a substantial conflict in the Physical Monadology. As long as he remains committed to simple substances as providing the structure of the empirical world, then his metaphysics remains a mixture of purely rational concepts and mathematical-intuitive ones. Again, it is only in 1770 that the function of simple substances for theorizing about the structure of the empirical world is finally challenged, although even then they remain a part of his rational theology. Therefore, we can really only identify a substantial break from pre-Critical philosophy when the epistemic insights and phenomenological method that he begins to explore as early as 1758 lead to a clear rejection of realism about the noumenal realm, which only takes place after 1770.

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I will not be as detailed in my analysis of the works from 1758 through 1764 as I have been of the works prior to them and those that will follow them. I will only outline what I take to be sufficient to show that Kant develops a two-pronged approach to metaphysics that he uses to preserve rather than overturn his previous work, an approach that investigates intuitive certainties and looks to metaphysical sources of our harmonious world. Ultimately, I will spend much of my time discussing Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). This is because many believe that it advocates for an anti-metaphysical skepticism that is at odds with his own earlier writings. For example, Laywine claims that in Dreams Kant recognizes that his early work was “a dismal failure” (Laywine 1993, p. 101). Schönfeld believes that Kant comes to deny “the viability of metaphysics” and that the text suggests “an outright revolution” in which metaphysics is replaced with “the science of the limits of human reason” (Schönfeld 2000, pp. 240–1). I shall argue that Dreams does not indicate such a radical revolution in his thought. In fact, Kant’s own long-standing metaphysical views are used within the text to show how to do metaphysics and what some of its basic conclusions are. What makes the work seem like a radical shift in Kant’s development is its explicit call for philosophers to recognize empirical constraints on understanding and explanation. For this reason, Schönfeld expresses the common view that Kant comes to accept in 1764 or 1765 the “downfall of metaphysics” and that he no longer held it to be “the essential foundation of any type of philosophical inquiry” (Schönfeld 2000, p. 231). I will show that this simply cannot be the conclusion from 1764’s Inquiry and that the shift in Kant’s thinking toward the perspective of the experiencing subject is only meant to arrive at a set of indemonstrable cognitions rather than to overturn those cognitions that he long held to be a part of metaphysics.

Philosophical Method and the Relation of Mathematics to Metaphysics I have criticized the “Newtonian” reading of Kant’s physics and metaphysics in the previous chapters. That reading also runs into the problem that his 1758 “New doctrine of motion of rest” advocates against absolute motion and rest, which are the major reasons for appealing to Newtonian absolute space in the first place. Yet, Kant’s arguments against these ideas are based less on metaphysical concerns and more on epistemic ones.

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Thus, this short 1758 announcement shows an important shift toward the perspective of the intuiting subject and toward a recognition of the importance of intuitive constructions and thought experiments for illuminating the fundamental properties of space. We might call this the first phenomenological shift of Kant’s career, of which there would be several more in all areas of his philosophy.4 Kant tells us to engage in a Cartesian-like meditation, a turning to our first-person experience of motion, which we recognize only through “change of place.” This is perhaps the clearest instance of what Heimsoeth says was the unique starting point of Kant’s thinking all along: “the problem of knowledge” as an ontological situation of “the finite subject” (1967, p. 161). This subjective perspective in 1758 is meant to show that our judgments of motion and rest are always relative, because the “place of a thing” is only known by “its position, situation, or by its external relationship to other objects around it” (NLBR, AA 2:16).5 Rest then only appears through stability of position within a frame of reference, but that frame of reference seems indefinitely expandable and is itself movable. While I do believe that Kant accepts the relativity of all rest and motion, it is important to note that his shift to our experiences leads him to say that “my judgment of the motion and rest of this body is never constant but can always change with new perspectives” (NLBR, AA 2:16, my emphasis).6 Of course, Newton admits that “it is certainly very difficult to find out the true motions of individual bodies and actually to differentiate them from apparent motions, because the parts of that immovable space in which the bodies truly move make no impression on the senses” (Newton 1999, p.  414). Whereas Newton thinks the situation is not hopeless, Kant seems to be of a different opinion. Kant explains kinematic relativity in the standard way. A ball may be at rest on a table that is at rest on a ship, but the ship is moving on the water. The river’s velocity east to west is then relative the greater velocity of the earth’s rotation west to east (NLBR, AA 2:217). Then the earth is moving around the sun, the solar system around the Milky Way, and so on. Kant supports this idea of relativity by an appeal to the passage from Bradley that he had approved of in his cosmology. However, he omits Bradley’s idea that the movement of the solar system would be relative to absolute space. Instead, he states that because of this system of relative spaces, one should never use motion or rest in “an absolute sense but always relatively” (NLBR, AA 2:17). He disregards Newton’s solution and says that it would not help to “imagine a mathematical space empty of all creatures as a container for the bodies,” because one would not be able

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to “distinguish its parts and the various places that are not occupied by anything corporeal” (NLBR, AA 2:17). There is no place at all within this short text where Kant endorses the classical Newtonian conception of absolute space. Kant’s arguments against the need to appeal to absolute space for relative judgments of motion are compatible with an ontological commitment to substantive space in some sense, and it is true that sometimes substantive and absolute conceptions of space are equated. It is more proper to call Kant’s view “substantive” (rather than “absolute”) because the material, force-based plenum view of space is a product of substantive activity. Yet we also have seen that the idea of space and of the form of the interconnection of all substances is an idea in God and in each substance, which is a sort absolutism, albeit not one that appeals to an absolute frame of reference. In fact, the 1758 rejection of space as a standard by which judgments of absolute rest and motion are possible, a rejection due to the relativity of all rest and motion, supports my account that Kant thinks of space as a dynamic field of attractive force. In some sense, every relative framing of space from the smallest to the largest would never provide us with the notion of absolute rest or motion. One would always find a vector space of attractive forces. Kant is after all willing to attribute motion and velocity to “the surrounding space” itself, at least from the perspective of judgment (NLBR, AA 2:24). Kant’s so-called new doctrine of motion and rest is simply to point out that there is no single perspective from which to say one object is at rest and the other is in motion. Thus, we should just say that two objects are moving in relation to one another and hold that they have true motion relative to each other (NLBR, AA 2:18).7 This doctrine was briefly stated in the New Elucidation (PND, AA 1:407). In 1758, he argues that the change between two things, like a cannonball being shot at a wall, does not reveal anything except that the two objects are “both approaching one another” and, thus, we should just distribute the amount of relative change that occurs “equally between both bodies” (NLBR, AA 2:19). As he stated it in 1755, “the subtotal of the forces is calculated from the effects which operate in conjunction with each other and are thus viewed in general as a totality” and that, after accounting for the force in differing directions, “what remains is the motion of the center of gravity” (PND, AA 1:407). Interestingly, this shift in perspective seems to weaken Kant’s commitment to the metaphysical postulation of innate forces. Kant states that notions like inertia and attraction merely serve “to explain the grand motions of the cosmos, that is, only as the law of some general appearance

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known empirically, of unknown cause, and which, consequently, one should not be too hasty to invoke as an internal force of nature” (NLBR, AA 2:20). While Kant had regularly described motion as an external appearance of the action of substances, it appears to be an important moment of restraint in 1758 to treat these notions of force empirically rather than metaphysically. What were once posited as the fundamental forces of matter (attraction, inertia, and repulsion) are now recognized as tied to the nature of how we must mathematically describe what is given to us. This does not exclude Kant’s continued commitment to their metaphysical origins, but we can at least see initial steps of a turn towards a recognition of the fundamental features of appearances as being tied to the form by which subjects encounter and measure the world. So we should not exaggerate Kant’s point here: he may very well be only saying that from the perspective of empirical judgments about force in space, then the cause is unknown.8 Metaphysically speaking, Kant surely still holds that simple substances generate these orbits of attractive force. Yet, he also undoubtedly does see more clearly the empirical source of our notion of force as well. Ultimately, the claims about the inexhaustible and creative forces of natura naturans that were the subject of the previous chapters will largely disappear from his writings in favor of a more careful analysis of the separate worlds of bodies and substances which culminates in the 1770 Dissertation. My sense is that in 1758 we can see that the pre-­Critical Kant is holding a position known as the neglected third alternative, which is typically a criticism of his Critical view.9 That neglected alternative holds that that the sensible world of space, time, and force is subject-­independent (and metaphysically grounded on simple substances), but that our cognitive perspective is also such that we are bound to a certain mathematical description of that reality rooted in our perspective. So while Kant is opening the door for the emergence of the possibility that what mathematics describes is more a feature of our perspective than the in-itself nature of matter, force, space, and time qua emanations of substances, such a recognition of the transcendental subjectivity of nature will have to wait until 1770. His transformation of what was a metaphysical thesis to what he calls a “physical law,” which “can never be proved” but is a “very fine and proper rule for making judgments,” is seen when he discusses the law of continuity (NLBR, AA 2:21). Where Kant himself actually stands on the law of continuity in 1758 is not entirely clear, but this notion will be central to his turn in 1770. Insofar as it is related to the use of the notion of the

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infinitesimally small, Kant discusses that notion in 1763 in the Negative Magnitudes article. There he argues that the outright rejection of the idea is a mistake and holds that “nature herself seems to yield proofs of no little distinctness showing that this concept is very true” (NG, AA 2:168). Nevertheless, he also holds that it is an idea that we cannot properly understand and that while it is useful in the study of nature, “dogmatic declarations” about its impossibility or about its reality are not really possible (NG, AA 2:169). He also argues that the standard account of motion and rest is actually committed to a sort of leap in nature (an “instantaneous effect”) to explain a change from rest to motion or else that it takes place by infinite steps and so does not happen at all (NLBR, AA 2:23). His rejection of absolute rest and motion leads him to challenge any view that believes it can find absolute beginnings and endings in nature. This suggests that he is moving toward the notion of true continuity, although that will not appear until the 1770 Dissertation, and it will be a feature of our sensible perspective and, thus, of the sensible world. Thus, it seems that he sees continuity as a mathematically acceptable hypothesis, but not entirely necessary, much like the notion of inertia to which it is tied. Kant says that he can accept inertia as an “experiential law,” but this is just a way of describing, from a given experiential perspective, that one object has a force (motion) that counters the force of another (NLBR, AA 2:20). When the objects are at relative rest to one another, they do not have inertia as “an internal force within themselves” (NLBR, AA 2:20). This shows a rather important change from 1756 Physical Monadology in which Kant held that bodies and their elements held “the force of inertia” in different quantities, which meant that they preserved themselves in motion rather than immediately expending all energy and being immediately “reduced to a state of rest” (MonPh, AA 1:485).10 While it is hard to draw any strong conclusion from “one printer’s sheet of a few pages” meant to advertise his lectures (NLBR, AA 2:21), I believe that there is development in two aspects of the 1758 announcement. First, his recognition of the mathematical description of nature as both true and an appearance related to our perspective is his clearest expression so far of the importance of the subjective perspective in philosophy. Second, rather than attribute to Kant anything like a refusal to admit metaphysical theses, I suspect that the metaphysical cautiousness of this article is both a result of its narrow scope and his growing recognition of the rootedness of metaphysical and mathematical knowledge on fundamental, intuitive, and indemonstrable concepts, which will become central to thinking in the

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1760s. It appears to me that Kant now finds scientific knowledge to be a partner of (rather than a subordinate to) metaphysics, and this is clearer in the works from 1763 and 1764, especially in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, and Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality. The alteration is seen in part through the new status that mathematics and geometry attain as the standards of certainty and knowledge regarding experience. In a reversal of his 1756 method of using metaphysics (substances and their virtual presence) to prop up the reality of the given world, the task of the Negative Magnitudes essay is to show how the propositions of mathematics can result in genuine philosophical applications (NG, AA 2:167).11 Kant argues that philosophy should not “imitate” the method of mathematics, but there should be a genuine application of the “propositions” of mathematics to “the objects of philosophy” (NG, AA 2:167). He argues that insofar as philosophy roots itself in the rational exploration of the mathematically grounded notions found in physics, then it can attain “heights” that it “would not otherwise have been able to aspire” (NG, AA 2:167). This suggests that metaphysics, unmoored from given reality as analyzed by mathematics, actually stands in the way of true philosophy. While I do not take this to be anything like a repudiation of the earlier philosophy, what it does show is that Kant is coming to terms with how his many claims about force, causality, space, time, and bodies all have their ultimate foundations in the givenness of the mathematically describable world to experience rather than reason. While this does not yet mean that Kant rejects his earlier metaphysical conception of nature, I do think that he is acknowledging the impurity and a posteriori elements of his early works. For example, he denies that a definition of space can be given, such as Baumgarten’s claim that space is “the order of simultaneous beings that are posited mutually outside of each other” (Baumgarten 2013, §239). While that has never been an adequate account of space for Kant, we can see how it has remained at the root of his thinking and how he then supplemented that metaphysical notion with the dynamical and mathematical conceptions of space. Thus, we can see a shift in his approach when he remarks that metaphysics does not offer anything to the account of space and, instead, geometry offers all the “data relating to the most universal properties of space” and that motion offers us the data of time (NG, AA

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2:168). Here we see sensibility and, thus, an intuitive mathematics, coming into its own.12 I have little to say about the actual content of the Negative Magnitudes essay and the distinction between logical and real grounds. Many find this distinction to be central to a shift in Kant’s thought (Watkins 2005, p. 162; Buchdahl 1969, pp. 552, 559) but it seems to me that the 1755 New Elucidation was well aware of the poverty of a philosophy that ignores what is “truly affirmative (realitas)” and “truly negative (negatio)” (NG, AA 2:172). The truly positive and negative can only be investigated through the causal notion of antecedently determining grounds, which he introduced in 1755.13 I believe that Kant’s main inheritance from his teacher Knutzen was this focus on “reality” as that which is supported by the “indubitable testimony of experience,” and that this is sufficient to be wary of views that say that force, space, motion, and interaction are “ideal” or merely apparent (Knutzen 2009, pp. 57–64). What interests me about this distinction in 1763 is that Kant derives it from the mathematical notion of “real opposition” or “repugnancy” between positive and negative quantities that can cancel each other out (NG, AA 2:173). The notion of negative magnitude is proposed as way of understanding real (non-­ logical) opposition among all material and mental phenomena. Kant is drawing on mathematics and physics, while explicitly setting aside the sort of logical grounding of all things in substances and, ultimately, God (NG, AA 2:202–3). He suggests that understanding the real causal oppositions and grounding of effects in nature can only take place through concepts that are ultimately rooted in “simple, unanalyzable concepts of real grounds” and not simply in “judgments” (of logic) which presume a real connection (NG, AA 2:204).14 Those simple unanalyzable concepts of the real are ultimately rooted in experiential certainties, which is to say they are based on intuitive-mathematical certainties, such as proofs of the infinite divisibility of space, the relativity of motion, the primacy of attractive and repulsive forces, and the conservation of reality, which are as central to his thinking in 1755 as they are in 1763. What I am calling a phenomenological shift in Kant’s thought is, at the same time, a commitment to the analysis even of metaphysical concepts to their components, including the basic mathematical-intuitive ones that are the consequently determining ground of non-sensible, non-intuitive notions.15 Remarkably, this shift in method even is seen in Kant’s attempt to prove God’s existence. In the Only Possible Argument, the ontological argument from 1755 is now competing with the physico-theological argument

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rooted in an a posteriori inference from “the unity perceived in the essences of things” and, in particular, from the systematic nature of geometric knowledge of space, an argument that only appeared briefly in the earlier discussion of the principle of co-existence (BDG, AA 2:93). The “order and harmony” that “prevail throughout space” and the ease with which these necessary truths are understood cause him to praise these miraculous and beautiful instances of unity and simplicity that are, nonetheless, complex in their ability to generate necessary truths (BDG, AA 2:95). Yet, space is not the only a posteriori source of such an inference. Kant believes we are led to the inference of “one great common original being” through the ideas of motion that extend through all of material reality leading it to economically form harmonious unities through the basic forces of nature (BDG, AA 2:99). While Kant goes on to trace various harmonies throughout nature, his conclusion is the same. If the essences of things were independent, there would be no reason to expect such harmony of things in nature (BDG, AA 2:112). They are not independent and so must emerge from a single, sustaining cause. I take this to be further evidence of the increasing prominence of intuitive-mathematical concepts to Kant’s philosophizing, which will be seen in the next chapter. Furthermore, it is this recovery of “pure mathematical cognition” (via a priori intuition), in response to its neglect and dismissal by thinkers such as Hume, that is the explicit source of his transcendental idealism according to the Prolegomena (Prol, AA 4:272). While I do see this clarification of metaphysical method as requiring a shift of emphasis, as seen in the shifting fortunes of the ontological and physico-theological arguments for the existence of God from 1755 to 1764, I do not think that we can attribute to Kant a full-­ fledged anti-Platonism. The two-world metaphysics from the previous chapters remains, but it is clear that our ability to sustain claims about one of those worlds is weakening. That metaphysical view remains but is weakened, as is visible when we look at the difference between the fate of the principle of the conservation of reality. What we find is that Kant’s metaphysical principle of the conservation of reality is relegated to “the real grounds of the universe” (NG, AA 2:197). This ground of that which “exists in the world” is something that is “external to it,” and it is these “real grounds” of coming-to-be and passing-away—namely of substances and their powers—that ultimately equal zero (NG, AA 2:197). But Kant denies explicitly that what he offers in 1763 is the claim that “the sum of reality, in general, is neither increased nor diminished by changes in the world” (NG, AA 2:198, my stress). His point is to stress that in

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experience, within the world of motions and forces given to us, what is empirically real is increased and diminished. The altered fate of metaphysics and mathematics is revealed in the opening paragraph of the Inquiry from 1764, in which Newton’s method of securing certainty regarding “physical hypotheses” through “procedures based on experience and geometry” is taken as the model of what philosophy as metaphysics must accomplish (UD, AA 2:275). The actual relation between Kant’s metaphysical method and mathematics is not immediately evident. There are a number of differences as well as similarities. He begins with the idea that mathematics arrives at a “general concept” through a synthetic, constructive process that is in some ways arbitrary (UD, AA 2:276). This arbitrariness stems from the fact that mathematics rests on unanalyzed concepts about space, time, construction, shape, body, and so on (UD, AA 2:278). Philosophy begins with a confused concept and analyzes its characteristic marks using mathematico-­ scientifically sensitive philosophy. This impure task of metaphysics engages in analysis of phenomenologically fundamental components of the world that we experience and that are described by mathematical science. Kant’s example of this process is the philosophical analysis of time which must explore the intuitive marks through procedures of experience and mathematical physics. There are still undoubtedly components of metaphysics, where “no analogon of contingency is to be encountered,” which will exceed our capacity to fully understand them, namely God and God’s presence to ultimate substances (UD, AA 2:297). Although the main focus of the 1764 Inquiry is this hybrid, impure form of philosophical inquiry, the pure form of metaphysics remains a way of investigating the (intelligible) world of God even in 1770.16 The phenomenological shift in Kant’s thinking is again seen here. First, he points out that philosophy does not work with intuitive constructions in which “concrete” signs explore what is universal, which is his notion of an intuitive (i.e. not purely rational) approach to mathematics. Thus, it must turn to “the thing itself” in reflection and through imaginative procedures (UD, AA 2:279). Through this phenomenological yet abstract process, one considers what is universal concerning things, yet this process evolves out of experience. While those who believe Kant is shifting toward empiricism believe he only has a “mostly negative characterization of philosophy” in these works, he illustrates his positive approach with the argument for simple substances of bodies from the Physical Monadology, which arrives at those entities through imaginative removal of composition from

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a body (Kanterian 2018, p. 288).17 His use of this example of simple substances of bodies seems to show that in spite of the clarifications of metaphysical method that are taking place, Kant is still holding on to his previous philosophy. When he returns to this example to illustrate the “only certain method for metaphysics,” there are several significant methodological changes from his 1755 account, although the core of the view remains unchanged. Firstly, he is clear that the notion of substance is an “abstracted concept” that depends on our experience of “the corporeal things which exist in the world” (UD, AA 2:286). He excused this impurity in 1756 by saying that he was using “the ordinary combination of concepts to which all philosophers subscribe” so as to be more inclusive to thinkers of various traditions (MonPh, AA 1:477). The second fundamental change is that he decides that it is not necessary to call simple parts of bodies “substances” as he had earlier in the text (UD, AA 2:279, 286). His inference to a determinate number of simple parts of bodies is left unstated, but it seems to derive from the irreducible idea of bodies as consisting of parts that can be detached from the whole. Presumably the contrast to infinitely divisible space, as well as the contrast between the idea of a space being “occupied” versus it being “filled” with forces of impenetrability, enable us to say bodies are not like mere space and so must consist of determinate, simple parts (UD, AA 2:287).18 Kant is clear that metaphysics can only analyze a concept down to a few “unanalyzable concepts” (UD, AA 2:280). Among them are the concepts of “representation” and “being next to each other” and “being after each other” (UD, AA 2:280). Presumably, Kant’s proof about bodies is also relying on the indemonstrable proposition of mathematics that “the whole is equal to all its parts taken together” (UD, AA 2:281). But the analyses of concepts can only go so far. To arrive at these indemonstrable propositions is to uncover the ultimate “data” of philosophical analyses (UD, AA 2:281). I think it is clear that Kant’s analysis of bodies and their composition out of simple elements is less satisfying than his illustration of a metaphysical analysis of space. The reason is that while space is “partially” analyzable, the notion of bodies seems to resolve itself into the unanalyzable concept of simples only though the interjection of a definition (an analytic indemonstrable truth), even though philosophy is not supposed to begin with such definitions (UD, AA 2:283, 285). It is clear that Kant is continuing to gloss over the purely rational foundations of his acceptance of simple substances. With the case of space, Kant seeks out all its characteristic marks. It is a manifold of external parts; those parts are not independently existing and so

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not constituted by simple elements (which he misleadingly had called substances at UD, AA 2:279), and it has three dimensions (UD, AA 2:281). Unlike the analysis of the elements of bodies, Kant says these features of space can be “examined in concreto” and “cognized intuitively” (UD, AA 2:281). But the philosophical analysis deals not only with magnitude, as mathematics does. Philosophy must deal with “infinitely many qualities,” such as direction which is central to the idea of being-next-to (UD, AA 2:282). Kant’s phenomenological analysis of universal concepts and their qualities is meant to build up axioms or fundamental judgments that relate to “what one initially encounters in that object with certainty” (UD, AA 2:285).19 This approach is said to be similar to Newton’s method in natural science, which uses “certain experience” and geometry to understand nature (UD, AA 2:286).20 These certain experiences are, in metaphysics, “inner” or phenomenologically reflective. While mathematical constructions show the universal fully in empirical demonstration, philosophy, being unclear about universal concepts in the first place, uses the particular (the given world) to spy at such universal concepts obscurely, which of course means that that is still the aim of metaphysics. In spite of what appear to be true advances in Kant’s thinking about metaphysics, as seen in his claim that “the business of metaphysics is actually the analysis of confused cognitions,” it is surprising that Kant’s argument about simple substances from the Physical Monadology would remain relatively unaltered (UD, AA 2:289). In effect, what Kant’s method has done to that argument is to make clearer the indemonstrable concepts that sit at the base of the doctrine of virtual presence. More so than in his earlier work, he is clear that what he calls an “absolutely simple element” cannot exist independently on its own (UD, AA 2:287). When we think of a body or a part of a body, we consider it as filling space as extension on its own. It would do so, we imagine, even if “nothing existed apart from it” (UD, AA 2:287). While this is so of a body, consisting of a “multiplicity of parts existing externally” to one another, it cannot be so of the simple element. The simple element only “occupies a space in the body” through its external connections to other elements and bodies (in nexis aliis) (UD, AA 2:287). So our phenomenological grasp of bodies and their parts are ultimately rooted in notions of impenetrability and contact or “the sense of touch” (UD, AA 2:288). But this means that considered in themselves, the simple elements of bodies “cannot, therefore, be extended,” where this does not mean that they are non-extended points but that they retain their simplicity in terms of the metaphysically “inner” and representational

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nature (UD, AA 2:287). Thus, the substance can be said to occupy a space in the body when in connection with other substances, but this must be regarded as a virtual presence. Kant is clear that we cannot say that its occupation of space is “the reason for its being extended,” because its spatiality is secondary to its active nature; rather, the reason for its being extended is the force that it directs against “numerous other things” (UD, AA 2:287).21 So while Kant has not altered his metaphysics in 1764, his conceptual analyses has at least made clear the distinct components of the doctrine of bodies being composed out of simple elements, components that we can now more clearly see are emerging from both sensible-­intuitive and purely rational sources. Ultimately, he concludes that “metaphysics is as much capable of the certainty which is necessary to produce conviction as mathematics” (UD, AA 2:296). Thus, scholars who claim that the 1764 Inquiry indicates a fundamental rejection of either metaphysics or his past thought seem to be mistaken. Nor do I think that it would be illegitimate to read this method as inchoately present in Kant’s earlier works.22 Kant tells us in 1765 that his approach is one that he has been working with “for some considerable time” (NEV, AA 2:308). Moreover, Lambert recognizes in a letter from 1765 a certain affinity between his thought and Kant’s, based on his reading of the Only Possible Proof for the Existence of God, which is that metaphysics must not be stuck in the ideal or “in mere nomenclature” rather than looking to “the matter or objective material of cognition” (Br, AA 10:52). In reply to Lambert, Kant says that he has often observed similarities between his thinking and Lambert’s, and their approach to method in metaphysics satisfies “the touchstone of universal human reason” (Br, AA 10:55). This does not suggest that Kant’s works from 1762 to 1765 represent a huge divergence or moment of crisis. He does say that he has only “reached some conclusions that he can trust” after several “capsizings” back when he was writing on “every earthly subject” (Br, AA 10:55). What is he referring to here? While this may be a criticism of the works that I have discussed so far, I doubt that it includes the 1755 cosmology with which Lambert also finds so many affinities. It very likely includes in his 1747 treatise and many of his minor works in natural science. I have also suggested that the subjugation of mathematics to metaphysics as stated in the 1756 Physical Monadology has clearly given way to a more equal footing for these areas of cognition. I have also mentioned the shift in his rational theology from 1755 to 1763. Furthermore, while Kant’s earliest works rather nakedly asserted the superiority of the doctrine of

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physical influence between substances and bodies over pre-established harmony, we have seen how his own view has deep affinities with the latter. Starting in 1758, he appears to recognize the epistemic limits on positing innate forces and powers that construct the physical world, although he surely believes that his appeal to attractive and repulsive forces remains valid. While I do not want to ignore the developments that are taking place across the works, we must avoid hyperbolic assertions of radical transformations and anachronistic attempts to find a Critical-era condemnation of metaphysics.

Interpretations of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer While Dreams of a Spirit-Seer from 1766 has led to radically different interpretations, the most common reading is that it is the definitive rejection of the pre-Critical project.23 The proliferation of interpretations is due, in part, to the presence in the text of sardonic references to Emanuel Swedenborg, the spirit-seer of the title who supposedly had mystical contact with the world of spirits. The confusion over this text even sustains a large literature on whether Kant had an “esoteric” hidden agenda in support of Swedenborg’s spiritualism.24 Kant admits, “I am very much inclined to assert the existence of immaterial natures in the world, and to place my own soul in the class of these beings” (TG, AA 2:327; Br, AA 10:69–70). Yet, as he continues in a footnote to this remark, “the reason which inclines me to this view is very obscure, even to myself, and it will probably remain so, as well” (TG, AA 2:327). It is not surprising that Kant would take the ideas of immaterial spirits and of their ontological primacy seriously given their primacy in rationalist metaphysics and the fact that Kant himself has accepted the existence of monads that have an inner, representation state and manifest via virtual presence.25 The Leibnizian tradition that Kant follows regards even the ground of material reality as a product of slumbering monads, that is, metaphysical substances with an inner representational nature that possess a preserving concept of the universe, of which they are unaware (as non-conscious entities) and which is of divine origin.26 Clearly, Kant needs to better distinguish his own views from a pure spiritualist metaphysics that results in phenomenalism.27 He needs to provide more explicit analysis of the soul and of what people think of as immaterial spirits. Representation is merely the capacity to have an inner state of intensive quality that carries meaning about the world. This description does not

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require that beings with the power of representation are thinking beings or souls as opposed to active powers of causation or information-­processing machines. So, Kant did not believe that he was committed to panpsychism, where substances were thought of as minds rather than merely as an analogy with minds. It surely is this proximity between his own view and a spiritualist phenomenalism that actually motivates Kant to get clear on the notion of souls. Swedenborg may be the worst offender of that tradition, but he is hardly Kant’s primary worry. After all, Swedenborg is only mentioned in two of the seven chapters, one of which ends by announcing that his thought is simply compounding ignorance upon ignorance. The entire force of the text is actually directed toward academic metaphysicians or “dreamers of reason,” who use the deductive-synthetic form of philosophical inquiry to arrive at knowledge based on purely rational definitions, such as the definition of a spirit as an immaterial substance.28 Kant’s resistance to talking about immaterial substances, his recognition of the need for a body for interaction and change of substances to take place, and his understanding of the empirical sources of these concepts are the reasons why his metaphysics does not reduce to spiritualism, even if it has substances with inner, representational states at its foundation.29 My sense is that Swedenborg is a ruse—a necessary one because Kant’s target was the philosophical orthodoxy that had total power over his future academic career. It was to this audience that he sent copies of his “anonymous” text (and not Swedenborg) in hopes that he could reform metaphysics and convert others to his way of thinking. We should believe Kant when he says in a letter to Lambert at this time that his philosophical project was to reform philosophical method and metaphysics not abandon it (Br, AA 10:56). In his letter to Mendelssohn about Dreams, he proclaims that the “true and lasting welfare of the human race” depends on metaphysics “objectively considered” (Br, AA 10:70). In that same letter, he admits that his critique of academic metaphysics in Dreams is the “effect of long investigation” and that it “will prepare the way for a positive [use],” which is an idea that Schönfeld argues has disappeared from Kant’s thought and been replaced with “laughter and irony” (Br, AA 10:70–1; Schönfeld 2000, p. 234). The reason why Kant places the “cloud-cuckoo-­ land” of academic metaphysics and Swedenborgian spiritualism “on the stage together” is no mystery either: while only the former is respectable, people are being misled into “incautious belief” in both cases—in the former by “sophistries of reason” and in the latter by “delusory stories” (TG,

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AA 2:356). What is problematic about the incautious belief in immaterial spirits, regardless of its source, is the resulting idealism in which the entire corporeal world becomes a mere sign or symbol of a spiritual world (TG, AA 2:364).30 The natural world becomes contingent and epiphenomenal, because immaterial spirits exist in community “independent of the mediation of matter,” which is a doctrine that Kant rejects throughout the pre-­ Critical period (TG, AA 2:330). While it is clear why my own interpretation of Kant might make him appear to be a spiritualist who makes minds the foundation of all reality, I do not think that saying that substances have an inner state, a responsiveness to external states of affairs, a power to change their state and the state of other reciprocally dependent substances, and a shared schema of the world against which they act and, thereby, coordinate with all other substances means that Kant thinks these beings are simply spirits (immaterial, thinking minds). It appears that even in Dreams, he remains committed to this picture in which “every substance including even a simple element of matter, must after all have some kind of inner activity as the ground of its producing an external effect” (TG, AA 2:328). The problem with the spiritualism of Kant’s rationalist predecessors and Swedenborg is that it results in a phenomenalism in which the material world is a shadow-play of spiritual reality, which is to say that it invents “immaterial principles” and occult forces in the world, is heedless of empirical limits, and is the result of “lazy philosophy” (TG, AA 2:331). What is most real for the spiritualists are perceptions, clear or confused, and a divinely enacted harmony that is either pre-established or occasional. It holds that the world of space and mathematical science is neither true nor real. Such ideas are clearly opposed to Kant’s thinking. While the spiritualist believes there are only thinking substances, Kant believes that among the simple, representational substances there are some that constitute matter and that would never constitute a “unified thinking entity” when combined (TG, AA 2:328). Yet, if Kant’s target in Dreams is such a grave threat to knowledge, then it seems unlikely that the text is merely laughter and irony. Neither is it merely a demonstration of how not to do metaphysics: Kant in fact shows how his pre-Critical metaphysical system avoids such a reduction to a spiritual world of occult forces.31 Dreams is not a skeptical anti-metaphysical treatise that demonstrates the “bankruptcy of metaphysics in general,” although it has been consistently read as such (Kanterian 2018, p.  326).32 Its attack on deductive forms of metaphysics cannot be taken as an attack on metaphysics in

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general nor can it be seen as an attack on his own earlier philosophy.33 If Kant’s earlier works were part of the Wolffian-rationalist program, then such a reading could be sustained, but I have tried to show, as Cassirer notes, “no indication can be found” that Kant “ever was intellectually dependent on the Wolffian system” (Cassirer 1981, p. 72).34 In contrast, Beiser describes his “early rationalism” as being a “metaphysics of vital forces” and an “immaterialism,” which is the target of Dreams (Beiser 1992, pp. 35–7, 45). Karl Ameriks, a defender of the immaterialist reading, admits that the pre-Critical Kant never directly argues for it and says, rather weakly, that his “acceptance of it is implicit in various formulations that occur in discussions of other topics” (Ameriks 2000, p. 27).35 I take Kant’s view in the pre-Critical works to be that (1) all monads are connected to bodies, (2) souls are conscious minds with wills, (3) not all representing beings are souls, (4) some representing beings can be combined to create matter, (5) souls cannot be combined to make matter (presumably because they do not have as a principle that they must emanate attractive force but instead are governed by a conception of what is good), and (6) our sense of ourselves motivates us to say that the soul is immaterial, but this is a merely negative notion that says little more than that it seems to operate different than the elements that generate force. Kant is willing to call the monadic elements of matter “material,” because they give rise to matter. When thinking of our general account of representational activity, he admits that “I cannot specify in what that inner activity [of substances] consists,” except by appeal to my own case and its apparent difference from physical force relations (TG, AA 2:328). He figures that since substances, even as simple elements of matter, are performing “activities dependent on representations,” that there is no other model for representing such inner activity except ourselves (TG, AA 2:328). What substances do, he says, is have changes of inner states that are caused by and a response to “the state of the universe,” which implies that they “intuitively cognize the state of the universe” (TG, AA 2:328). Of course, Kant recognizes that this information-bearing relationship to the world is, insofar as it is an awareness, characteristic of souls or minds. The substances of the simple elements of matter will have a far more obscured relationship to external data (slumbering monads), responding automatically to immediate situations according to limited variables and restrictive principles of action. The lack of details about the predicates and inner operations of substances is a function of the fact that Kant’s metaphysical method has always arrived at the idea of ultimate substances by analysis

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and analogy. This approach is significantly different than synthetic (rationally constructive) metaphysicians who begin by merely positing a definition of substances as immaterial. Kant begins from objects, minds, effective causality, and the world-whole as empirically certain and harmonious, and then his conceptual analysis arrives at the idea of interconnected nexus of simple substances as its bedrock. But that connection not only is left vague, it is necessarily unable to be clarified. His metaphysics as analysis, even before Kant named it as such, seems to have always been operating at the limits of understanding. The spiritualist metaphysics that Kant attacks in Dreams fails to recognize this explanatory gap and, in so doing, discounts the significance of data of the world in which we find ourselves. “The mediation of matter” is insignificant to spiritual activity on the view Kant is attacking, because a true spiritual community (the reception of influences according to “pneumatic” laws) exists among all minds, which annihilates space (TG, AA 2:330, 332). This occult communion supposedly takes place in the soul, yet it is obscured by the metaphysical evil of matter and the body (TG, AA 2:333). For the spiritualist tradition, the incongruous worlds that we inhabit are dividable into one that is real and one that is unreal and misleading. Such a view is in complete conflict with Kant’s optimism. But why do interpreters think that this criticism of spiritualism in Dreams has any bearing on Kant’s early work? Laywine argues as follows. Kant’s metaphysics is immaterialist in nature, and he believes in a theory of physical influx in which material objects (bodies) interact with those souls (Laywine 1993, pp. 54, 75). This means, in a sense, that Kant subjects immaterial substances to sensible conditions of space, time, and force, which she calls his spiritual Newtonianism.36 But if this is so then why not endorse the “extravagances” of Swedenborg in which the spirits of the dead are interacting with us? Souls, even of the dead, are like impenetrable atoms colliding with us, giving rise to Swedenborg’s psychic visions. What is odd about this interpretation is that Laywine’s interpretation is pointing to the opposite problem that concerns Kant in Dreams. Whereas Laywine sees the problem as an incoherent sort of materialism, Kant sees spiritualism leading to an autonomous realm of spirits that renders the material, sensible world epiphenomenal. Both problems are the result of the supposed attempt to create “a unified and comprehensive philosophy of nature,” which connects metaphysics and Newtonian science (Schönfeld 2000, p.  79). To think that Kant combines metaphysics and physics obscures how alterations in external relations influence and determine the inner

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states of substances. That doctrine and its fundamental dualism is the reason why Kant does not succumb to the reduction of one world to the other, to either a Newtonization of spirits (materialism) or spiritualization of nature (phenomenalism), even while retaining the metaphysical notion of simple substances with inner, representational states. Often the radical anti-metaphysical reading is arrived at through the lens of Kant’s Rousseau-inspired Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and his remarks on it, which are interpreted as suggesting the acceptance of common sense Popularphilosophie.37 This shift in Kant’s style toward a popular approach to philosophy supposedly shows that he “lost heart and admitted defeat”: the two domains of knowledge—science and metaphysics—could not be combined (Schönfeld 2000, p.  14).38 But a shift in style is hardly convincing. Schönfeld attempts to argue that Dreams expresses “complete skepticism toward metaphysics” by misreading a passage where the capacity for metaphysics to “solve the problems thrown up by the enquiring mind, when it uses reason to spy after the more hidden properties of things” is actually affirmed (Schönfeld 2000, p.  241; TG, AA 2:367). Schönfeld says that this “advantage” that Kant affirms is “not an advantage at all,” because he believes that it necessarily fails (Schönfeld 2000, p. 241).39 But this is a result of decontextualizing the remark that “hope is here all too often disappointed by the outcome” (TG, AA 2:367). But the hope that is disappointed here is the hope that metaphysics could in fact provide some knowledge of immaterial beings: “hope for the future” or in the afterlife is thwarted, as that is what Kant believes underlies much of the confused belief in spirits and ghosts (TG, AA 2:349). Kant believes that metaphysical inquiry into some of the hidden properties of things remains possible. Even if he were talking of metaphysics (and not hope in pneumatology and knowledge of the afterlife), he only says that it is often thwarted and not that it is hopeless. A critical role of metaphysics is also stated as being able to keep “human understanding” on the correct path by making sure that knowledge is based on “empirical concepts” and stays within the limits of “what one can know” (TG, AA 2:367). While that second function of metaphysics sounds like the sort of claim that would overturn Kant’s extravagant claims about the preserving power of God and the virtual presence of substance, I have argued that he believes that this analysis of concepts, such as the perfection and harmony of the interconnected world-whole as given cosmologically, materially, and mathematically, can remain the basis for his two-world metaphysics. To stay true to empirical concepts does not mean to be a simple empiricist. It means

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instead to recognize that a person cannot have knowledge of anything that requires us to be given “data which are to be found in a world other than the one in which he exists as a conscious being” (TG, AA 2:368). Therefore, when reason spies after the hidden properties of things, it can tell us that there must be simple elements of material bodies, but it cannot provide the data or the causal story of how those simple elements manifest as force. The data that is the starting point of metaphysical analysis must have its root in empirical experience of the world, of the self, or of mathematical science, but that does not mean that we cannot use analysis to arrive at claims about metaphysical entities. Schönfeld also supports his reading of via remarks that Kant makes to Mendelssohn in correspondence. For example, Kant says that in Dreams his method is, first, to “mock himself” (Br, AA 10:70). But there is no reason to think by the context either in the letter or in the text of Dreams that this mockery is of his pre-Critical philosophy. Instead, Kant explicitly says that he wanted to mock his own uncertainty and self-conflict about the existence of spirits by emulating different perspectives, rather than simply ridiculing people who believe in them. The only other passage from Kant’s correspondence with Mendelssohn that Schönfeld believes shows a rejection of his past work is a rather complicated paragraph that needs careful dissection. Kant explains to Mendelssohn that his motivating problem was whether sense could be made of how the soul, whether attached to an organic body or not, is present in the world. Of course, he has a theory that this happens through virtual presence, but he does not have an account of how it happens. To explain how this happens requires one to determine whether one could discover “a primitive power” by virtue of a pure rational inference (Br, AA 10:72). The account would have to be a priori because the inner of substances by definition cannot be given to the senses. But such an account, he says, is equivalent to rational elucidation of “the primary fundamental relationship of cause to effect,” as well as a purely rational account of birth, death and life, both of which are “impossible” to give (Br, AA 10:72). Kant also states this problem within the text of Dreams and says that it far transcends his power of understanding (TG, AA 2:328). While Schönfeld believes that the pre-Critical metaphysics was attempting to provide just such a purely rational theory of causality, I have argued that this is a mistaken interpretation of the works of the 1750s. There is no evidence that Kant ever believed that he could ever explain how metaphysically “inner states” translate into “outer activity,” even if he was led to posit that some such interaction must take place (Br, AA

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10:72). That gap is a constant feature of the pre-Critical works that becomes more explicit as Kant’s method focuses more and more on the irreducible phenomena of our experience.

Analysis of the First Chapter of Dreams of a Spirit-­Seer: Clarifying Spiritualism In the first chapter of the opening “dogmatic part” of Dreams, we receive a clear account of Kant’s pre-Critical metaphysics with special attention to the empirical limits of knowledge. By “dogmatic,” Kant means merely an exercise of reason or method of inquiry that is “decisive,” not necessarily one that starts with unimpeachable dogmas (TG, AA 2:307). This chapter, I believe, is by far the most misunderstood of the seven chapters, so I will provide a close reading of it in order to show that the pre-Critical metaphysics is not overthrown by it and that spiritualism is not advocated in it. Kant’s goal in it is to “unfold the concealed sense of the concept” of “immaterial spirit,” which needs to be done because this is a “surreptitious concept” that is not merely an abstraction or a negative concept designating something simply different from the material (TG, AA 2:320). His method is to elaborate his own metaphysical system and then change the idea of “simple beings” that can ultimately fill space by offering “resistance by means of impenetrability” to the idea of something occupying space and not repulsing matter (TG, AA 2:320–1). In other words, Kant’s metaphysics is used in the chapter as something rational and intelligible that can be a tool in charitably reconstructing what people mean when they talk of spirits. In the roughest of terms, what people do when thinking of spirits is explained in the second Critique: dabblers in metaphysics “think of matter so refined, so superrefined, that they make themselves giddy with it and then believe that in this way they have devised a spiritual and yet extended being” (KprV, AA 5:24). Kant himself has never argued for these sorts of “immaterial beings” that are spiritually present in “external relations” but are not capable of being physical present through force or motion and cannot “constitute a solid whole” if combined (TG, AA 2:321). Essentially, what people think of as spirits are beings that are in space but neither as bodies (circumscriptive ubeity/actual presence) nor as a power that fills space through an orbit of activity (definitive ubeity/virtual presence). He imagines that if they were in space in either of these ways, they would not be called immaterial spirit beings, and so the notion under

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discussion here is of a being that can be in space in neither of these ways (TG, AA 2:321). But this has never been Kant’s view of substances. It is admittedly strange that he would set up the following dilemma: either spirits are analogous to the sorts of things that compose bodies and exclude matter from space (“the elements of matter”) or else they are mysterious things that can occupy space without any effect on matter whatsoever (TG, AA 3:321). This is strange because it is surely the soul or mind that is at issue, and Kant has never given reason to think that souls, while virtually present in bodies, have the same sort of force emanation by which a body is constructed by the simple elements of matter. Instead, the soul creates motion through conation. According to Dreams, the simple elements of matter, even if they have internal, representational states, must be regarded as “material entities” (TG, AA 2:321). Kant is presumably using this dilemma to clarify the incoherent notion of an immaterial spiritual presence that is distinct from and unencumbered by bodies and that has no extension of power. Kant sets up an initial comparison between spirits and simple elements of matter, but he will turn to the notion of the conative soul later in Dreams. I said that in this first chapter attention is paid to the empirical limits of knowledge. After articulating the concept of spirits, he warns that even to say whether such things are possible “involves an unusually large step” (TG, AA 2:322). We often have the empirical concept of an actual thing, like impenetrable matter, and believe that we understand its possibility, but we do not. Instead, we have the experience of impenetrability, and we attribute it to all matter and its elements, even though “the human understanding has reached its limit here” (TG, AA 2:322). Metaphysics is still possible, but this experience of impenetrability must lie at the start of any metaphysical reasoning about bodies (rational physics). The notion of immaterial spirits jettisons that fundamental experience, for which reason we are faced with “a kind of unthinkability,” which can only be mitigated by relying on “analogy with my empirical representation” of which the spiritualists do not avail themselves (TG, AA 2:323). In order to continue to unfold the concept of “spirit,” Kant takes that “unusually large step” that he warned his readers about and posits that spirits are possible (TG, AA 2:323). Moves such as this, where Kant begins to actually engage in theorizing about spiritualist metaphysics and uses concepts he himself does not accept, have confused readers as to what position he actually holds (Kanterian 2018, p. 327). Kant is attempting to make these notions minimally intelligible, but as he said in the letter to Mendelssohn, the

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result of taking up this position is self-ridicule because, in fact, the empirical core of the analogy is abandoned by the spiritual philosopher that he is emulating. He illustrates this collapse of intelligibility by showing how spiritualists must think of spirits in space via analogy with his own doctrine of virtual presence: something simple can be present in a complex space but still retain its indivisibility. Kant says that something like this must be what spiritualists are thinking, although the spiritualists will disagree with his own theory that the virtual presence of substantial powers results in the forces of attraction and repulsion. Experience alone, he states, allows us to know that material beings actually have force (TG, AA 3:22). Admittedly, his own theory runs up against “the fundamental relations of causes and effects” and cannot be made fully comprehensible: how the inner states of simple substances create force is unknown (TG, AA 2:323). But since ignorance is ignorance, why not think that spirits, which even leave those fundamental forces behind, and his metaphysical simples are on the same footing? Kant seems to go this route as he emulates the spiritualist. But there is obviously a difference: material simples are bound to the experienced force of impenetrability, and immaterial simples are not. I believe that Kant intentionally covers up this difference in order to push his explication of spiritualist metaphysics a bit further. He explains that “corporeal elements” are only spatial insofar as they exist in community with other elements and when considered “existing separately for themselves,” then we can say that they “contain no space” (TG, AA 2:324). By analogy, spirits also intrinsically do not contain space or have shape. If one is legitimate metaphysics, then why is not the other? Kant of course has what he believes to be legitimate reasons for considering all substances, including that that give rise to “corporeal elements,” as containing no space in themselves and as having their essence with the principles that define their possibility, reasons such as the appearance of the most perfect and fecund harmony of all things in the universe. But spiritualism lacks any such empirical foundations that it can then use to postulate immaterial substances as they have been defined as in principle occult. Wedding his own view to “the conjectured possibility of immaterial beings in the universe” is not actually something that Kant thinks is legitimate, rather he has intentionally overstepped limits that have always governed his theorizing (TG, AA 2:324). This argumentative device has led numerous interpreters astray.40 Kant began with the hypothetical claim that spirits were possible, but in the final section of the first chapter, he asks us to take for granted “that it

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has been proved that the human soul was a spirit,” although “no such thing has as yet been proved” (TG, AA 2:324). As mentioned earlier, the comparison of spirits with the simple elements of matter seems forced, as the metaphysical entity within Kant’s own metaphysics that should be brought to bear on spiritualist metaphysics is the soul, which does not fill space with repulsive, impenetrable force, but which is tied to a body. Can the doctrine of virtual presence of the soul illuminate the doctrine of spirits? The human soul is something Kant himself has not elaborated in much detail in his previous works. Dreams provides us with a statement of Kant’s own view of the soul, which is a version of the classic virtual presence doctrine or presence via a “sphere of external activity”: that is, “my soul is wholly in my whole body, and wholly in each of its parts” (TG, AA 3:325).41 Kant certainly believes “either I should know this little” or else I “know nothing at all of the matter” (TG, AA 2:325). This is a view that he calls common sense, rooted in experience, but also containing a truth that coincides with reason. Kant says that this view means that there is no “place in the body where the soul is at,” so he denies that this means that the soul is extended (circumscriptive ubeity): its virtual presence shows neither a multiplicity of internal or external parts (TG, AA 2:325).42 This is a part of Kant’s notion of legitimate metaphysics (rational psychology): the notion of the soul, even if we cannot say much else about it, is empirically based in my presence to myself in the whole of my body. As Kant says in a note, the real empirical ground of why we talk about souls is the experience we have not just of ourselves but of all sentient beings and their spontaneity, which motivates us to say that such beings, who “contain within themselves the ground of life … can scarcely be of a material nature” (TG, AA 2:328).43 This is the legitimate, empirically abstractive use of the notion of a soul that Kant contrasts to the surreptitious use of the concept that he has been articulating so far (TG, AA 2:320). This Aristotelian line of thinking, which was to influence Johann Gottfried Herder, respects our empirically constrained perspective.44 What is the contrasting case to this empirically constrained but still metaphysical doctrine of virtual presence? Presumably, the spiritualist believes that souls are actually present in space in some way. They do not accept the mere virtual presence of souls because they believe in a direct communion between souls (an immaterialist interactionism) that need not be mediated by matter. So, when the soul is actually paired with a body for the spiritualist, it is an actual presence in that world as well as a presence to a completely immaterial world (TG, AA 2:330–232). This leads Kant

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to speculate that the immaterialist would agree with “wise men” like Descartes and place the soul in “an indescribably tiny place” in the brain that uses “ropes and levers” to communicate with the body, while its truer communication is purely spiritual and not mediated by the body (TG, AA 2:325–6). On this view, the soul is “like the spider sitting at the centre of its web” (TG, AA 2:326). We have not seen any such view in Kant’s metaphysical system so far. The Cartesian view thus distorts the legitimate notion of spirit and makes it identical to “any element of matter” in the sense that it is given circumscriptive ubeity (TG, AA 2:326). Kant criticizes the immaterialist for being unable to give a distinguishing mark between souls and “the raw elementary matter of corporeal natures,” which would mean that when “drinking our coffee we may perhaps be swallowing atoms destined to become human souls” (TG, AA 2:326–7). His argument seems to be the following. We understand the soul from our experience of living beings, as the “inner capacity” of an animal to “determine itself voluntarily” (TG, AA 2:327).45 Upon such a basis, not only is our ability to say much about the soul severely limited, but it would appear to be essentially bound to a body, capable of a sort of communication throughout the body (virtual presence), and dependent on the stimulation of moving forces in the matter of the body in order to undergo representational change. Little else can be said. But the spiritualist philosophy does not start from this position and, instead, must think of the soul as a ghostly but actual presence in space that is entirely separable from and independent of material forces. Such a being must be something like a pointal entity or existing in some determinate region of space, thus having a sort of circumscriptive whereabouts. Virtual presence and association with the creation of empirically given forces is rejected. Thus, no distinction between circumscriptive ubeity and definitive ubeity is possible for the spiritualist. Similarly, if we regard the soul as present in space, then it is the invention of a spiritual or pneumatic power that has no connection to the forces of attraction and repulsion. These souls or rational beings presumably could be anywhere and may even be attached to the simple elements of matter. The consequence of this view is, as Kant mockingly points out, when you drink your coffee you may well be ingesting souls. By rejecting the empirical basis of knowledge, the spiritualist philosophy has no reason not to simply place spiritual beings in space and in bodies in such a way that they are fully present. Yet, by filling the world with such an occult, immaterial set of relations and powers, the natural world is devalued and made into something essentially false.

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That there is some sort of ultimate substance underlying both organic and inorganic bodies is a part of metaphysics that Kant always accepts during the pre-Critical period including Dreams. He asserts this in the final paragraph of chapter one: “Every substance, including even a simple element of matter, must after all have some kind of inner activity as the ground of its producing an external effect, and that in spite of the fact that I cannot specify what that inner activity consists” (TG, AA 2:328). We can imagine the inner activity of one substance “operating on the inner principles” of the states of other substances, and although we have neither a purely rational account of nor any empirical data about how this occurs, we nevertheless can look to empirical experience and see how the force of bodies and the principle of living beings expresses that inner activity (TG, AA 2:328). Does the fact that Dreams finally brings to light this ignorance at the heart of one of the core problems of metaphysics mean that Kant has come to repudiate his earlier metaphysics? I think not. Not only does the first chapter of Dreams retain Kant’s previous philosophy as the means to make intelligible and to refute the spiritualist philosophy, but we know that the methodological works of the 1760s have revealed the legitimate but limited scope of metaphysical inquiry that had been inchoately present even in Kant’s earlier works.

Analysis of the Remainder of Dreams: Reforming Metaphysics The difficulty of sorting out Kant’s own view in Dreams is quite exaggerated by scholars, who have called it “one of the most contentious essays Kant ever wrote” (Firestone and Jacobs 2008, p. 20). In fact, the separation between Kant’s own views and the spiritualist’s “dreams of metaphysics” is made quite explicit to the reader even when he emulates “occult philosophy” in the second chapter of the dogmatic part of the book (TG, AA 2:329). Kant alerts us that the first chapter was the “dim torch of metaphysics” casting a “half light” on “the realm of shades” (TG, AA 2:329). In that chapter, our understanding was (properly) clinging to “the outer senses,” but some possible footholds by which we might (improperly) ascend to “higher concepts of an abstract character” seemed revealed (TG, AA 2:329). But in the second chapter, Kant moves headlong into more radical areas of “occult” philosophy by portraying a philosophy of spiritual beings divorced from material reality. Clearly, the “insights” that

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are motivating the occult philosophy in the second chapter are far more extravagant than the first chapter and are not a mere continuation even of the tentative steps made there to make sense of the notion of spirits.46 The second chapter begins by using living, organic beings as proof of “the existence of immaterial beings,” which was not allowed in the first chapter (TG, AA 2:329). That is to say, this occult philosophy is rejecting the criticism of the previous chapter that immaterial spirits were indistinguishable from the “mass of lifeless matter” (TG, AA 2:329). In Kant’s metaphysics, this distinction between dead versus living matter is suspect. He has never relied on this distinction and has only thought of dead, mechanical motion versus motions that are the result of active force inherent in matter. As we know, since 1758, Kant seems to have waivered on utilizing the notion of inherent force in a metaphysical sense rather than in a merely descriptive sense of phenomenal appearances. So, the absolute division between dead and living matter is one that already distinguishes the doctrine in the second chapter from Kant’s own. Also, this distinction between the dead and the living does not even recognize Kant’s remark that we really do not understand the ultimate nature of cause and effect, and so are not in a position to actually distinguish the dead from the living. Many readers see this chapter and its assertion of “immaterial beings,” who are unified in a whole “immaterial world (mundus intelligibilis),” to have deep affinities with the two-world metaphysics that I have attributed to Kant (TG, AA 2:329).47 It has even been said to be a model for “his later noumenal realm” in the Critical era (Shell 1996, p. 111). But this terminological similarity is misleading. The spiritualist precisely inverts Kant’s metaphysics. It rejects that there is any need of “mediation” by “corporeal beings” and holds that spirit-to-spirit interaction is “natural and indissoluble,” whereas “special divine provision” has to intercede so that spirits have any relation to bodies (TG, AA 2:330). This is clearly a sort of occasionalism of constant miracles. Kant’s own view is that God’s special and divine provision instills in substances a representation of a coordinated universe and this is what allows their powers of receptivity and action to be reciprocally determining through (and only through) material reality. Interaction between substances requires bodies rather than is hampered by them. The “immaterial world” in Dreams bears little relation to the notion of the intelligible world as it appears in the 1770 Dissertation, for the notion of the spatiality and temporality of intelligible beings is abandoned there, whereas it is central to the spiritualist conception.

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At this point, Kant sarcastically says that he is giving up on “the careful language of reason” and the use of “academical tone” that “dispenses both the author and the reader from the duty of thinking” (TG, AA 2:333). Disdainfully, he suggests that we simply take this talk of spirits, pneumatic laws, and the spirit world as proven. He then provides an account of “moral influxes of spiritual nature” and how these can be seen to be like gravitational forces to illustrate the occultist’s fantasy, a view that he admits to Mendelssohn is not his own and is an unhindered “philosophical fabrication” (Br, AA 10:72). Kant makes an analogy between the way in which Newtonian gravity works and the way that this moral or spiritual gravitation works.48 The point of doing so is to give evidence for the spiritualist view that we exist in an immaterial communion of souls. Kant sees these ideas as charming. It leads to a vision in which the human soul is in an “immediate community of spirits” and receiving moral transmissions from a “general will,” which, after death, would be our entire being (TG, AA 2:336). The result is that “the present and future world would, therefore, be of one piece, so to speak, and constitute a continuous whole, even according to the order of nature” (TG, AA 2:337).49 I have argued that just such a unification project has not been Kant’s aim in the pre-Critical writings. It is true that there is a community of simple substances that do receive a preserving and creative “transmission” from God, but there is no attempt to show that a single order of nature (whether pneumatology or physical force, causality, space, and time) unifies things-­ in-­themselves and appearances. After mockingly explaining why spirit communication is rare and how humans with especially sensitive “sensorium of the soul” can communicate with other souls in this life (TG, AA 2:340), Kant substantially turns the tables. In the third chapter, which he calls “anti-cabbala” or “a fragment of ordinary philosophy” against occult philosophy, he presents a scathing attack on just this doctrine. I do not think that this crude, reductivist criticism is anymore representative of Kant’s view than the second chapter was.50 It is the philosophy of the skeptic, and it does not grant even the possibility of truth to the notion of spirits. Kant begins by describing the metaphysicians who advocate spiritualism as dreamers of reason: they are awake in the sense that they know that their ideas of spirits are theoretical postulates. He contrasts them to “dreamers of sense” who, according to this ordinary philosophy perspective, are little more than madmen that cannot tell their own imaginings from what is real (TG, AA 2:342). Yet, Kant is hesitant, claiming he does not mean that madness is the cause of

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spirit-seeing; rather, he is mocking the theory by showing that spirit-­seeing is indistinguishable from madness and so has no basis for being true (TG, AA 2:348). Maybe it is spirit communication or madness or indigestion (TG, AA 2:348). By operating with notions that cannot even be proven to be possible nor shown to be impossible, Kant thinks that derision will show the epistemic vacuity of the thesis. The crude physiological reductivism in the chapter is not actually representative of Kant’s more respectful attitude toward spiritualism. However, it is not uncommon to see this anti-cabbalistic chapter as Kant’s “solution,” which is certainly not the case or else Kant is performing an extended philosophical analysis of something as meaningless as bad digestion. We should not take this chapter of reductive physiological criticism to be a full-scale attack on metaphysics in general either. It is directed explicitly at those who convert pure inventions of the mind into external apparitions. Kant thinks that many “dreamers of reason” realize that they are engaged in a theoretical enterprise and that when penetrating the inner ideational nature of things are constructing a purely rational, picture of things. But to then project those ideas out into the world as the true, spiritual nature of things and, thus, to invalidate experience, material nature, and science is indistinguishable from a sort of madness or dream state. Unsurprisingly, Kant’s actual conclusion from the first part of the book is found in chapter four, which proclaims to offer the “theoretical conclusion.” He sees spiritualism as an honestly motivated sort of self-deception. In particular, Kant is sympathetic with a human being’s “hope for the future” and for life after death, which motivates, albeit illegitimately, the understanding to grant truth to spiritualism (TG, AA 2:349). Although the chapter on occult philosophy seemed to offer a “real, generally accepted observation” that could legitimate talk of spirit-beings, namely the transcendental idea of the Good and a theory of moral unity among persons, Kant is clear that these are “sufficiently powerful” to inspire us only to be indecisive about tales of spirits and to treat them seriously rather than to just ignore them as madness or indigestion (TG, AA 2:233, 351). The theory of the spiritual world is said to be “pretentious,” but he is clear that the hope for a future life, although a “defect” of the understanding, is one that he does not “even wish to eliminate” (TG, AA 2:350). Thus, it is not to be regarded as mere stupidity or madness. By the end of the dogmatic first part of Dreams, it is clear that nothing has been established positively about spirits. The epistemic limits of the first chapter have not budged either to grant as known the possibility (let alone the actuality) of

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spirits or to deny their possibility. While Kant is clear that he believes that he has adequately exorcized spiritualism, we should not draw from this the conclusion that he believes we can return to common sense and set aside metaphysics (Shell 1996, pp. 119–9). After all, alleviation of our confusions has been a result of metaphysics. What remains to be done in the second “historical” part of Dreams is to actually say something about Swedenborg, but Kant quickly abandons his assessment of Swedenborg for a criticism of academic metaphysics. He begins with the first chapter of the second part by recounting some stories of Swedenborg’s psychic abilities, which Kant says that he will “recommend to the reader’s own free examination” (TG, AA 2:353). Although he openly states that these are mere fairy tales, Kant does not want to mock people who believe in such things. Our weak understanding and our curiosity are to blame. The second chapter of the second part offers Kant’s own summary of Swedenborg’s spiritualism that he gleaned from the eight volumes of the Secrets of Heaven. Kant seems legitimately surprised that Swedenborg’s views bear an “uncommon likeness to the philosophical figment of my imagination,” that is, to his reconstructions of a rationalistic spiritualism and occult philosophy, which he speculates is either the result of some hidden cleverness on Swedenborg’s part or, the solution Kant seems to favor, mere chance, like truth arrived at by a “frenzied poet” (TG, AA 2:359). This suggests that Kant was ignorant of the actual influence of Wolff on Swedenborg.51 When Kant finally turns to Swedenborg, “his hero,” he announces, almost at the end of the work, to have arrived at “the purpose” of it (TG, AA 2:360). He then distills the “quintessence of the [Swedenborg’s] book into a few drops”—in particular, the central claim that “corporeal beings have no substance of their own; they only exist in virtue of the spirit world, though each body subsists not in virtue of one spirit alone but in virtue of all spirits together” (TG, AA 2:364). The whole world becomes a symbol of the spiritual, which Kant says makes Swedenborg an idealist, although he clearly doubts that the discussion has any philosophical merits at all (TG, AA 2:364). Ultimately, Kant breaks off his recounting of Swedenborg’s views and says that he is worried that it might frighten his readers, give them nightmares, and disturb pregnant women (TG, AA 2:366). It is remarkable that a book that has so little of substance to say about Swedenborg had such a lasting effect on his reputation. After worrying that he has lost the confidence of his readers, Kant claims that he “did have a purpose in mind, and one which is […] more

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important than the purpose I claimed to have” (TG, AA 2:367). Here Kant is announcing that his point was not really to consider Swedenborg at all. We started off in ignorance about spirits and ended in learned ignorance: the purported analysis of spirit-seeing was misdirection. Instead, the entire purpose was to reform metaphysics. This explains why in a chapter supposedly on Swedenborg’s views, Kant begins with a discussion of metaphysical method that concerns “modern students of nature” and not spirit-seers (TG, AA 2:358). He argues against a method that begins from a priori reflection and from the “pinnacle of metaphysics” but is in fact proceeding down a path that “had already been covertly laid down by means of markers planted in the direction of the a posteriori point,” so that talk of spirits ends up connecting with and explaining the world we observe (TG, AA 2:359). He describes this as an “imperceptible clinamen” or Epicurean “swerve” by which their a priori reasoning is actually being guided by their “squinting at the target of certain experiences” (TG, AA 2:348–9). Kant’s own method of metaphysics is to remain connected to “the humble ground of experience,” to reason from that basis, and to use reason to keep reflection from drifting into “empty space” on “butterfly-­ wings” (TG, AA 2:368). Kant concludes the second chapter of the second part by stating that metaphysics has two advantages, which I have discussed above in the refutation of Schönfeld’s supposed evidence for Kant’s abandonment of metaphysics. The first is to use reason to “spy after the more hidden properties of things,” which can succeed, as Kant’s own metaphysics shows, but when aspiring to grand aims, like showing that there are spirits that persist after death, will result in disappointment (TG, AA 2:367). The second aim does not intend to extend human understanding but is “more consonant” with it, and this is the task of exploring the limits of what we can know by analysis to the indemonstrable components of all cognition (TG, AA 2:368). The final chapter states rather clearly Kant’s own viewpoint, and it does not conflict with the first chapter of the book. The proper use of reason arrives at its “limits” and sees the supposed knowledge of spirits as vain. He argues that philosophy begins with given notions of cause, effect, substance, action, and my experience of myself as a living subject and works to “unravel the complex phenomena and reduce them to simpler representations” (TG, AA 2:370). But it can never get beyond these notions to a full understanding of supernatural or spiritual explanation. To attempt to generate such an explanation is to posit “wholly arbitrary” occult forces. Now it is certainly true that Kant often has appealed to God in his

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pre-Critical metaphysics to explain, for example, why there is a harmony of all things such that they form a reciprocally determining system. Does this constitute mere vanity and a “fiction” (TG, AA 2:371)? Is the rational theology and cosmology of Kant’s pre-Critical thought being excluded by Dreams? One reason to think that it is not is that Kant retains this theory of God in the 1770 Dissertation, along with much of the rest of his metaphysics. But another reason is that the often crucial role that God plays in connecting metaphysical substances in his early thought is not the same as the invention of “fundamental forces,” which attempts to render intelligible the inner nature of cause and effect (TG, AA 2:371). Rather, it uses the given world of interconnected spatio-temporal bodies and the reciprocal determination of all things to reflect on what must be the case for substances to have this power. As we know from the Inquiry, Kant firmly believes that “metaphysical cognition of God is … capable of a high degree of certainty in all those areas where no analogon of contingency is to be encountered” (PND, AA 2:297). No attempt is made to use analogies from experience in rational theology, which of course leaves a “great deal of obscurity” when trying to understand God’s presence to substances. Nevertheless, the rational necessity of God as the unity and the ground of the possibility of the world-whole remains legitimate as a metaphysical inference. It is based on the possibility of the inner connection or harmony of the substantial foundations of the forces “which one already knows through experience” (TG, AA 2:371). Finally, Kant ends the text with a quote from Voltaire, “Let us attend to our happiness, and go into the garden and work!”—which has suggested to many a skeptical, anti-metaphysical turn (TG, AA 2:373). This is a mistake. Kant’s final paragraph concerns whether this occult philosophy or something like it is essential for people to be moral and virtuous. His argument is that a noble soul will have hope in an afterlife, but that hope is based in their moral nature and not the foundation of it (TG, AA 2:373). Kant’s quote of Voltaire means nothing more than that we should continue to be moral, noble and virtuous, concern ourselves with how we comport ourselves, and not worry about the afterlife. This is the doctrine sometimes referred to as Fatum Christianum or Christian fatalism.

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Conclusion While there is a sense in which Kant does believe that our “only alternative is to posit the non-physical or intelligible world,” he certainly does not believe that we have to posit an immaterial world that makes intelligent souls into the only true reality and yet still pictures them as essentially spatial and temporal (Treash 1991, p. 44). As we can see from Dreams, to arrive at such a theory is based on a rejection of the careful use of reason, on taking as proven what has not even been established to be possible, and the illegitimate extension of analogies without recognition that they only have meaning because of their foundation in the experience of cause and effect, in self-experience, or in the experience of harmony in the world. Although Kant will be dogged by a two-world ontology well into the Critical era, he does believe in the pre-Critical works that we can say enough about ultimate substances to provide a distinct, rational ontology that retains the reality of the material world while also recognizing the reality of metaphysical substances consisting of an “inner ground” of “external relations and their changes” that, if properly understood, can be called a “power of representation” (TG, AA 2:328). To try and characterize the world of substances in entirely spiritual and immaterial terms as a sort of “telepathic rapport” is to ultimately just begin to posit occult forces (Broad 1953, p. 135). Kant denies that characterizing substances as having “obscure representations” leads to such an occult view, because the substances that make up bodies do not have an active faculty of representing (i.e. awareness of representation); rather, they merely have a way of acting and changing their state in response to the changing data of their external situation and doing so relative to a schema of coordination. Dreams not only leaves Kant’s past metaphysics untouched and illustrates the philosophical method from the Inquiry, but it also makes clearer than ever before the phenomenological ground of Kant’s view of the soul and of force and body.

Notes 1. This “shift to empiricism” reading has long existed (Oesterreich 1959, pp. 18–38). More recently, it is stated in Shell (1996, p. 4) and Zammito (2001b, p. 388). A rejection of this reading is found in McQuillan (2016). 2. Objections to my characterizations of Kant’s use of mathematics have been made. It is entirely true that Kant wishes to separate the method of analysis

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in metaphysics from a constructive, deductive, and synthetic method that models itself on the mathematical construction of proofs. See McQuillan (2016, pp.  23–9). But I take Kant to also recognize the importance of mathematical demonstration in intuition. To support this view, see Callanan (2014). We can say that Kant is critical of “synthetic” (rationally constructive) methods in both mathematics and metaphysics because both actually rely on what he will eventually come to call a priori synthetic (experientially constructive) or intuitive demonstration. 3. Thus, I disagree with Forster that we see a moment of Pyrrhonian skepticism in the 1760s. The letters and works from that time period do not support it. Forster looks to Kant’s recollections of his development of the ideas behind the antinomies as proof of this crisis, but attributing this to Kant requires us to see the metaphysics of the 1770 Dissertation as “a major slide backwards” (Forster 2008, p. 23). I find that implausible, and I think it is a result of not adequately grasping how the problems of simplicity, totality, mathematics, and experience were always guiding the preCritical works. 4. Pollok has called Kant’s development to be a “phenomenalization of nature” (Pollok 2002, p. 64). Klemme calls Kant’s development a “turn to the subject” (1999). 5. On the continuity of the 1758 work with Kant’s Critical work on this topic, see Friedman (1986, p. 34). 6. See Buroker on how Kant thinks of force as the cause of motion (rather than acceleration) and, therefore, continues the Leibnizification of Newtonian notions of motion and force from earlier works (Buroker 1981, pp. 44–46). 7. On his notion of true motion, see Stan (2009, p. 39). 8. Kanterian takes Kant to be saying the inner nature of objects is in principle unknowable (Kanterian 2018, p. 173). 9. See Melnick (2004, p. 26). 10. See discussions of Kant’s shifting views on inertia and the general confusion about the notion at the time that Kant was writing, see Polonoff (1973, pp. 77–89, 160–162). Buroker has a largely Leibnizian reading of Kant’s views in 1758 (Buroker 1981, p.  46), whereas Friedman has a largely Newtonian one (Friedman 1992, p. 43). 11. While the 1764 Inquiry is the first work to make clear the difference between mathematics and metaphysics, it is clear that the division is found in all his pre-Critical works (Guyer 2000, p. 34). 12. Nevertheless, I would resist indicating a definitive break called “the system of 1762/3” (Anderson 2015, p. 136). If the idea is that he sees the antiWolffian potential of his approach, then that has long been apparent to Kant (Anderson 2015, p. 137). Kant never had “faith in the validity of the

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Leibnizian intellectualist program of reducing all knowledge to a purely logical calculus performed upon certain primitive characters” (Falkenstein 1995, p. 34). 13. Thus, it appears to me false to say that the Negative Magnitudes essay brings to light the notion of causality that “was not sufficiently examined hitherto” (Kanterian 2018, p. 298). 14. I am advocating here for the view of Heimsoeth: “Here [in 1755] begins Kant’s consideration of causation as the ontological, synthetic ground of connection as opposed to all merely logical-deductive relations which are intelligible to reason by mere concepts” (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 171). 15. See Kerszberg (2001, p. 41). 16. Rivero (2014) offers an account of Kant’s development toward a “subjective” and “critical” metaphysics that investigates the structure of human cognition in the 1760s. 17. Thus, I do not believe that Kant rejects the Leibnizian idea of “slumbering monads” (Kanterian 2018, p. 287), based on what he says about them in the Inquiry (UD, AA 2:277). All Kant says is that Leibniz invents or creates the concept of the monad, and this is a fundamentally different sort of procedure than a geometric construction that defines a given concept through demonstration. But this does not rule out that the notion can be arrived at by other means. 18. It is often said that he rejects the arguments from 1755 to 1756 because they have definitionally true claims, such as the idea that a simple substance cannot contain the causal ground of its change of state within itself (Caranti 2004, pp. 287–8). Caranti believes that the metaphysics lectures from the early 1760s show Kant turning into quite the empiricist and that this is consistent with the methodology of the 1764 Enquiry (Caranti 2004, pp. 289–90). 19. Against an overly empiricist reading of this method, see Guyer (2000, p. 38) and McQuillan (2016). Kaulbach argues that this reference to the “inner” is what Kant will simply call a priori in the Critical Era, which challenges the empiricist reading of this work (Kaulbach 1965, p. 93). 20. Obviously, I do not find a “tormented ambivalence” toward metaphysics, which results in a confused comparison with Newton’s method and a general lack of clarity about the empirical and a priori aspects of metaphysics (Kanterian 2018, pp. 291–2). 21. This clarifies that the repulsive force does require interaction in order to activate, and so it is false to conceive it as existing even if one removes “all spatial composition of bodies” (Pollok 2002, p. 72). As spatial composition is a function of force interactions, to remove it is to eliminate the dynamism altogether. Pollok’s claim is invalidated by his own recognition

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that the filling of space is a function of dynamic relations among cells of force and that “each monad needs other monads” (Pollok 2002, pp. 73–4). 22. It is a common claim that the method of the 1760s is “at odds” with the work from the 1750s, which falsely implies that Kant had simply been working with the “mathematical or synthetic method in metaphysics” (Pollok 2002, p. 77). 23. Kanterian, for example, maintains with the dominant tradition that the 1760s is a moment where Kant “turns against” and is “ambivalent” about metaphysics (Kanterian 2018, p. 323). 24. Some of the literature in pursuit of a Swedenborgian interpretation of Kant’s project in Dreams are the following: du Prel (1964), Sewall (1902), Manolesco (1967), Palmquist (1989), Johnson (1996, 1999, 2002), Firestone (2009), and Thorpe (2011). 25. See Tonelli (1974). 26. Heinz notes Kant’s acceptance of this doctrine (Heinz 2001, p. 114). 27. Shell argues that Kant does not think that the simple elements of matter have a power of representation because he argues in Dreams that their combination does not result in a thinking being (Shell 1996, p. 110). But that has never been the criterion of whether something has inner states. 28. As noted by Grier (2002, p. 9). 29. “Thus if I say: the soul is simple, then I still cannot prove from this that it is immaterial, and distinguish material from immaterial monads. No, if the soul is simple, then it can also be material, but on that account it need not yet be matter” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:929). 30. This is also part of his criticism in 1763 of positing the direct hand of God in nature, see Orr (2016, p. 534). 31. See McQuillan (2015, p. 194). 32. See Beiser (1992), McGlynn (2014, p. 334), Alberg (2015, p. 171), and Forster (2008, p. 19). 33. This is the view advanced by de Vleeschauwer (1962, 37). 34. See also Kuehn (2001, p. 83). Kant’s “earliest point of departure in 1755 was already a considerable distance from Wolffian ‘dogmatism’” (Wood 2005, p. 7). 35. Ameriks uses lecture notes after 1770 to attribute immaterialism to him (Ameriks 2001, pp. 24–5). But Kant is fairly non-committal there, saying that the “I” acts as the ground of the judgment that the soul is immaterial, but that all that this means is that we cannot “assume materiality as a ground of explanation of actions,” which means that the notion is a merely negative one that “excludes materiality” (V-Meta-L1/Pölitz, AA 28:273). 36. Nuzzo’s account of Dreams is similar to Laywine’s, in that she believes that the main issue is that Kant’s early views, including even and their defense of physical influence, were largely Wolffian (2008, p. 54). This means that

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souls are actually in space and not merely virtually present, which we know not to actually be Kant’s considered early view. This means that the early Kant (and Wolff) are either caught by a sort of materialism or by an occult pneumatology. 37. On the reading of Dreams as an example of Popularphilosophie, see: Zammito (2001a, pp.  78–85), Alberg (2015), Schönfeld (2000, pp. 230–1), Kanterian (2018, pp. 312–322). 38. See also Gardner (1999, pp. 16–18). 39. See also Shell (1996, p. 126). 40. Laywine misreads this first chapter as actually asserting that “spirits and elements are the same kind of thing,” but this is precisely not Kant’s point (Laywine 1993, p. 94). She believes that the “voice” in the first chapter is not Kant’s own, and I have argued that he does entertain ideas that he believes are extravagant and false. But the entire chapter is not a “satirical” voice that represents an uncritical metaphysician who actually offers a solution to “the problem of spiritual impenetrability” (Laywine 1993, pp. 89, 87). 41. Heimsoeth attributes a doctrine of “spiritual force” to Kant and points to Dreams in order to do so, but there is little evidence to think that Kant ever uses the idea of a pneumatic or spiritual force (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 172). In the lectures when thinking about motion and the inner states of monads, it is said to be “uncertain, but one’s own experience almost shows that the thoughts of the soul are almost not without motion” (V-Met/Herder, AA 28:47). But the idea that thought is so bound up with our own moving body is surely very far from any sort of proof a shared nature between the inner and the outer. 42. Heβbrüggen-Walter argues that Kant vacillates somewhat between virtual locality and “epistemic locality,” which is a weaker metaphysical thesis rooted in our experience of the soul (Heβbrüggen-Walter 2014, p. 37). I do think both elements are at work in Dreams. 43. The vital activity of the living being has seemed to Kant to be particular inaccessible to metaphysics since 1755 (NTH, AA 1:230). The claim that Kant tries to explain such mind–body interaction as being on par with Newtonian force relations is explicitly rejected in the 1755 cosmology. 44. See Heinz (2001), Zammito (2001a), and Herder (2002). 45. Thus, it is false that Kant believes that “we cannot find in experience any relevant evidence of such an internal entity, as experience offers merely evidence of external activity of the forces of physical objects” (Kanterian 2018, p. 326). 46. Some scholars believe that the second chapter advocates for this spiritualist viewpoint (Heinz 2001, pp. 118–9).

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47. She takes the fundamentally occult division between the spiritual and the material worlds to line up with the noumenal-phenomenal distinction. 48. To be clear, Kant did not invent this view, and he attributes such a view to Herr Wright of Dunham in the 1755 cosmology (NTH, AA 1:329). 49. Kanterian seems to think that Kant is actually arguing in favor of this conception in which “the human soul … is connected to both realms” (Kanterian 2018, p. 330). The reason why the two-worlds metaphysics of Kant’s earlier works is not the same as this is that the conception of the immaterial world is of a community and hierarchy of intelligences that stand in no need of materiality and would be a radical sort of reciprocity in which time and space make no difference (TG, AA 2:332). 50. Shell describes it as “a weapon of prejudice to counter prejudice” (Shell 1996, p. 116). And yet elsewhere she does suggest that he endorses it as a legitimate criticism (Shell 1996, p. 6). 51. See Swedenborg (2000, 2009).

References Alberg, Jeremiah. 2015. What Dreams May Come: Kant’s Träume eines Geistersehers Elucidated by the Dreams of a Coquette. Kant-Studien 106: 169–200. Ameriks, Karl. 2000. Kant’s Theory of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2001. Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics and His Precritical Philosophy of Mind. In New Essays on Pre-Critical Kant, ed. T. Rockmore, 19–36. Amherst: Humanity Books. Anderson, R.  Lanier. 2015. The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant’s Analytic/ Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumgarten, Alexander. 2013. Metaphysics. Trans. C.  Fugate and J.  Hymers. London: Bloomsbury. Beiser, Frederick. 1992. Kant’s Intellectual Development: 1746–1781. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, 26–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broad, C.D. 1953. Immanuel Kant and Psychical Research. In Religion, Philosophy, and Psychical Research, 116–146. New York: Humanities Press. Buchdahl, Gerd. 1969. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins Descartes to Kant. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Buroker, Jill Vance. 1981. Space and Incongruence: The Origins of Kant’s Idealism. Dordrecht: D. Riedel. Callanan, John. 2014. Mendelssohn and Kant on Mathematics and Metaphysics. Kant Yearbook 6: 1–21.

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Caranti, Lugi. 2004. The Problem of Idealism in Kant’s Pre-Critical Period. Kant-­ Studien 95: 283–303. Cassirer, Ernst. 1981. Kant’s Life and Thought. Trans. J. Haden. New Haven: Yale University Press. De Vleeschauwer, H.J. 1962. The Development of Kantian Thought. Trans. A.R.C. Duncan. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Du Prel, Carl. 1964. Einleitung: Kants mystische Weltanschauung. In Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über Psychologie. Pforzheim: Fischer. Falkenstein, Lorne. 1995. Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Firestone, Chris. 2009. Kant and Theology at the Boundaries of Reason. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. Firestone, Chris, and Nathan Jacobs. 2008. Defense of Kant’s Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Forster, Michael. 2008. Kant and Skepticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedman, Michael. 1986. The Metaphysical Foundations of Newtonian Science. In Kant’s Philosophy of Physical Science, ed. Robert Butts, 25–60. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. ———. 1992. Kant and the Exact Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gardner, Sebastian 1999. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. London: Routledge. Grier, Michelle. 2002. Swedenborg and Kant on Spiritual Intuition. In On the True Philosopher and the True Philosophy, ed. S. McNielly, 1–20. London: The Swedenborg Society. Guyer, Paul. 2000. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1967. Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism. In Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke Gram, 158–199. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Heinz, Marion. 2001. Herder’s Review of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). In New Essays on Pre-Critical Kant, ed. T.  Rockmore, 110–128. Amherst: Humanity Books. Herder, Johann. 2002. Review of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. In Kant on Swedenborg, ed. G. Johnson, 114–118. West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation. Heβbrüggen-Walter, Stefan. 2014. Putting Our Soul in Place. Kant Yearbook 6: 1–21. Johnson, Gregory. 1996. The Kinship of Kant and Swedenborg. The New Philosophy 99: 407–423. ———. 1999. Did Kant Dissemble His Interest in Swedenborg? The New Philosophy 102: 529–560.

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———. 2002. Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. West Chester: The Swedenborg Foundation. Kant, Immanuel. 1992. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. and ed. Mary Gregor. In Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Lectures on Metaphysics. Trans. and ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Correspondence. Trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Theoretical Philosophy After 1781. Trans. and ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kanterian, Edward. 2018. Kant, God and Metaphysics: The Secret Thorn. London/ New York: Routledge. Kaulbach, Friedrich. 1965. Der Philosophische Begriff der Bewegung: Studien zu Aristoteles, Leibniz und Kant. Köln/Graz: Böhlau Verlag. Kerszberg, Pierre. 2001. Kant and the Idea of Negation. In New Essays on Pre-­ Critical Kant, ed. T. Rockmore, 37–49. Amherst: Humanity Books. Klemme, Heiner. 1999. Kant’s Wende zum Ich: Zum Einfluss von Herz und Mendelssohn auf die Entwicklung der kritischen Subjekttheorie. Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 53: 507–529. Knutzen, Martin. 2009. System of Efficient Causes. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials, ed. E.  Watkins, 54–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuehn, Manfred. 2001. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laywine, Allison. 1993. Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy. Atascadero: Ridgeview. Manolesco, John. 1967. Introduction: Kant and Swedenborg. In Dreams of a Spirit Seer by Immanuel Kant and Other Related Writings, ed. J. Manolesco. New York: Vantage Press. McGlynn, Cirán. 2014. Kant Through the Looking Glass. Kant Studies Online, 322–344. McQuillan, Colin. 2015. Reading and Misreading Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Kant Studies Online, 178–203. ———. 2016. Immanuel Kant: The Very Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Melnick, Arthur. 2004. Themes in Kant’s Metaphysics and Ethics. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press.

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Newton, Isaac. 1999. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Trans. I. Cohen and A. Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2008. Ideal Embodiment: Kant’s Theory of Sensibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Oesterreich, Konstantin. 1959. Kant und die Metaphysik, KantStudien Ergänzungshefte 2. Würzburg: Journalfranz Arnulf Liebing. Orr, James. 2016. Teleology as a Theological Problem in Kant’s Pre-Critical Thought. Modern Theology 32: 522–543. Palmquist, Stephen. 1989. Kant’s Critique of Mysticism: (1) The Critical Dreams. Philosophy & Theology 3: 355–383. Pollok, Konstantin. 2002. “Fabricating a World in Accordance with Mere Fantasy…”? The Origins of Kant’s Critical Theory of Matter. Review of Metaphysics 56: 61–97. Polonoff, Irving. 1973. Force, Cosmos, Monads and Other Themes of Kant’s Early Thought, KantStudien Erganzungshefte 107. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann. Rivero, Gabriel. 2014. Zur Bedeutung des Begriffs Ontologie bei Kant: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Boston/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schönfeld, Martin. 2000. The Philosophy of Young Kant: The Precritical Project. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sewall, Frank. 1902. Swedenborg and Modern Idealism. London: James Speirs. Shell, Susan. 1996. Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stan, Marius. 2009. Kant’s Early Theory of Motion: Metaphysical Dynamics and Relativity. Leibniz Review 19: 29–61. Swedenborg, Emmanuel. 2000. Ontology. Bryn Athyn: Swedenborg Scientific Association. ———. 2009. A Philosopher’s Notebook. Bryn Athyn: Swedenborg Scientific Association. Thorpe, Lucas. 2011. The Realm of Ends as a Community of Spirits: Kant and Swedenborg on the Kingdom of Heaven and the Cleansing of the Doors of Perception. The Heythrop Journal LII: 52–75. Tonelli, Giorgio. 1974. Kant’s Ethics as a Part of Metaphysics: A Possible Newtonian Suggestion? With Some Comments on Kant’s ‘Dreams of a Seer’. In Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W. Schneider, ed. C. Walton and J. Anton, 236–263. Athens: Ohio University Press. Treash, Gordon. 1991. Reason, Kant’s Dreams, and Critique. In Akten des Siebentes Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, II:1, ed. G.  Funke, 41–53. Bonn: Bouvier. Watkins, Eric. 2005. Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER 5

The Asymmetry of Space: Kant’s Theory of Absolute Space in 1768

Space as Dynamic and Asymmetrical Kant’s essay from 1768 entitled Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space has generated a surprising amount of literature, because of its intriguing argument that absolute space must exist to account for why there is a difference between left and right hands. No existing interpretation believes that Kant’s argument depends on the theory of space that he has been utilizing since 1747. As I have argued, it is widely held that Kant accepted a Leibnizian, relational theory of space beginning in 1747 and possibly well into the 1760s, although there are also a number of attempts to argue that he accepted a Newtonian conception of space at some point prior to 1768. The problem with attributing either view to Kant in 1768 is that they are irrelevant for understanding the relationship between handedness and space. Scholars have puzzled over how the difference (incongruence) between left and right hands could depend on a relation to absolute space. The argument connecting such phenomena to absolute space has seemed either non-existent or hopelessly flawed.1 Indeed, it is a failure as long as a classic, immaterialist Newtonian view of absolute space is assumed.2 In fact, scholars have come to believe that Kant rejects Newtonian, absolute space in 1768 even while advancing an argument for it.3 Thus, they claim that he ends up closer to the Critical view of space.4 But it seems to me that he surely would not have published this work if were that contradictory of a text.

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The force-based, substantive conception of space that I have offered in previous chapters actually provides us a solution to his mystery. If space is made of dynamic force, emanating from “attraction points,” then it will have its own qualitative features, particularly directionality (NTH, AA 1:340). Rather than a featureless space of mathematical points, Kant’s rarefied, force-based space only appears to be a void. Such a concept of space has two features that shed light on Kant’s 1768 argument. Firstly, it is dynamic in nature. Secondly, that dynamism demonstrates a pervasive asymmetry. Space qua the primary matter or elementary Urstoff of the universe has a single directional rotation (NTH, AA 1:266, 285).5 This is a non-metric, qualitative feature of space and of any part of space. If space has an asymmetric, directional orientation, then it obviously relates to that same property in handed objects.6 The difference between a left or right hand is explained by whether it matches or differs from the non-metric, directional property that is a universal feature of space itself. Thus, Kant’s argument is not as disastrous as it seems if we recognize that the material or force-based plenum conception space has a dynamic (non-­mathematical) center, vertical poles, a central horizontal plane, and left–right rotation, and that each part of space has similar directional aspects. My proposal has been stated, but not developed, by Remnant as the possibility that space possesses “some sort of pervasive asymmetry” (Remnant 1991, p.  55). Rusnock and George claim that, on Kant’s view, it seems that “space has absolute directions” (Rusnock and George 1995, p. 271; 1994, p. 460). These suggestions are correct but have never been taken seriously, elaborated, nor discussed in conjunction with Kant’s prior material absolutism.7 As I have shown, it does appear that Kant believed that he was agreeing with or perhaps improving upon Newton by claiming that space was made of “a substance of infinitely small resistance” (FEU, AA 1:186). This should stand as a warning that we ought not to assume that Kant’s notion of absolutism and his understanding of Newtonian space were (either prior to or during 1768) the standard immaterialist interpretation. Besides looking at the property of the handedness of certain objects, Kant also makes the claim that all extensions or orderings of parts have a metric or relational directionality in space, and thus, compound matter itself relies on space. This argument will be absolutely essential to the Critical theory of space and of time in 1770 and is at the heart of the next two chapters. Thus, scholars are not wrong to think that part of Kant’s argument has some significance for the Critical theory of space. But rather than that being the argument that spatial features are simply a part of our

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representational-experiential makeup, I find Kant’s true innovation here to be the claim that quantitative measure depends on the possibility of qualitative positioning.

Basic Concepts: Position (Lage) and Direction (Gegend) To start off, we need some sense of the fundamental notions of Gegend or direction and its contrasting notion Lage or position. Position is clear: it means “the reference of one thing in space to another” and “the positions of the parts of space in reference to each other” (GUGR, AA 2:377).8 Lage also seems to be represented most primitively by “the concept of being next to each other,” which Kant mentions in the Inquiry (UDG, AA 2:280). This symmetrical relation of “being next to” relates to our most basic idea of extension and impenetrability, because two things are only next to each other (contiguous) insofar as they do not penetrate the same place. It is important to note that Lage encompasses the whole of Leibnizian analysis situs.9 Analysis situs concerns both quantitative and qualitative aspects of space and only excludes a system of universal measurement.10 Leibniz wants to show that geometry cannot be reduced to algebra without relying on arbitrary assumptions and proposes that geometry requires both magnitude and form or figure, which allows comparisons, proportions, and the like to emerge (Leibniz 1956, p. 392). Leibniz explains the content of analysis situs through the example of “a seeing mind concentrated at a point” being shown two temples in which “nothing can be found in one which you do not also find in the other” (Leibniz 1956, p. 393). The two temples may differ in magnitude (size), but “the proportions of walls, columns, and all the rest are the same; the angles are everywhere equal or in the same ratio to a right angle” (Leibniz 1956, p.  393). He is using this example of a mind-point, because, as a point, it would not be able to determine the difference in magnitude: whether something is big or small is relative to the measure used. To lack a system of measure means that neither a body, an external reference point, a measuring stick, nor even continuous experience allows the seeing mind-­ point to situate the two temples relative to one another or to a third thing. Nevertheless, Leibniz wants to show that a geometric analysis of two sets of positions in space in total isolation from one another and without a shared measure can result in judgments about the form of objects and

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about their similarities or differences. However, a purely algebraic approach to geometry would be unable to do this. How the mind-point can actually map the interior of the two temples and judge them to be similar is not obvious, but I assume it can simply see and judge the relations (positions) between the shapes and locations of the architectural form of the temple. Yet, we are likely to doubt whether the mind-point can arrive at an adequate geometry. Can it really just see such forms or must it appeal, for example, to its own movement or body as it transverses the space of the temple? Here we can see the point of Kant’s arguments. First, the mindpoint cannot discover incongruence and so its conception of geometry is incomplete. Secondly, not only does measurement require the notion of Gegend or directionality but spatial form itself presumes the possibility of such directional movement. Thus, the mind-point is left with nothing but the inferior algebraic approach that it was intended to avoid. The notion of Gegend has been defined as the idea of “the direction of an orientation” (Walford in Kant 1992, p. 457), directionality of order, or, synonymously, a “directionality of sense” (Walford 2001, p.  423).11 The idea is that there is a different sense to directional orientations given the asymmetrical nature of these sorts of relations. “X is to the right of Y” is not equivalent to its converse or to the symmetrical relation of being-next­to. In effect, Kant’s problem in the essay is to explain why there is such a difference of sense and how such a difference can hold of some relations or objects, such as two incongruent temples. This difference seems entirely inaccessible to the mind-point. In fact, there are two notions of directionality at work in Kant’s essay, one of which is internal to the object and one of which concerns external spatial relations. The former will be called handedness, which is a non-metric, qualitative, asymmetric property of things. The latter concerns the locating of things in space relative to some set of directional coordinates, which is a derivative notion that results from applying the primitive, non-metrical directionality of sense to a theory of spatial coordination and measurement. This metric directionality of position can obviously change with movement (X is to the right, now it is to the left), whereas handedness cannot. Once we are occupying the shared world with its system of distances and measurements, then it is tempting to reduce directionality as a whole to metrical directionality and to see the latter as a description that can be eliminated for a purely mathematical or quantitative one. In other words, the directional system of above and below, right and left, and front and behind may seem to be reducible to a non-directional coordinate system (GUGR, AA 2:379). But such a

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reduction to a space of mere position (Lage) also eliminates the sense of asymmetric directionality that allows there to be handedness, whereas there are, undeniably, such asymmetrical relations in nature and, in particular, in incongruent counterparts. This system of directional notions—up, down, left, right, front, back— is what Kant refers to in the title of his work as “directions in space” (Gegenden in Raume) (GUGR, AA 2:375).12 He holds that other directional notions, such as north, south, east, and west (compass points or Weltgegenden) are dependent on the more basic directional system (above, below, left, right, front, back). The availability of metrical directionality to us is due to the three-dimensionality of physical space, thought of as planes, intersecting at right angles at the point of an observer (i.e. their body) (GUGR, AA 2:378–9). The directional system centered at the three-­ dimensional planes dividing the observer’s body is not reducible to a series of symmetrical relations. There remains a difference of sense between different directions, suggesting that there is an underlying asymmetry behind the notions. For example, down or below is distinguished from up or above by the traditional force of downward gravity. Front and back are obviously distinguished by the forward-facing nature of our senses and propensity to move in that direction. And left and right have physical differences, according to Kant, such as the fact that we favor one side over the other. The title of Kant’s essay tells us that there is an “ultimate ground” of this system of directions, not to be confused with an epistemic ground.13 That ultimate ground is called direction (Gegend) “in the most abstract sense of the term” and is described as “the relation of the system of these positions [of parts of space in reference to each other] to the absolute space of the universe” (GUGR, AA, 2:377). Here is the interpretive sticking point. If we say that positions merely have a metrical relation to the space of the universe, then we are speaking merely of location and this seems to have nothing to do with directionality. So how can absolute space be the ultimate ground of the primitive system of directional notions? Absolute space, on the classical Newtonian model, is the directionally neutral, three-dimensional, continuous, unified, immaterial, immovable system of positions (Lagen).14 So it would seem that all that absolute space has to offer by way of a “relation” is more relations of position (Lage), but incongruence is entirely absent from the geometry of the mind-point constrained to positionality. Thus, scholars such as Earman argue that Kant has “no coherent argument at all,” because appealing to absolute space to

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understand direction and asymmetry in an object can only make uses of “points and lines of the space external to” the object, which merely reproduces the directional, asymmetrical order that was to be explained (Earman 1991, p. 137). Kant himself rejects considering this “relation to absolute space” merely in terms of a relation to a place or “places in the space – for that would be the same thing as regarding the position of the parts of the thing in question in an external relation” (GUGR, AA 2:378). The solution is found in the fact that besides calling this a “relation” to absolute space, he also says that the direction of order “refers” to “universal space as a unity” (GUGR, AA 2:378, my stress). I take this “reference” to be a comparative notion between qualities: the quality of handedness (non-­ metrical directional) references and is grounded upon that same quality in the forces that make up space itself.

Kant’s Argument for Absolute Space Based on Incongruent Counterparts Kant’s argument against relational theories of space is based on the fact that the Leibnizian mind-point cannot distinguish between two temples that are identical in every way except that one has an asymmetry that is mirror-reflected in the other. Of two such objects, Kant says that they would be “exactly equal and similar, and yet still be so different in themselves that the limits of the one cannot also be the limits of the other” (GUGR, AA 2:381). These left–right reversed temples should have indiscernibly identical form on Leibniz’s account, but in actuality, they are incongruent.15 “The surface which limits the physical space of the one … cannot serve as a boundary to limit the other, no matter how that surface by twisted and turned” (GUGR, AA 2:382). Kant’s primary argument asks us to “imagine that the first created thing was a human hand,” which we clearly see would “have to be either a right or a left hand” (GUGR, AA 2:383). If we were relational theorists about space, then we would believe that there is nothing other than body and “all actual space would simply be the space occupied by this hand” (GUGR, AA 2:383).16 Now the relationist may say that directionality is “found in the constitution of bodies” and admit that the solitary hand is either left or right. Supposedly, this difference lies in the shape of a thing or how its parts are combined, although this is precisely what the Leibnizian analysis situs describes and, in so doing, leaves out incongruence.17 But if this difference cannot be

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found in the geometric nature of the parts of the hand, then they must deny that the solitary hand would be either left or right (GUGR, AA 2:383). Of course, the relationist could deny that there is any intrinsic property of things that determines left or right orientation at the outset, but Kant thinks this is obviously false.18 Kant believes that he has shown that no geometry that concerns only positions and magnitude can account for this intrinsic asymmetry of order, in particular, the sense of the difference between similar and equal but incongruent orders. The geometry of position will examine “the proportion and the position of its parts to each other” and “scrutinize the magnitude of the whole” to arrive at the most complete description available to it (GUGR, AA 2:381). But it will not find the “inner” difference that distinguishes a handed object from its counterpart, because that difference simply cannot be analyzed in terms of “the relation and position of its parts to each other” (GUGR, AA 2:381).19 Kant does seem to say that this property does belong to a thing’s “physical” or “corporeal form” (GUGR, AA 2:381). But I take Kant’s point to be that it belongs to the materiality or physicality of the thing in contrast to its mathematical form. I claim that Kant’s account of handedness is that it is not a feature of metrical geometric form or how that form relates to the positions around it. Instead, this quality of matter in objects refers to “universal absolute space” by either matching or being the opposite orientation of the pervasive asymmetry of space itself (GUGR, AA 2:381). This solution is drawn from the view of space from previous chapters. As I have argued, Kant believes that there is a basic matter or Urstoff made entirely of an active, attractive force. This primary matter is incapable of being thought of as impenetrable extension or as consisting of molar bodies in space, for such bodies and the repulsive forces that create them only emerge after the initial, infinite distribution of this “original material of all things” (NTH, AA 1:228, 264). In the proto-universe, these microfields of attractive force are divided into regions of different intensities, and these regions “put each other into motion” and are “a source of life for themselves” (NTH, AA 1: 264). He calls the original matter of the universe a “subtle though universally active matter which, in the products of nature, constitutes the active principle, and, as a true Proteus, is able to assume all shapes and forms” (FEV, AA 1:211). From the original dispersal of this prime matter, ordinary matter and the forces described by Newtonian physics emerge. Most importantly, the Urstoff or “elements of self-forming nature” all “acquire a general motion from west to east”

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(NTH, AA 1:266, 285). It is misleading to say this material fills space as if space is something other than it. After all, the notion of filling space requires a notion of shape or form which would be a positional notion. Kant’s view is that our apparently empty space is made of a “substance of infinitely small resistance” or “infinitely thin matter” too weak to interact with ordinary matter but, presumably, still preserving the original rotation that all force initially had (NTH, AA 1:338). In this way, we have an answer as to how the solitary hand would be either left or right, without anyone being there to judge it so, because its asymmetry can be thought of as corresponding or not with the asymmetry of this basic material that makes up space itself. That is, the hand itself is formed from the matter of space, and either has the qualitative feature of leftness or rightness that can be theoretically compared to the rotational force that gave rise to it.

Kant’s Solution and the Fall of Parity Although there is nothing mysterious about asymmetrical objects, Kant’s puzzle is why there is a fundamentally different sense associated with incongruent counterparts that cannot be accounted for by the geometry of his day. This is not merely an epistemological puzzle, but like the classic Ozma problem, it can be illustrated via the problem of knowing this difference of sense. The Ozma problem asks “how can we communicate … our meaning of left and right” to some distant planet when “there is to be no asymmetric object or structure that we and they can observe in common” (Gardner 2005, p. 167). Suppose you and I are each a mind reduced to a point in Leibniz’s temples, each of which has an asymmetrical order that is the mirror image of the other. The question is whether one mind-point could communicate to the other which temple (L-temple or R-temple) it is in without any reference to a commonly shared exemplar of left–right asymmetry. The solution to the Ozma problem is to appeal to a fundamental law of nature that is invariably asymmetric across the entire universe. If the law of parity held and everything in nature fell into symmetrically divided classes, then there would be no such law. But the law of parity does not hold in nature. Gardner points out that “the south end of a cobalt 60 nucleus is most likely to fling out an electron” (Gardner 2005, p. 216) or if one looks at neutrinos they all appear “like a bullet spinning from a rifle with left-handed rifling” (McManus 2002, p. 139). Rusnock and George note that “evidently, Kant was a firm disbeliever in parity” but do not allow this as a solution to the ontological problem of

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directionality. They see this as nothing more than appealing to local asymmetries. They claim that this is “just as serviceable” a solution to Kant’s problem, because they believe that he is only concerned with the epistemic problem of how we go about telling left from right (Rusnock and George 1995, p. 272). Kant’s examples in the 1768 essay of local appeals to incongruence are meant to show law-like deviations from the principle of parity (setting aside whether his examples are true or not): all human hair grows in a spiral left to right, all hops spiral from left to right, “whereas beans wind in the opposite direction,” “almost all snails, with the exception of perhaps, only three species” have shells that spiral left to right, and these patterns do not depend on contingent circumstances or in location but are caused by “the seeds” of the things themselves (GUGR, AA 2:380). In the organization of our own body, “the right side … enjoys an indisputable advantage” in terms of skill and power and “all peoples of the world are right-handed (apart from a few exceptions which … do not upset the universality of the regular natural order),” whereas the left side is more sensitive (GUGR, AA 2:380). My proposal is quite simple: Kant’s view is that there is some deep, natural, and universal law that operates in an asymmetric and directional way, against which directional objects can be said to either match in their directionality or differ. That nomological foundation is the asymmetrical left–right directionality of the motion of space (and any part of space) itself. This differs from Rusnock’s and George’s claim that “if space has absolute direction, then hands are left and right because of their relations to these directions,” which is an appeal to “absolute north” or “absolute west” (Rusnock and George 1995, p.  271). That fails to explain the asymmetrical difference of sense that allows there to be a directional difference between east and west in the first place. For there to be absolute, irreducible metric directionality, there must be a non-metric directionality (handedness as a property of a thing, in this case space itself) that does not rely in any way on spatial positionality and is instantiated in a way that is universal and lacking in parity. I have mentioned in the previous chapters that Descartes’s conception of space has affinities with Kant’s. If we turn to Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, we find that there is an essential directional asymmetry in nature, and it is bound up with incongruent counterparts. Descartes argues that matter of “the second element” consists of spherical contiguous bodies that form “curvilinear” triangular gaps, through which matter of “the first element” fill and pass (Descartes 1982, pp. 133–4). Although

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some elements of the first matter are extremely fast moving and almost constantly changing shape, there are slower moving and more regularly shaped bits of first matter that have straight line motions through these triangular gaps made by the contiguous spheres of the secondary matter (Descartes 1982, p. 133). This bulkier primary matter has the following shape: they are “small {fluted} cylinders with three grooves {or channels} which are twisted like the shell of a snail,” and this allows them “to pass in a twisting motion” or to corkscrew the little triangular spaces between the secondary matter (Descartes 1982, p. 134).20 These particles are emitted from the north and south poles of the sun. Moreover, because they approach the center of the heaven from opposite directions, that is, some from the South {pole} and some from the North, while the whole vortex rotates in one direction on its axis, it is obvious that those coming from the Soul pole must be twisted in exactly the opposite direction from those coming from the North. (Descartes 1982, p. 134)

So it is clear that the rotating center of the heavens causes some portion of the material elements of the plenum to become, according to a universal and invariable law, incongruent counterparts.21 Because of the parity of these particles emanating from the poles, this may offer no solution to the Ozma problem. Nevertheless, it shows that a major influence on Kant’s own cosmology thought that one could find incongruence among the most basic, primary matter of the universe.

Resolution of Some Interpretative Difficulties A Newtonian conception of space that is entirely “positional” has led to a failure to properly characterize both the property of handedness and its relation to absolute space. As Walford notes, Kant’s “central conclusion” must be that directionality (such as being right-orientated or left-­ orientated) is a “primitive and non-metric spatial property” that belongs to some objects (Walford 2001, p. 418). But not even Walford has recognized that Kant attributes that property to space itself, making his view a relative of Aristotle’s, in which there was a natural above–below directionality (Aristotle 1984, 208b9–25; Jammer 1954, p. 19). The confusion over Kant’s argument can be seen in Rusnock’s and George’s claim that he cannot “make up his mind” whether direction is an “inner characteristic” or an “outer characteristic.” They decide that is an outer one, because

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those are given “through comparison with other bodies”—the other outer characteristics being “magnitude and external place” (Rusnock and George 1995, p. 265). Similarly, Van Cleve says Kant’s solution is a form of “extrinsicism” because “leftness or rightness of a hand does depend on something outside of it,” whereas the “intrinsicist” holds that the difference between left and right pertains to the parts of a thing (Van Cleve 1991, p. 204). These interpretations fail to recognize anything other than positional relations either internal to the hand or to something outside the hand. But the entire point of Kant’s essay is to challenge this idea by showing that non-metric directionality (handedness) is something belonging to the object. While handedness is subjectively available to a knower who has a sense of the difference between left and right, it exists objectively in the world insofar as there is a universal seat of the difference of sense between the asymmetrical relation of handedness. This puzzle about how to interpret Kant’s view of handedness rests on applying a division between inner and outer characteristics that is spelled out in entirely positional terms. But by rejecting such a division, Kant’s view is not as confused as it seems.22 To use Van Cleve’s terms, Kant is a “holist”—left and right is a “thoroughly nonrelational affair” and these are “monadic properties”—of which, Van Cleve says, “no one I know of has held this view” (Van Cleve 1991, p. 205). As it turns out, Kant did. While it is true that he does think of handedness in terms of a “reference” to absolute space, this reference is not an external, spatial relation. It is an internal relation that the object has of matching (or not) the direction of space itself. It is at this point that we can point to Kant’s metaphysics to explain what might be meant by the “inner difference” or “inner ground” that distinguishes left- and right-handed objects (GUGR, AA 2:382). Kant says that the difference between left and right hands cannot consist in the way in which the parts of the body are combined with each other. Instead, he claims that the very nature of matter, by which it forms a shape, depends on “the determinations of space,” and while the differences of left and right are found “in the constitution of bodies” and “can be immediately perceived,” the ground of this difference cannot (GUGR, AA 2:383, 381). All corporeal form is grounded on Gegend or the “reference of that physical form to universal absolute space, as it is conceived by the geometers” (GUGR, AA 2:381). To say that this difference is an inner one and that the determinations of space ground the form of matter is to say that the microphysical structure of the world, which is written into the inner metaphysical nature of substances and manifest in the nature of force,

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gives to all of space and all of matter certain features. As we know, Kant has held that three-dimensionality is one of those features. So also is the qualitative monadic property of handedness. Matter has certain spatial properties because it emerges from space itself. This leads us back to the idea that I stated in my first chapter: Kant holds a “substantivalist position” in which what exists at the ground floor of the natural world (although not the metaphysical one) is “spacetime” and that the “ordinary material contents of the world should be viewed as ‘pieces’ of spacetime itself” (Sklar 1974, p. 166). This point relates to a second difficulty, namely the confusion over the difference between handedness (a primitive, non-metric property) and metric directionality by which we orientate things in spatial relations of distance via compass points or other Gegenden. In the latter relations, such as “X is 5 meters to the left of Y,” a change in the perspective of the observer seems to change the relation itself.23 Thus, these relations seem reducible to a purely quantitative relation. Of course, metrical, directional relations are important for Kant’s point, leading him to discuss them on several occasions, because, insofar as we are not eliminativists regarding them, they are dependent on a fundamental difference of sense that accompanies and distinguishes the “to-the-right-of” relation from, for example, the “5-meters-apart” relation. But Kant’s fundamental concern is the non-metrical property of handedness, which no change of position or motion can modify. Now the failure to separate non-metric directionality (handedness) from metric directionality (being 5 meters to the right of) derives in part from Kant’s ambition to show that all material extension (compounded matter) irreducibly stands in metric directional relations in space. He begins the 1768 article with the claim that “the positions of the parts of space in reference to each other presuppose the direction in which they are ordered in such a relation” (GUGR, AA 2:377). We may certainly grant that our epistemic position is one for which all positional relations necessarily appear as directionally orientated. We are self-moving beings who navigate the world and locate ourselves and objects via directions. But Kant is interested in more than this claim about our directionally dependent cognition: My purpose in this treatise is to see whether there is not to be found in the intuitive judgments about extension, such as are to be found in geometry, clear proof that: Absolute space, independently of the existence of all matter

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and as itself the ultimate foundation of the possibility of the compound character of matter, has a reality of its own. (GUGR, AA 2:378)24

We are now in a position to understand what Kant means when he says that absolute space is the very foundation of the compound character of matter. We know that space is made of the attractive forces that are the ultimate foundation of the possibility of compound matter. While this means space is the ground of the actuality (the efficient cause) of compound matter, it does not show that it is the ground of the possibility of the compound character of matter. That stronger claim is established by Kant’s argument from handedness, which tells us that materiality itself, which is capable of being formed into figures with handedness, must be a part of a space that contains a universal, non-regional, non-metric, directional asymmetry. In other words, Kant has offered a sort of transcendental argument: the foundation of the possibility of compound matter must be something that has qualitative, directional features, because we know matter to have such a feature. This requires us to reject both the relationist view of space as well as an immaterialist space without qualities. Absolute space is independent of all compounded matter (bodies), as Kant says in the passage just quoted, but it must also be thought of as a material substrate with at least the dynamic, asymmetrical quality of directional rotation. If matter is such that it can be compounded so as to have handedness and the geometries of other theories of space cannot account for this, then we need a geometry and, thus, a theory of space itself that can allow for such directional features as part of the fabric of reality. It is worth noting these features of space and matter are found in both his physics and his cosmology. Kant’s vision of the universe itself is that it rotates around a central, gravitational core. Around the rotating center of the universe, there are poles, and the early vertical fields of matter and force were condensed to a horizontal plane or disc of projected force around which all matter sank into regular orbits. Although there is no analogue to front–back directionality, we can say that the universe and space itself has north–south poles, a central plane indicating the middle and the above–below distinctions, as well as a left–right or east–west rotation. We have already seen the root of this idea in Descartes’s cosmology. If this is Kant’s view, then it will be the case that all positionality does in fact have directionality relative to absolute directions stemming from the center of the universe and its gravity. Thus, it will make sense to say of an actual, material isosceles triangle that the angle made by its two equal sides

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is orientated absolutely left of its unequal side based on its relation to the center of the universe and that one equal angle is above (or to the north of) the other in absolute relation to the central plane of the universe. Yet, another reason why Kant thinks the very possibility of compound matter and, thus, of extension and magnitude requires directionality and absolute space is the problem with Leibniz’s thought experiment. The actual act of measuring any magnitude requires the marking of direction, the direction from which the measurement begins and ends. How can the mind-point determine the inside of the temple without starting at a point from which it then directionally moves? But how can it even note direction? So not only does the mind-point fail to grasp handedness (non-­ metrical directionality), it does not seem to have the capacity to distinguish the metrical directional relations among positions (Lagen), which are required for mathematical construction. What I am pointing to is the intuitive basis of geometry. The fact that Kant was interested in the Inquiry in the way in which mathematical constructions in intuition act as essential supports to mathematical reasoning has now been brought into focus as having significant implications for the very nature of matter and space. Without a metric (a measuring rod), a sense of direction, and a unified, continuous space in which measurement takes place, the mind-point has no way of reckoning with any feature of the temple, let alone its incongruence with another temple. While we can begin to see the Critical notion of space emerging within this focus on intuition, I do not think that Kant’s argument in 1768 collapses into a mere assertion of our intuitive capacity to determine directionality using our bodies. For example, Walford claims that what Kant means by the primitiveness of certain concepts, and of Gegend in particular, is that “they can only be apprehended intuitively” (Walford 2001, p.  415). Rusnock and George argue, with regard to appeal to absolute space as an explanation of direction, that Kant “takes the steam out of this line of argument” because he also suggests a solution “independent of absolute directions”—namely, that we can apprehend incongruence by comparing it to some norm or available standard (Rusnock and George 1995, p. 272). Nuzzo argues that Kant senses the difficulties of his own argument and “ends, as it were, with a proof of a different thesis,” which is that “the body” and our own intuitive grasp of directionality “replaces absolute space” (Nuzzo 2008, p. 35).25 This mixing of the epistemic issue of how we know left from right, with the ontological problem of the ground of directionality in nature and in space is something Kant would

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simply not allow in 1768. The obvious reason for this is that it would mean, that without some being to actually intuit the universe with a solitary hand it would be neither left nor right, which, he has argued, is absurd.

Conclusion Kant’s 1768 article has long been analyzed in isolation from his earlier theory of space because of the mistaken view that the earlier theory was simply a Leibnizian, relational theory and not an absolutist one. While Kant had some form of absolutism in mind throughout his pre-Critical works, I have argued that he was never an immaterialist when thinking about absolute space. If we begin from the undeniable connection between space itself and the primitive active force that Kant sees at the foundation of all nature, then we find that the directional features that he analyzes in 1768 were a part of his theory of absolute space all along. General neglect of the early natural scientific writings, the discrediting of the hypothesis of the ether, the resulting narrowing of our conceptual alternatives of what space may be to reductive relationism and immaterialist absolutism, and presumptions about either Kant’s Leibnizian or Newtonian orthodoxy have led generations of scholars to overlook the solution that I have proposed. Space has a non-metric directionality (handedness). Parity does not hold, because space has a unidirectional rotation. A foundation thus exists that allows one to say of a solitary hand that it would be either left or right. Moreover, material space also has a natural center, north–south poles, and a central disc of force extending from its center, which allows one to say that all positional order necessarily has a directional orientation in the whole of space.

Notes 1. For example, Severo says that the 1768 argument cannot be saved (Severo 2005, p. 30). 2. Remnant (1991) argues that Kant makes the simple blunder of assuming that left–right is defined in one case (human bodies) but not in the other (hands). Earman responds that Remnant’s proof of circularity is too simple and argues that Kant relates handed objects to handed bits of absolute space, which he says solves nothing for that is no different than appealing to local handedness in objects (Earman 1991, p.  137). See also Hoefer (2000).

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3. Alexander argues that Kant accepts the notion of “the Void,” which differs from the receptacle view of Newton in that it does not regard space as an absolute series of positions that provide a frame of reference (Alexander 1984, p. 6). What I find problematic in Alexander’s account is that he says that “the Void” has no geometry and, thus, no dimensionality (one would assume). But it still (somehow) has “non-geometric” properties that allow the possibility of geometry: directionality, part-whole relations, and infinity (Alexander 1984, p. 12). Byrd rejects Alexander’s Void for being “featureless” and thinks Kant adopts a Newtonian space or “space of the geometers” (Byrd 2008, p. 793). 4. Walford questions whether Kant fully endorses the reality of absolute space and holds that he is compatibilist, accepting both absolutism at the ontological level and relationism as the method of empirical science (2001, p. 433). Falkenstein, for example, argues that 1768 finds Kant unable “to conclude the paper with a wholehearted endorsement of the Newtonian, substantivalist solution” (1995, p. 34). This position goes as far back as to Riehl and Fischer, who also believed that the 1768 article does not actually support the reality of absolute space (Garnett 1939, p.  117). The most extreme version of reading the Critical theory of space into the 1768 article is Nuzzo’s (2008). 5. Kant’s words are “die Materie, die der Urstoff aller Dinge ist.” The implication here is that Kant rejects parity and holds something similar to the idea, expressed metaphorically, that “space is a weak left-eyed giant” rather than a Cyclops with an eye in the middle of his head (McManus 2002, p. 138). 6. An alternative defence of Kant has been to say that these asymmetrical, handed, or chiral objects illuminate the distinction between orientatable and non-orientatable spaces (Nerlich 1994). A mirror-image object such as a left or right hand might exist in an orientatable space, in which case left– right orientation is preserved in any rigid motion. There are such things as non-­orientatable spaces in which left–right orientation is not preserved in rigid motion, and objects that seem incongruent can be made congruent. I just do not see this distinction as one that Kant can make. 7. Walford mentions but does not take seriously the idea that Kant speaks of absolute space as it were an “infinite substance … mysteriously permeating all things in space, and, so to speak, suffusing them with its own topological and geometrical qualities” (Walford 2001, p. 435). 8. This distinction is found in Euler (1967, §7). It contains Descartes’s notion of external place, but it also includes the notion of internal place as Walford notes (2001, p. 409). 9. A discussion of Kant’s views in relation to analysis situs can be found in Storrie’s essay (2013).

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10. Walford says that anything metric is reducible to the quantitative and that the qualitative is not metric (Walford 2001, pp. 416, 411 note 14). His reasoning is that following Russell, metrical geometry is based on the notion of distance or a magnitude, and that true qualitative, “geometry of position” (projective and descriptive geometries) does not include such considerations (Russell 1903, pp. 382, 393). Because, according to Russell, order and the geometry of it relies on asymmetrical relations, and because Leibniz seems to have had no place for such things (as evidenced by his failure to consider incongruence), then Walford holds, I assume, that Leibniz fails to arrive at a geometric study of quality (Russell 1903, p. 227). 11. I take it that Walford’s notion of the directionality of sense derives from Russell: “Order depends upon asymmetrical relations, and … these always have two senses, as before or after, greater or less, east and west, etc.” (Russell 1903, p. 227). The notion of a difference of sense is “the difference between an asymmetrical relation and its converse” (Russell 1903, p. 228). 12. It has been suggested that Kant’s title might be an instance in which Gegenden is better rendered as “regions,” because this would make the title refer to the intuitive ground of our own body as the “ultimate ground” of how we differentiate regions of space. I think that by rendering Gegenden into the more indeterminate notion of “regions” as opposed to the notion of “directions” (left, right, up, down, etc.), one is probably trying to move Kant’s argument toward the epistemic question of how we distinguish regions of space using our embodied ground of our intuition of Gegenden. Yet, this modification renders the title misleading because the idea of Gegenden in intuition is substituted for the ontological notion of Gegenden in space. 13. I tend to agree with Zerbudis (2012) that the 1768 article is entirely compatible with Kant’s epistemology in the 1760s. 14. Thus, Walford states that direction is a “genuinely qualitative property of space,” which seems to mean that it is a real, objective feature of some spatial things; that is, it belongs among our fundamental spatial concepts, but he does not explore the possibility of it being a feature of the structure of absolute space itself (Walford 2001, p. 417). Instead, he analyzes the connection between absolute space and direction in terms of unity or the relationship of being-in space, which he describes as “a relation to space as a unity in respect of its tridimensionality” (Walford 2001, p. 425). Although tri-­ dimensionality is a foundation for directionality (i.e. Gegenden are directions in three-­dimensional space), I do not see how directionality is in any way derivable from the unity of space qua three-dimensional and neither does Walford who thinks this argument fails.

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15. The fact that Leibniz treats two-dimensionally incongruent triangles as congruent is often pointed to as evidence that he had no account of incongruence. The comparison between two-dimensional and three­ dimensional incongruence is a central component of many reconstructions of Kant’s argument, especially those concerning the orientatability of space. But Kant does not even consider two-dimensional left–right-orientated objects to be possibly incongruent: “If two figures drawn on a plane surface are equal and similar, then they will coincide with each other” (GUGR, AA 2:381). It is only in three-dimensional figures that equality and similarity do not equal congruence. I have never seen this noted in the literature. The most extensive account of Leibniz’s theory of congruence and incongruence, as far as I know, is De Risi’s, who argues that Kant’s argument is based on the confusion of two different types of congruence, that is, “functional congruence” defined geometrically without appeal to motion and congruence “through motion” (De Risi 2007, pp. 278–93). 16. Some scholars believe that this argument against relationist is question begging because it depends on the introduction of a human body into the thought experiment. I wonder if the current standard translation results in this confusion by saying “that human would have to be either a right hand or a left hand,” which is total nonsense (GUGR, AA 2:383). The “es” in that sentence is referring to “das erste Schöpfungsstück” and, so also, the solitary hand, which is mistakenly translated as “that human.” 17. Frederick argues that Kant thinks that the difference lies in shape (“left and right hands do not have completely similar shapes”) and that exact congruence is required for sameness of shape (Frederick 1991, pp. 3–5). 18. This leads relationists to defend the claim that in a universe containing a solitary, it would be neither left nor right (Remnant 1991, p. 58; Hoefer 2000, p. 246). Other relationists try to distinguish left and right—even in a solitary universe—in terms of different sets of possible relations (Sklar 1991, p. 177). 19. As clearly noted by Broad (1978, p. 38). 20. Some have speculated that Kant focuses on incongruent counterparts because of Leibniz’s objection to Clarke concerning the possibility that God could have created the entire universe in absolute space but simply reversed (Wolff 1963, pp. 9–10; Byrd 2008). De Risi argues that it comes from Buffon (De Risi 2007, p. 291). Severo notes that Vaihinger believes the inspiration comes from Segner. A reviewer of Severo’s article notes that there is a description of handed screws in Part 4 of Descartes’s Principles (Severo 2005, p. 49). But it seems to have gone without notice that an essential feature of Descartes’s theory of matter in Part 3 of the Principles relies on incongruent counterparts and the polarity of the heavenly bodies that emit this primary matter.

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21. Gaukroger believes that, at times, Descartes is arguing against the idea that “space has an intrinsic directionality” and discounts its presence in Descartes’s text as a relatively insignificant point used in explaining sun-­ spots and magnetism (Gaukroger 2002, pp. 103, 152). 22. This shows that the purported “paralogism” that Rusnock and George find in Kant’s argument, based on an “equivocation” on the distinction between inner and outer characteristics, is artificial and based on foisting an alien distinction on Kant’s analysis (Rusnock and George 1995, p. 266). 23. Bernecker claims that he offers a novel interpretation of Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts by focusing less on distinguishing left from right and more on identifying an incongruent counterpart. The problem with his solution is that he confuses perspective-relative metrical directionality with the non-metrical directionality of handedness. He falsely claims that handedness changes appearance based on the perspective on it: as if a left hand or screw appears right-handed as I shift my position. Given that that is false, Bernecker’s account is irrelevant for understanding what interests Kant when considering incongruent counterparts (Bernecker 2010, p. 524). 24. This may appear to challenge the idea that Kant’s view of space is a “material” one. But I have made clear that Kant has two notions of materiality— the material of compounded bodies (secondary matter) and the force, which when combined together constitutes material bodies (primary matter). Immaterial or “void” views of space are typically thought of as lacking qualitative structures, so Kant’s view, while certainly combining features of different views, seems more in line with material plenum theories. Thus, we must take quotes like the one above to be saying that space is independent of extended bodies. 25. This is a longstanding interpretation that Garnett attributes to both Alois Riehl and Kuno Fischer, which he rightfully criticizes (Garnett 1939, p. 117).

References Alexander, Peter. 1984. Incongruent Counterparts and Absolute Space. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 85: 1–21. Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Berkecker, Sven. 2010. Kant on Spatial Orientation. European Journal of Philosophy 20: 519–533. Broad, C.D. 1978. Kant: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byrd, Jeremy. 2008. A Remark on Kant’s Argument from Incongruent Counterparts. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16: 789–800.

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De Risi, Vicenzo. 2007. Geometry and Monadology: Leibniz’s Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space. Basel: Birkhäuser. Descartes, René. 1982. Principles of Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Earman, John. 1991. Kant, Incongruous Counterparts, and the Nature of Space and Space-Time. In The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. James Van Cleve and Robert Frederick, 131–150. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Euler, Leonhard. 1967. On Absolute Space and Time. In The Changeless Order; The Physics of Space, Time and Motion, ed. Arnold Koslow, 115–125. New York: George Braziller. Falkenstein, Lorne. 1995. Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Frederick, Robert. 1991. Introduction to the Argument of 1768. In The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. James Van Cleve and Robert Frederick, 1–14. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Gardner, Martin. 2005. The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings. Mineola: Dover Publications. Garnett, Christopher, Jr. 1939. The Kantian Philosophy of Space. Port Washington: Kennikat Press. Gaukroger, Stephan. 2002. Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoefer, Carl. 2000. Kant’s Hands and Earman’s Pions: Chirality Arguments for Substantival Space. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14: 237–256. Jammer, Max. 1954. Concepts of Space. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1992. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leibniz, G.W. 1956. Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol 1. Trans. Leroy Loemker. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing. McManus, Chris. 2002. Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nerlich, Graham. 1994. The Shape of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2008. Ideal Embodiment: Kant’s Theory of Sensibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Remnant, Peter. 1991. Incongruous Counterparts and Absolute Space. In The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. James Van Cleve and Robert Frederick, 51–59. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Rusnock, Paul, and Rolf George. 1994. Snails Rolled Up Contrary to All Sense. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54: 459–466.

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———. 1995. A Last Shot at Kant and Incongruent Counterparts. Kant-Studien 86: 257–277. Russell, Bertrand. 1903. Principles of Mathematics. New  York: Norton and Company. Severo, Rogério Passos. 2005. Three Remarks on the Interpretation of Kant on Incongruent Counterparts. Kantian Review 9: 30–57. Sklar, Lawrence. 1974. Space, Time, and Spacetime. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1991. Incongruous Counterparts, Intrinsic Features, and the Substantiviality of Space. In The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. James Van Cleve and Robert Frederick, 173–186. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Storrie, Stefan. 2013. Kant’s 1768 Attack on Leibniz’ Conception of Space. Kant-­ Studien 104: 145–166. Van Cleve, James. 1991. Right, Left, and the Fourth Dimension. In The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, ed. James Van Cleve and Robert Frederick, 203–233. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Walford, David. 2001. Towards an Interpretation of Kant’s 1768 Gegenden im Raume Essay. Kant-Studien 92: 407–439. Wolff, Robert Paul. 1963. Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Zerbudis, Ezequiel. 2012. Incongruent Counterparts and the Origin of Kant’s Distinction Between Sensibility and Understanding. Archiv für geschichte der Philosophie 94: 326–352.

CHAPTER 6

The Moment of Transformation: Time and the Critical Turn in the Inaugural Dissertation

The Collapse of the Pre-Critical Metaphysics In the previous chapter, we have seen how Kant came to recognize that quantitative spatial relations of distance or position were dependent on the qualitative feature of the material forces of space itself, namely its left–right directionality. Before returning to the doctrine of space in 1770 and the transcendental subjectivization of it, I want to make the case that the transformation that Kant’s thought undergoes in the Inaugural Dissertation hinges on his thinking about time. Until this point, Kant had not given the notion of time much consideration. He had discussed a principle of succession in 1755, but that notion of change in state was little more than argument about external causality, and so he did not think of time distinctly as opposed to change in general. To explicitly treat time by itself is one of the most unexpected aspects of the Dissertation, although Kant had said that such an investigation was possible in 1764. While it is clear to most that Kant’s “great light” of the year 1769 is his uncovering of the “illusion of the understanding” (the subreptic axioms or antinomies) (AA 18:69; Gotz 2001), the significance of his reflections on the notion of time in the discovery of these illusions has not been fully recognized. The fact that the 1770 Dissertation contains explicit and definitive criticisms of his previous metaphysics has continually been obscured by scholars believing that the works of the 1760s were already a rejection of his earlier thought. This has been shown not to be the case. As we have come to see,

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even as a methodological and phenomenological shift took place across his earlier works, the fundamental concepts and topics that he returned to again and again remain fairly stable. But to pivot to an exposition of the notion of time was to introduce a series of considerations that, having no precedent in his earlier work, necessitated serious revisions. I have argued that the division between worlds, between substances and their appearances, has been present throughout Kant’s thinking. Some scholars believe that this division itself is the central innovation that provokes the Critical turn. That seems textually unsound based on the reading presented thus far. What seems most important for this transformation in Kant’s thought, in my opinion, is the recognition that he had been thinking of substances and their changes of state in temporal terms and based on analogy with our own representational states. To then give up on that temporal model of substances is to move toward an even more Platonic notion of substances—timeless rather than dynamic—which is how Kant will come to visualize the “intelligible world” during the Critical period (MAN, AA 4:507).1 When that doctrine of the temporality of substance is challenged, the bifurcation between pure metaphysics and mathematical physics (and a philosophy constructed upon primitive aspects of experience that are conjoined with basic mathematical and scientific notions) becomes conceptually unbridgeable. In a sense, the temporality of activity was all that kept simple substances and empirical reality bound together.2 To now divide Being into the temporal and non-temporal strikes me as the fundamental recognition that “the most universal laws of sensibility play a deceptively large role in metaphysics,” as it necessitates this division between worlds and gives rise to “a quite special, though purely negative science, general phenomenology” (Br, AA 10:98). In that science, “the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations, would be determined” and restricted from applying to “objects of pure reason” (Br, AA 10:98). This negative science asserts that space, time, and their axioms are “very real,” although restricted to “the conditions of all appearances and of all empirical judgments” (Br, AA 10:98). This “propaedeutic discipline,” rather than destroying metaphysics, actually preserves it by eliminating confusion that comes from “admixture of the sensible” (Br, AA 10:98). It seems remarkable to me that when Kant chooses to summarize his advancements in 1770 to Lambert that he does so by explaining that his phenomenology of human sensibility has profound consequences for metaphysics, asserting the reality of space, time, and their axioms. The implication of this division is that the classic objects

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of metaphysics—such as the simple substances upon which his metaphysics had previously been built—are seen as merely “something thought through a universal or a pure concept of the understanding as a thing or a substance in general” (Br, AA 10:98). Similarly, when Kant writes to Herz in 1771 and mentions that he is writing a work called “The Bounds of Sensibility and of Reason,” he frames the project in metaphysical terms as working out “the foundational principles and laws that determine the sensible world,” which is his propaedeutic “general phenomenology,” and which will then contain an outline of what is essential to “Metaphysics” (Br, AA 10:122).3 While in 1771, Kant may have continued to believe, as in 1770, that pure metaphysical reflections on substances and God remained possible, it would appear that in 1772, when sketching his renamed work The Limits of Sensibility and Reason, any discussion of metaphysics, as that which stands outside the explication of the laws of the sensible world, had been replaced with reflections on “its nature and method” (Br, AA 10:129). This famous letter to Herz in 1772 is where many scholars find the crucial moment in which the Critical philosophy emerges, a moment where Kant identifies “the key to the whole secret of metaphysics,” which had been hitherto hidden even to him (Br, AA 10:130). It is clear that the insight that he sees as so significant is the discovery of the categories of the understanding and the need to explain their applicability to the external world, which he we will do through their sensible schematization. This insight also leads “transcendental philosophy,” which is rooted in “concepts belonging to completely pure reason,” to no longer have the metaphysical import that remained possible in 1770 (Br, AA 10:132). As Kant frames these issues, we can see how significant the nature of space and time are to his development of the Critical philosophy and how it remains rather forced to say that his concern is merely epistemic rather establishing an ontology of the sensible world through his “general phenomenology.” While I do not want to get too involved in the nature of the Critical philosophy as it evolves after 1770 and what its ultimate shape is, I think we must avoid anachronistic reading of the Dissertation through innovations that emerge after it. Even though the only publication by Kant between Dreams and the Dissertation is on the nature of space, my approach to Kant’s develop might be challenged. It might be thought that rather than a continuation of the working out of how metaphysics can be both rooted in the world as given by mathematical physics and intuition and be able to appeal to a

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world of ultimate metaphysical substances, Kant is primarily focused on epistemic question of proper method in metaphysics. Is this not what is shown by his works of the 1760s and, for example, his letters to Herz? While he does tell Herz that he attempts to make judgments that are limited and thus more definite and more secure, I would argue that he has always been conservative in this regard (Br, AA 10:56). Have the challenges of explicating the ultimate nature of substance, space, matter, and force been abandoned for questions of method? In 1765 at least, Kant says that the culmination of his entire project is to be called “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Philosophy” (Br, AA 10:56). That sounds very much like the sort of reckoning of the mathematical sciences with metaphysics that has always been his interest, which I have argued in the 1760s uses primitive intuitive notions, such as body, division, combination, succession, simultaneity, space, attractive and repulsive forces, and so on. From these notions, which are rooted in the mathematical sciences, he then draws upon pure rational metaphysics, were no “analogon of contingency is to be encountered,” to account for the harmony and perfection of the world-whole (UD, AA 2:297). Is there any reason to think that what drives the development of the Dissertation are simply concerns of over method and epistemology rather than the sort of project that I have described? Kant’s lecture announcement from 1765 explains that he will investigate “the metaphysical science of man based on experience” or “empirical psychology,” the theory of matter, which leads to the division between mental and material beings and transitions to rational psychology, and then “the science which is concerned with God and the world” (NEV, AA 2:308–9). If we look at the letter exchange with Lambert, who writes to Kant in 1766 and to which Kant replies only in 1770, we find that while Lambert has quite a lot to say about philosophical method and the division between logic (form) and material knowledge based on simple concepts “like space and time,” he nevertheless argues that philosophy should take up a Euclidean model and must carry its “analysis of measurable objects to the point where the mathematician can find unities, measures, and dimensions” (Br, AA 10 65–7). This is not just a negative reflection on method. It is a constructive philosophical ontology. When Kant finally replies to Lambert, he says that he too has been attempting to find “the manifest and immutable laws of that science,” by which we must assume that he means the material axioms or “indubitable, wholly incontestable rules” upon which metaphysics can finally make progress (Br, AA 10, 96–8). All in all, I see no reason to think that Kant is not still engaged

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in sketching the basic structure of his metaphysics, albeit one that has found intuitive simple components or axioms of the whole of the sensible world within the analysis that he is calling general phenomenology. Now the reading that I will offer of Kant’s theory of space and time and the implications that it will have on how we understand transcendental idealism and the Critical project will seem bold, extravagant, and implausible to many scholars. After all, is not Kant simply interested in the elements of our cognition which allow us to have objective experience? There are a few things to say about this. Firstly, we must remember that the tradition that Kant is working within always defined metaphysics as “the science of the first principles in human knowledge” to which “ontology” as the explication of “the more general predicates of a being” belongs (Baumgarten 2013, §1, §5). As we have already seen, both Kant and Lambert seem to believe that the philosophical analysis of the indubitable aspects of experience (general phenomenology) results in axioms of the material world that align with quantitative mathematical-scientific notions. I see no reason to not call this transcendental phenomenology as ontology. Secondly, I would ask the reader to not prejudge what Kant is doing in 1770 based on an understanding of what is supposedly taking place in the Critique of Pure Reason. The truth is I reject that Kant’s 1781 masterwork is simply an analysis of mind and experience without consequences for an idealistic or subject-dependent ontology of the natural world. But that is a debate that I need not engage in now. I have shown that nothing prior to 1770 suggests that Kant wants to merely give an account of the structure of human experience in isolation from metaphysical claims about the nature of reality. Thus, I ask the reader to judge the interpretation that I give of Kant’s turn in 1770 based on how it fits with the text of 1770 and with everything Kant has said up to this point.4 In what follows, I will focus on the second, third, and fifth sections of the Dissertation, which are the ones that Kant tells Lambert to focus on, after saying that “the first and fourth sections can be scanned without careful consideration” (Br, AA 10:98). But I will not ignore the first section on the notion of a world in general. After all, Kant’s lectures remark that “each word is significant in the definition given of the world. …There are sheer ontological concepts here. Therefore, it belongs to transcendental philosophy” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:850). My approach will be to begin with section five, because it is where the criticism of Kant’s previous metaphysics can be found. That criticism is simply that the concept of time can no longer be applied to what Kant has been referring to as simple

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substances. Nor can space be so applied, but I take it that Kant had been thinking about the non-spatiality of substances for quite some time. The implications for Kant’s previous philosophy of this restricting of time to the sensible world are enormous. But the theory of time that he establishes in section three of the Dissertation is even more monumental. What we find is that Kant offers a metaphysical account of how time is the product of the perspective of the subject. That temporal perspective—being both the form of the world and yet ontologically bound to the qualitative perspective we introduce in the world—is why Kant’s position can legitimately be called a phenomenology that arrives at the ontological axioms of the sensible world. The idealistic metaphysical claim at the heart of this view is that the relations in the world and outside of the mind are a feature of the presence of our temporal being in the world. This I take to be the first articulation of transcendental idealism and the Copernican Revolution in philosophy.

The Subreptic Axioms and the Role of Time in Kant’s Turn Kant’s metaphysics has been using what he now calls subreptic axioms, which illegitimately import the notions of space, time, and number into his monadology (MSI, AA 2:410). Revealing these confusions is the negative outcome of his “general phenomenology” (Br, AA 10:98). While these subreptic axioms show up in a variety of ways, they all are based on a failure to limit space and time to the form of the sensible, external, relational world. Kant had recognized that the unity of the world of substances and their reciprocal dependence derived from their creation and preservation by God, but he had posited an established harmony in which the change of temporal inner state by a substance led to a change in the substance’s force expression and virtual presence in the world, a process that was governed by superadded powers and a universal active mirror or map of the world within each substance. Clearly, Kant imagined each numerically distinct monad to be paired with an orbit of activity (virtual presence and definitive ubeity) and to be undergoing a temporal sequence of internal changes. To reject this is to completely reject the doctrine of “physical influence, in the vulgar sense of that term” and any “interaction of substances and transient forces, which can be cognized by means of their existence alone” (MSI, AA 2:407). Yet, Kant does more or less continue to think of a plurality of substances in a community with one another

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as the structure of the intelligible world, but now they are Platonic ideas rather than dynamic, temporal beings (MSI, AA 2:407). The substances all derive from God, but now God appears as the Platonic ideal of “noumenal perfection” and as a common measure of all things or a “principle of the coming into being of all perfection whatsoever” (MSI, AA 2:396). So while Kant continues to speak of ultimate substances forming an intelligible world via a “generally established harmony,” in which “substances are sustained by a common principle” through God, he makes no attempt to connect such a pure rational vision to elements in the world (MSI, AA 2:409). God is virtually present to those intelligible substances, but this is a God that “exists outside the world,” both the noumenal world of atemporal essences  and the phenomenal world  of space and time (MSI, AA 2:408). All Kant allows himself to assert is that space and time may “bear witness to some common principle constituting a universal connection” of all things, but they do not “expose it to view” (MSI, AA 2:391). I am mentioning these claims to show that Kant’s exploration of these two worlds is clearly metaphysical in nature. The Dissertation is attempting to retain, rehabilitate, but also clarify the nature of metaphysical cognition. I will not explore the remnants of his previous metaphysics in the Dissertation, in part because all that really remains of his metaphysics is his rational theology, but also because it constitutes a vague and incongruous sketch of ideas with which we are already familiar. The first subreptic axiom illegitimately makes space and time into the condition of the possibility of the object of the understanding. The fallacious principle is that “whatever is, is somewhere and somewhen” (MSI, AA 2:413–4). Kant’s examples of this are those who bandy about idle questions about “immaterial spirits” and their place in the world, as he had discussed in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (MSI, AA 2:414). This subreptic axiom leads to the circumscriptive ubeity of the soul: the soul must be somewhere and somewhen. Kant says that what they do not understand is that souls and the like have “virtual not a local presence” in the corporeal world (MSI, AA 2:414). This is another moment, much like his retention of the idea of substances in an interactive community created by God qua principle of perfection of which space and time symbolize, in which Kant is dangerously close to being unintelligible. His new discovery that space and time cannot be applied to such substances challenge the idea that some presence, power, or aspect of a thing could even be virtually present given that space and time seem essentially excluded from them. Kant does seem to have been thinking of substances as being “somewhen,” but now

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he must place them out of time. Kant retains, well into the Critical era, that the idea of a “monadology” is “an intrinsically correct platonic concept of the world … considered, not at all as objects of the senses, but as thing in itself … which, however, does indeed underlie the appearances of the senses” (MAN, AA 4:507). What he denies is that this can in any way be marshalled to offer an “explanation of natural appearances” (MAN, AA 4:507). The application of the notion of presence (virtual or otherwise) in the world was applied to God’s creative preservation of simple substances and was long recognized by Kant as a tenuous idea that we could not understand. This leads him now to place God entirely outside the world that he causes, even outside the noumenal world of substances. But now this very idea applies to all substances: they too must be entirely outside the world that they cause, the sensible world of bodies. At this point, the granting of such beings even virtual presence in space or action in time appears as it probably has always seemed to many readers: a vague, unintelligible cop-out. Virtual presence becomes less a metaphysical explanation of appearances and, instead, a symbol for that which is not intrinsically impossible, but which we cannot make intelligible to our sensible intellect. We have lost the ability to even consider substantial, temporal, representational change as anything but a subreption. As we know that this analysis of the subreptic axioms and the doctrine of space and time will eventually lead Kant to abandon any attempt to make a Platonic metaphysics of transcendent, ideational substances philosophically and ontologically significant. We can easily see why such an abandonment is necessary. This first subreptic axiom seems to be challenging the legitimacy of talk of temporal causation between metaphysical beings or between metaphysical and physical beings. Such talk is symbolic and cannot be understood: it can only be problematically or hypothetically asserted (MSI, AA 2:414; MAN, AA 4:508).5 While the symbolic or analogical attempt to talk of the connection between worlds in terms of “virtuality” is clearly an ad hoc solution, we can at least say that Kant is at least aware of how weak and unsatisfying these claims are. The divide between the two worlds has never seemed greater, and it will only grow over the next decade. In spite of the familiarity of these issues, this first subreptic axiom reveals something new when he discusses the labyrinth that emerges if one applies time to pure objects of the understanding, such as God. The idea of God’s knowledge being temporal raises problems about knowledge of the future in “which He is not yet” (MSI, AA 2:414–5). While it is not the case that Kant had thought of God as within time, he nevertheless had never raised

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the worry that if time is made absolute as the basis of all beings, even metaphysical ones, that theology and metaphysics becomes beset by insuperable paradoxes. Now he raises the sorts of puzzles seen in the Leibniz– Clarke correspondence about God’s placement of creation within an absolute framework of time and, for that matter, space.6 To apply the concept of time to God, he remarks, is essentially to envision that the “necessary being” must descend “successively down through all the moments of imaginary time,” that God’s “duration” in the past exhausts itself and disappears, and that God is yet to live through the future (MSI, AA 2:415). Now Kant had discussed the virtual presence of God and God’s relation to time in the Inquiry in a way that did not use this subreptic axiom. He argued that nothing is past or future to God, because he does not “determine for Himself a moment of time in this series” (UD, AA 2:297). Still, if this applies to God, does it not also apply to other substances? If it applies to all substances, then talk of the world of space and time as being the emanation and means by which simple substances are temporally changing and active is no longer possible either.7 Kant seems to think that he can still talk of “interaction arising from the [generally established] harmony [of God as the creative principle of perfection]”—an interaction that can be seen as “real and physical” (MSI, AA 2:409). Yet, it is difficult to make sense of this without applying the notion of duration to those harmonized substances, which is no more legitimate than applying it to God. At best, Kant can say that world of time, space, motion, and number is but a sign or symbol that leads us to contemplate this Platonic vision through pure ideas. The second type of subreptic axiom does not just assume that all reality falls under sensible conditions but integrates sensible conditions into the reasoning of metaphysics itself. For this reason, Kant says that they “conceal themselves to a still greater extent” (MSI, AA 2:415). The subreptic axiom of quantity asserts that “every actual multiplicity can be given numerically” and that “every magnitude is finite” (MSI, AA 2:415). The subreptic axiom of quality says that “whatever is impossible, contradicts itself” (MSI, AA 2:415). Kant says that the predicates of being either numerable or contradictory do not in themselves contain the concept of time. Yet, when we try to give “form to the concept of the predicate,” then time does enter into it, which then infects our concept of the subject. The subject in the two axioms is “multiplicity” and the “impossible.” In the case of quantity, time enters into it, because magnitude and multiplicity are only “cognized distinctly” and, thus, numerically, through the

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process of “successive co-ordination” in time (MSI, AA 2:415). As such, coordination is only actual within “a finite time,” which leads to the qualitative subreptic axiom. This is because it is assumed that due to the fact that an “infinite series” cannot be cognized, it must be impossible (non-­ actual). After all, it cannot be given numerically. This is how thinkers mistakenly deny the reality of an infinite series in the sensible world and use the subreptic axiom that what is impossible for sensibility must contradict itself. Now in the realm of the pure understanding, all things that are caused have their “own principle” from which they emerge, which means that there is no “regress which is without a limit” (MSI, AA 2:415). That is, intelligible things emerge from the idea or principle that is the ground of their possibility, as one would expect from a Platonic conception of substances. This notion of cause at work in the understanding is that of “dependency” (MSI, AA 2:415). This brings the problem of Kant’s earlier metaphysics into view. When thinking about substances that undergird material reality, he certainly had thought of them in the relationship of dependency. But he had also used the sensible notion that the empirically given world of multiplicity and magnitude must be measurable and therefore must terminate in a “specifiable beginning” that combines both the metaphysical-causal relation of dependency and the empirical-quantitative notion of a simple metric and the possibility of measurement (enumerability) (MSI, AA 2:415). This was his argument for simple elements of matter and the assumption of a correspondence between those simple elements of matter and the monads qua principles of determination. He had clearly attributed to substance’s causal powers far more detail than the mere logical relationship of dependency. The general problem of his earlier system is exposed when he states that it is a mistake to assume “if there is a substantial compound, then there are principles of composition” out of simples that lead to the compound (MSI, AA 2:415). So, in direct opposition to his earlier thought, he says that one cannot assume that “in such a compound there is no regress in the composition of the parts to infinity” and “that there is a definite number of parts in any compound” (MSI, AA 2:415). This idea undermines the metaphysical foundation of Kant’s modified atomism and corpuscular theory of force as emanations of determinate substances. Why else believe that there are atoms of force (the virtual presence of substances) that make up the living fabric of space and matter except that they are the corresponding expression of individual metaphysical substances? Why should material reality break down into material

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atoms or cells of force if there is not some metaphysical assumption against their infinite regress? While Kant may retain physical (mathematico-scientific) reasons for thinking that bodies are composites of fundamental atoms, the attempt to align such a picture with a monadology is no longer possible. In 1770, it has now become impossible to think that there is some clear relation of correspondence (isomorphism) between simple substances and the forces that make up the natural world. Force in the world may well be the virtual presence of intelligible substances, but the Platonic notion of substance as principles (as non-serial and non-continuous grounds) suggests that the metaphysical analysis of the concept of body can no longer lead us back to such an idea. Thus, to consider the fabric of material nature being grounded upon individuated expressions of numerically distinct substances—that is, to envision atoms or corpuscles that are in some way corresponding to a single substance and its inner states—is no longer feasible. We might still call bodies “substantial compounds,” but that does not mean that they are not divisible to infinity. We cannot assume that there are any parts except those that are met with in the process of analysis.8 While Kant may still think of them as the external manifestation and virtual presence of those substances, the intelligibility of this doctrine is under serious threat. What reason does one have to ground reality on these ultimate substances that are not purely rational? Is this not a mere regulative idea of reason for the sake of inquiry or even an article of faith? In 1770, Kant continues to hold that certain metaphysical claims can be known “under the certain sign of reason”—such as that “bodies consist of simples” and that the world “acknowledges a principle of itself”—and yet, when speaking of the physical world and its bodies, one cannot say that “there is a definite number of simples constituting any body whatsoever” or that the mass or duration of the universe is finite and measurable (MSI, AA 2:416). As he says early on in the Dissertation, an argument based on “reasons deriving from the understanding” may lead us to affirm simples that are interconnected into an intelligible world, but he worries that this method of rational deduction is arbitrary (MSI, AA 2:389). He says that he will instead focus more on “the character of the subject” and carefully distinguish between a priori and a posteriori analyses (MSI, AA 2:389).9 Kant’s investigation into time and number are the keys for this dramatic change in his thinking, far more so than any shift in his thinking about space. This is not to say that his views of space have not undergone the same radical shift, but the intrinsic non-spatiality of substances was

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always part of Kant’s thinking and did not keep him from thinking of them as determinately underlying and corresponding to material emanations. Now, having challenged the application of time and number to them, Kant must see ontological indeterminacy to be inherent in sensible nature. It is worth stressing that this rather unassuming point—that from sensible composition we cannot assume decomposition to numerically distinct simples or simple moments—is a fundamental break in Kant’s thinking. There has been a fair amount of speculation of what it might mean to say that Hume woke Kant from a dogmatic slumber. Many believe it to be rooted in Hume’s skepticism and the problem of induction, which is ultimately a claim about causation.10 That is to say, Hume shows that the laws of nature are assumptions of custom and that causation is entirely unknown to us except as external appearance. It is of course true that Kant refers to Hume and causation in the preface to the Prolegomena (Prol, AA 4:260–1). Furthermore, Kant takes Hume to offer a challenge to all a priori concepts, including space and time, which is to claim that all of our concepts are derived from experience. Yet, the 1770 Dissertation already marks a substantial shift toward transcendental idealism and hardly concerns itself with the concept of causality or skepticism at all. If Hume played a role in Kant’s transformation in 1770 (or in the “great light” of 1769), then the most plausible explanation of that influence would be through Humean reflections on space, time, composition, and substance.11 Yet, most scholars seem to agree that Kant was not familiar this early in his development with Hume’s Treatise, where such discussions take place. So while it is plausible to think that Hume is the reason why Kant felt the need to have to deduce the “categories” of the understanding, I think it misleading to say that until there was the project to establish the necessity of such phenomenal, causal knowledge against Humean skepticism that Kant was simply a dogmatist and transcendental realist.12 A lot will depend on how one understands the distinction between transcendental realism and transcendental idealism, but I would argue that the key doctrine of the latter—namely, the metaphysical dependence of the formal structure of the world on the transcendental subject already exists in 1770.13 The qualitative version of the second subreptic axiom is one that is not the source of such a dramatic change in Kant’s thinking, at least not on the face of it. The underlying principle of this subreptic axion is the conversion of the principle of contradiction into the sensible claim that “whatever simultaneously is and is not, is impossible,” which Kant thinks to be true and self-evident. But when we convert this into a general claim not just about

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sensible objects and say that “everything impossible simultaneously is and is not,” then we have made an error (MSI, AA 2:416). Here one is beginning from the notion of the impossible and considering it to simply be the sensitively explicated notion of not having conflicting qualities at the same time. If one accepted this axiom, then one might be led to argue that what appears as impossible to “the human understanding,” which is of course “constrained and limited,” actually is contradictory (MSI, AA 2:416). Truthfully, we only know whether something is possible if it is given actually in time, and we only know something is impossible if we grasp its conflicting predicates temporally as predicated of it simultaneously. The judgment of impossibility and possibility seem to hinge on “subjective conditions of judging as objective” a thing and its qualities across time (MSI, AA 2:416). Interestingly, Kant’s discussion is motivated by a worry about the proliferation of the idea of “possible” forces. The logical notion of force is of a relation between a substance and some accident (ground and consequence), and many such forces, for example, between spirits or between soul and body, seem possible, because they are not obviously contradictory for our limited understanding. Thus, they tend to proliferate. Kant had long held the idea that the relations among substances needed to be considered in strictly metaphysical terms and through the “internal” notions of ground and consequence. But his pre-Critical story of the interaction of substances (i.e. the power to change the internal state of substances) appears to be just such an illegitimate use of sensible concepts. Were they posited simply because they do not contain a contradiction for the sensible intellect? Was he guilty of fabricating forces, rather than recognizing that an “originary force” can only be accepted insofar as “it has been given by experience”? On the one hand, the forces that Kant utilizes in his earlier cosmology were not, in this way, unhinged from experience. Nor were the actions of substances simply identified with motion and bodies, as they were for Knutzen (2009, 63–64). Also, the action of substances was identified with an internal change of state, which has its ground in our own experience of representational activity, and on the idea of a reciprocal determination by which whatever substances there are make up a unified world. On the other hand, Kant clearly is no longer able to simply assert that the activity of substances simply generates the forces and form of nature. The power of substances to cause nature and its forces to be is surely an “originary force” that seems to be merely possible and not capable of being justified as actual.

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To summarize, the first type of metaphysical prejudice simply held that space and time (forms of intuition) are the ground of the existence of all types of objects. God and substance were placed in space and time. The second type used illicit sensible concepts within metaphysical reasoning about substances. In particular, it is assumed that substances were denumerable because things are denumerable in experience and that what is impossible to be given to us in experience must be contradictory. Now in the third and final type of subreptic axiom, the concepts of the understanding have a distinct non-sensible meaning, but they are only applicable to the world through sensible conditions and that can then infect their meaning. His example of this is the idea that if things are contingent, then they must not have existed at some time. The “nominal characteristic marks” of whether something is contingent is essentially whether it can be found to have not existed at some point. If we find that it did not exist at some point, it surely is contingent. And so, the application of the notion of contingency is dependent on experience and time. But these nominal characteristics are not the real characteristics of contingency. We cannot conclude that whatever exists contingently did not exist at some point in time. After all, the world is contingent, but it could be “everlasting” (MSI, AA 2:417). This subreptic axiom does not appear to be a mistake that he had been guilty of in earlier works. Kant concludes his account of the misleading principles of past metaphysicians (including himself) by looking to “principles of harmony” such as the principle that all things in the universe happen in accordance with the order of nature, which is of course a principle he accepted (MSI, AA 2:418; PND, AA 1:408). It is clear to Kant that this principle stems not from some rational insight into nature, but from our own subjective need to see the universe in this way. But how much of Kant’s own analysis of the intelligible world of substances, which still populates the Dissertation, remains only because of just such a principle of harmony? Similarly, the principle that all (material) reality remains and does not pass away is a principle that we cling to because of a need of the understanding. Were this not the case there would be nothing “stable and enduring” and, thus, nothing for our understanding to attach to (MSI, AA 2:418). While I have shown the tenuousness of the remains of Kant’s pre-Critical metaphysics within the Dissertation, it is of course open to Kant to recognize that these subjective needs of the understanding are motivating some of his own claims. While he is not entirely open about this fact when discussing the intelligible world of substances and God, we know that this will

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eventually become his view. Kant does admit that his assertions about virtual presence and the like “have been asserted with more temerity than truth,” and says that he is assigning a “hypothetical and mediate” locality to the soul and substances, which are attached to them “derivatively and contingently based on experience” (MSI, AA 2:419). This shows us how weak these claims now are in 1770.

The Dependency of Time on the Subject In Baumgarten’s Metaphysics, time was only briefly mentioned and was roughly divided between objective and subjective aspects. The objective aspect is simply the order of “successive beings,” while the present is identified with “the time that is simultaneous to the thought,” which means that past and future are that which proceeds and succeeds the presently thought moment (Baumgarten 2013, §239, 297).14 The apparent dependence of the present on thought would not have troubled Kant prior to 1770. Just as he had argued for absolute space, he would have argued for an absolute time, a simultaneous but temporally moving now within each substance, which presumably would have been tied to their divine preservation. There is no evidence that Kant reflected on absolute time, but if he had, then he might have reflected on the temporality of substances and how slumbering, unconscious monads would seem to be unable to have a present (or thought). Either he would have had to attribute an essentially indexical or reflective-thinking component to all substances, including the material elements, or he would have to see time as an external feature of the actual community of substances and their interactions or he would have to see the infinite representation of the universe given to each substance to also have a harmonized clock. Regardless of how he might have solved this, another possibility also exists. Rejecting those solutions, the Dissertation recognizes that thinking beings (souls) are the only one’s capable of generating the thought of the present and, secondly, that the very notion of the objective order of succession (x is after y) depends on such an establishment of the present. Quite often, the Critical-era theory of time is understood in merely epistemic or cognitive-psychological terms. Famously, Allison claims that time (and space) is not a “reality” of one sort or another, but is merely understood in terms of its “epistemic function” in Kant’s mature thought (Allison 2004, p. 98). Kemp Smith famously called Kant’s doctrine of time “the most vulnerable tenet in his whole system,” because he believed that

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it meant that Kant was a phenomenalist and that the motion of bodies did not exist (Kemp Smith 1992, p. 137). It is surely unlikely that Kant ever held that motion was an illusion, even if he had always called it an outer appearance. Others have argued that Kant’s Critical doctrine of space and time is less a cognitive story and more a physiological one, by which it is meant that space and time are the manners in which sensory stimuli in the sense organs are “disposed and presented” (Falkenstein 1995, p.  359). For example, Broad argues that Kant’s notion of time is that we have an “innate absolute time” and that we are presented with inner states, like anger, that are given a “date and duration” by the mind, but that which affects us (ourselves?) cannot be said to have a date and duration (Broad 1978, p. 52). I will return to these standard interpretations of Kant’s theory of the forms of the sensible world in the next chapter, when discussing the 1770 theory of space, which is the focus of most scholars. I do not think that the case for the ideality and subjectivity of space can be made in separation from the theory of time, and in fact, the case is strongest with time. While Kant does focus on time alone in several key moments in the Critique of Pure Reason, the reversal of the Dissertation’s order of discussion seems to have contributed to a general neglect of the concept of time by scholars. It is worth noting at the outset that Kant provides an argument against this common interpretation of his view in the Dissertation. It is sometimes thought that Kant’s view of the forms of the sensible world is merely a claim about our form of mental or sensory representation. But Kant denies that the form of a world is just the “whole of representation,” because a singular, actual representation or a sequence of them does not have the transcendental and ontological function of actually binding the world into a unity: it is just the mind forcing “the multiplicity into an ideal unity” (MSI, AA 2:390). Time cannot simply be inside us as Broad argued above, because it would only unify our mental states and not connect all the possible events and objects of the world. Just as the formal principle of the intelligible world was an ontological notion that connected all intelligible substances together, space and time also have such an ontological function. For this reason, the view that I will be advocating for is an ontological or metaphysical interpretation of thesis of the idea that space and time are the a priori forms of human intuition. In other words, I do not think that we can simply discount “the concept of a world” and say that the Dissertation is primarily concerned with “the distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition” (McQuillan 2016, p. 45). While he certainly does discuss sensible cognition, he does so because this shows us the

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principles or form of the entire sensible world, which is what Kant says that he is talking about in the title of his work, in the headings of the chapters, and in the body of the text. The interpretation that I offer requires borrowing distinctions from McTaggart that few scholars utilize when talking about Kant’s theories of space and time.15 I believe they are warranted because such directional notions were central to the 1768 theory of space and because of the light they shine on Kant’s arguments. McTaggart analyzes time in terms of three series—named, A, B, and C. The B-series is the system of temporal moments that can be mapped by the relations of earlier-than and later-­ than.16 It is the idea of an objective, unchanging system of relations between events—what some call world-time or calendar time (Faulk 2003, p. 215). McTaggart explains, “if N is earlier than O and later than M, it will always be, and has always been, earlier than O and later than M, since the relations of earlier and later are permanent” (McTaggart 1934, p.  113). But the B-series alone is not time. It is a non-dynamic system without change. Change is relative to the A-series, to past, present, and future determinations. The dynamic nature of the A-series bears the reality of the directionality of time and is often represented, as Kant imagines it, spatially in terms of a point moving along a line (KrV A33/B50). The B-series, although non-dynamic, contains a directional (non-reversible) order between earlier and later events and is, therefore, dependent on the A-series.17 According to McTaggart, if t1 is earlier than t2 on the B-series, it is absolutely or permanently so. Yet, we can think of the B-series in abstraction from directionality, as the absolute order of (symmetrical) relations of events without any earlier or later. This is the C-series. For McTaggart the order of “realities which in time are events” are a pure series not in time (McTaggart 1934, p. 116). This directionless order is taken to have a direction by a person, but intrinsically, it has no direction: it is non-temporal (McTaggart 1934, p. 117). I maintain that Kant agrees with McTaggart that the quantitative relations of time (being earlier-than or later-than), which are known as the B-series relations, are dependent on the existence of qualitative relations known as the A-series.18 Thus, the core argument for the ideality or subjectivity of time is that the qualitative structure of time found in the A-series is a condition of the possibility of the quantitative B-series. The a priori intuition of time is the marking of the present moment, the creation of a phenomenal temporal simple, and the instantiation of the essential indexical of “now” that has the asymmetrical, qualitative difference of

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sense that comes from its relation to a past and a future.19 For this reason, we may say that time is a “subjective” principle of form or “a fixed law of the mind” (MSI, AA 2:398). This does not mean that time is merely the way in which temporal properties or time-stamps are applied to sense-­ data. Time is a “fixed law of the mind” in the sense that the essentially indexical formation of the present moment creates a phenomenal simple and the directional perspective from which any quantitative temporal procedure must take place.20 “All the things which can be objects of the senses” necessarily belong within our deconstructive analyses toward the simplest moment and our constructive syntheses toward the whole of time (MSI, AA 2:398). But there would be no such temporal sequences if there was not an essentially indexical designation of phenomenally simple temporal moment with qualitative features. This means that the time of the world has as its transcendental condition the existence of a cognitive subject capable of what Kant calls time-determination. Ultimately, the sense that such a view makes of the text and the solutions that it gives to a number of problems that have befuddled interpreters are significant reasons to take it seriously, even if it Kant himself does not always clearly distinguish quantitative and qualitative aspects of time. The objective temporal relation between any event A and any event B is simply a temporal expanse (of the B-series) and not time itself. We might call these durations, as Kant does in his lectures, although it should be noted that that is not standard terminology for the time as will be seen when Lambert’s view is discussed.21 Durations, however, are metaphysically dependent on the introduction of a perspective for which there are temporally simple events in the first place that enable the marking of points A and B, as well as there being a directional passage between those points. It has not been adequately recognized that Kant’s argument depends on the idea that no such features are to be found in a mathematical notion of time, as an infinitely divisible series of quantitative relations. While the shift toward the perspective of the subject that has been emerging in Kant’s thought now takes center stage, it is important to recognize that time is not simply in the mind. It is true that B-series temporal relations require a temporal, essential indexical, and a directional perspective in order to exist. While the latter are the products of a consciousness, the B-series relations are not enclosed in consciousness somehow. Present, past, and future are, as he calls them, laws of the mind that prescribe the law of interconnection to the whole of the sensible world, because through that asymmetrical, qualitative relation all events can be met and, indeed,

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only by constructing the present moment can events be determinate at all. Certainly, this is a sort of idealism in which the simple moments of event A and event B, as well as the determinate temporal relation between them, do not exist in themselves or objectively in an absolute way. After all, the manifold continua of time are infinitely divisible. No intrinsic division into simple moments and determinate relations between them exists. Time is a principle of the entire phenomenal universe, of all things outside of the mind locatable in qualitative and quantitative relations of time, and not simply of the states of the mind. But independent of a perspective that constructs perspective-relative simples in time and makes possible a directional synthesis between them, Kant does not think we can say that nature in itself consists of things or events in time. A great number of scholars have concluded that Kant’s claim that space and time are forms of intuition places them in the mind or in the sense organs. The view offered here rejects that. Just as a source of handedness acted as the ground of a law that prescribed a qualitative component to all spatial and material reality and made possible all positional spatial relations in 1768, so also does the existence of an essentially indexical perspective construct a transcendental framework for the entire sensible world. The presence of a being capable of essential indexical, locative cognitions functions like the qualitative, asymmetrical property of handedness within space did in 1768. It is a transcendental condition on the very possibility of positional relations. Such a view of course is thoroughly dependent on a metaphysical view that the material world is entirely made of relations, indefinitely divisible and unifiable into relative frames of reference, which makes all determination of place in space and time perspective-relative and, thus, conventional, in a metaphysical sense. Kant’s seven-numbered sections show this to be his view. The first section argues that “the idea of time does not arise from but is presupposed by the senses” (MSI, AA 2:398). Temporal relations within or among those things that come before the senses are the relations of being simultaneous or successive. These quantitative relations or B-series relations are only possible through “the idea of time”—namely the idea of the present in relation to the past and future (MSI, AA 2:398). That is to say, the relation that two events happened at the same time requires a reference to the essentially indexical “now.” This is because “at the same time” refers to the intuition of the moment of happening and to the procedures of measurement that determine to some arbitrary stopping point that they occurred simultaneously. Similarly, the relations of earlier-than and

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later-than are B-series relations between two demarcated events, which presuppose not only the essentially indexical marking of the present but also relations of past and future or the directional flow of time. This is what Kant means when he says that “I only understand the meaning of the little word after by means of the antecedent concept of time” (MSI, AA 2:399). Therefore, successive perception of B-series relations does not “generate the concept of time,” because in order to mark things as being at a moment in time and as following another one must already have a sense of the “now” and the before and after (MSI, AA 2:399). Time, he argues, is poorly defined if one thinks of it simply as the objective B-series of relations, as “the series of actual things which exist one after the other,” because these B-series relations cannot be given in experience without our already grasping the notion of things existing at “different times” and “at the same time” relative to the present and through the subjective experience of the A-series relations of time (MSI, AA 2:399).22 Importantly, we obviously do perceive spatio-temporal objects in relations. It is sometimes thought that this is not so for Kant: sensation is supposedly received with no spatio-temporal properties. Sensation is then said to be entirely given spatio-temporal form by the mind or the sense organs. On my own view, we can perfectly well perceive B-series relations, although we cannot do so without already occupying and initiating a temporal perspective on the world through the generation of the A-series. Kant’s point is that empiricists who might argue that time is just an idea that we gather from the successiveness of things in experience are wrong.23 We only have the experience of the B-series relations of before and after, and in fact, they only exist because of an appeal to “antecedent concept of time,” which is our intuitive sense of the “now” and the different times relative to which I am oriented in the future and the past. Kant’s recognition of the difference between the A- and the B-series is clear in the following note: It is not moments of time which appear to succeed one another, for, if this were the case, another time would have to presupposed for the succession of the moments. It is rather the case that actual things seem, as a result of a sensitive intuition, to descend, so to speak, through a continuous series of moments. (MSI, AA 2:410n)

Kant’s point seems to be that if we took objective, B-series designations of temporal position and expanse to be time itself, then we would have to imagine “another time,” because the B-series does not have the feature of

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continuous, flowing change. Instead, actual things appear to us as caught in the flow of time as a result of the A-series relations that emerge because of the perspective occupied by a sensitively intuitive being. While actual objects and B-series relations are real and experienced as being in the continuous flow of time, they are nevertheless subjectively dependent. This is what we might call a transcendental parallax. To call it transcendental is to say that the A-series as generated by the temporal perspective of the subject makes possible the B-series time-determination and constitutes a law for the entire sensible world. Now neither A-series nor the B-series relations are trapped in the mind. Objective relations of before and after, as well as the very individuation of temporal moments, do carry with them a reference to the directional A-series relations of present, past, and future. The cognitive subject actualizes a set of rules for time-determination that lays down the general form of the chronometric procedure for the entire world. Other subjects do the same and intersubjective comparisons can be made. The essentially indexical present moment, like any designation of a moment, is a perspective-relative, objective designation within a system of possible measurement. In the simplest terms, B-series relations are measurements that transcendentally depend on the presence of measurers who have a measuring stick and a set of rules. What makes this an idealism is the idea that the possibility of measurement itself is the metaphysical ground of that which is to be measured. These ideas, although strange, are not unfamiliar to us at this point. Kant has actually always held that the physical form of the natural world is the product of there being representational entities that have an a priori representation of the world, which we can think of as a rule-governed procedure for action. What has fundamentally altered is that the function of providing these rules that constitute the form of the sensible world has been removed from simple substances in general. Instead, that function is now given to cognitive subjects alone. This, I take it, is the heart of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. The second section of his account of time begins with this recognition: “the idea of time is singular and not general,” which is an important clarification of what he means by an antecedent concept of time prior to the empirical sensation of relations (MSI, AA 2:399). Kant’s notion of a singular concept is basically the idea of a name, like Rome, by which I “think only one thing” (V-Lo/Blomberg, AA 24:257). The idea that when we mark time, whether marking B-series relations or our grasping ourselves and the A-series relations, that we are always representationally and ostensively referring to the same, singular time, once again suggests that

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temporal intuition cannot be just the grasping of the time-stamping of a duration in my own mind and experience. All minds and all events take part of “the same one boundless time” (MSI, AA 2:399). If we take finite wholes of B-series relations, such as “2  years,” then they must connect directly (“I was in Japan for a 24 month expanse.”) or by an intervening time (“I was in Japan for 6 months a decade ago and then for the past 18 months.”) within the whole series of such relations. The relations of earlier and later contain within them a reference to a qualitative feature of time, namely its directional change. The difference of sense of being “five hours earlier than” versus “five hours later than” cannot be grasped by the understanding alone and cannot be made sense of without a reference to the directional movement of past to future. Thus, “the mind only discerns the distinction between them [earlier and later] by a singular intuition” of time as that singular boundless future and past within which I am oriented in the present (MSI, AA 2:399). To say that things are situated intuitively in time rather than under the characteristic mark of a “general concept of time” points to the ultimate meaning of B-series relations as temporal distances to be met with along the temporal path along which I am (and any other sensible, intuitive subject is) oriented. It is obviously central to overcoming the mental interpretation of Kant’s theory of time that one recognize that the “now” (the present) is not simply a thought in my head or a time stamp of sense-data in my organs. Such a view is stated by Falkenstein as the claim that “time and space must be orders of sensations” that are not received in the content of sensation but given to sense-data by the sense organs (Falkenstein 1995, p. 49). But surely such a view cannot adequately explain how all B-series temporal determinations of all minds can be said to fit within a singular intuition of the one unique time. It is of course true that the “now” is a sort of act, an essentially indexical designation by a subject. But it is the designation of a moment of simultaneity for all things; it constitutes a time-slice of the whole world, dividing it between past and future and making possible the movement of synthesis toward the whole or analysis toward ever smaller parts. But the “now” like any limit is negotiable and requires (potentially) intersubjective measurement to make it ever more precise. It is not just a stamping of sense-data in my sensory apparatus. It is an ostensive definition: an act in the world. It is also not a truly simple chronometric point. The “now” is capable of more and more precision, by more and more sophisticated means of artificially deconstructing the present of intuition beyond the immediate senses. Through such deconstruction of the

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present, what once appeared as simple (and events that appeared as simultaneous) may be revealed as successive. This is to say that there is no simplest moment for which reason there is no absolute simultaneity. There is only simultaneity relative to a particular designation of the moment in time. This means also that relations of past and future are relative to what is designated as the present moment. While we may take one designation as temporally simple, it is actually complex, containing folded within it an infinite series of potential temporal relations. Likewise, we can imagine the present moment to be expanded such that, what appears to us as a thousand of years appears as a single moment. Each moment and each expanse are equally complex (infinite) and are in-themselves without an intrinsic metric that individuates them. Considerations such as these lead Kant, in the short third numbered paragraph, to his first conclusion about time, namely, that it is an intuition, a pure one, prior to and a condition of “the relations to be found in sensible things” (MSI, AA 2:399). Of course, the very idea that temporal relations are found in sensible things and not just in states of the mind will seem impossible on some readings of Kant. But there is nothing standing in Kant’s way of saying that sensory experience of objects is of their (spatio-)temporal relations. It is just that they have those relations because of a temporal perspective that designates the “now” in relation to a past and future. Thus, this prior intuition amounts to grasping the one boundless time, having a sense of there being different times, instantiating the essential indexical, and sensing the qualitative, directional relations to the past and the future. This is the pure intuition of time and is what it means to say that time is subjective, an intuition, a law of the mind, or the form of sensible intuition.24 In the empirical intuition of time, one grasps B-series relations of earlier-than and later-than among various objects or events or specific measures of durations, which all depend on that prior intuition. The temptation is always to regard objects and events as being intrinsically temporal and existing in absolute B-series relations. But, as I have argued, this is not available to Kant because of the collapse of the possibility of appeal to simple metaphysical substances to imbue form into the sensible world.25 The objects of the sensible world, while surely still made out of attractive and repulsive forces, must now be thought of as “nothing but [external] relations,” which means that the simplest object, atom, or demarcation of space and time is ultimately an infinity of relations (KrV A265/B321). In a sense, this is a consequence of what Kant’s view has always been: all of nature is virtual presence and nothing simple can be

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found within it. Everything in nature is as much one as it is a multiplicity. This indeterminacy is the metaphysical reason behind Kant’s idealism about space and time. It also means that there is no intrinsically simple moment, no “now” that cannot be further deconstructed. Also, if we try to envision the natural world absent the perspective of a mind that establishes the quantitative and qualitative metrics of time by its existence, then we are not even left with what McTaggart calls the C-series, which is the directionless sense of the totality of all events from an essentially atemporal perspective, because the C-series retains the idea of individuation. For Kant, there is no intrinsic or absolute individuation of points, events, or places, and so the C-series is actually an illusion created by the idea of a sort of eternal, mathematical perspective in which all of time is fully individuated down to its simplest points. Kant calls this an “absurd fabrication” (MSI, AA 2:400). So in fact, absent the perspective of a being that creates the qualitative and quantitative metrics of time-determination by its own existence, we can only think of the world as “matter (in the transcendental sense), that is the parts, which are here taken to be substances” (in the Platonic sense) and without any representation of a “form” or “principle of the possible influences of the substances” (MSI, AA 2:389–90). Such an abstraction, Kant says, would be barred, by definition, from asserting “as possible a transeunt force in the world” (MSI, AA 2:390). This is Kant’s notion of things-in-themselves or of noumena. In the fourth section, Kant offers three paragraphs rather than just one as in the previous sections. His focus is on the notion of time as “continuous magnitude” (MSI, AA 2:399). Time is not just one continuous magnitude among others, but is actually, “the principle of the laws of what is continuous in the changes of the universe” (MSI, AA 2:399). Change and motion are obviously temporal processes. Kant then makes the claim that all continuous magnitudes are without simples (MSI, AA 2:399). Continuous magnitudes are made up of relations without ultimate relata. He says that the relations are “thought,” but I believe what he means here is that the designation of any finite magnitude as a whole is a process of setting limits between events, of constructing arbitrary simples or “nows” within a set of relations that are potentially infinite. Time is nothing outside of “composition,” which is the designation of “limits with time between them” or of “moments” (MSI, AA 2:399). We can clearly see from this why the A-series is essential not just for our knowing of B-series relations but for there to be B-series relations at all. Independent of the designation of these “moments” or “limits” through intuition of the

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“now” and its directional orientation away from the past and toward the future, there is no composition, no establishing of relations between points. Yet, if we are imagining a world that is the mere possibility of temporal construction and division, one in which no determinate limits and relations are established, then what we have is not recognizable as a temporal world. This stripping away of determinacy leads us to the idea of noumena “in the negative sense” (KrV B307). If the simple moments of time, the relata of the relations, are mere limits, then absent the setting of limits, we have the unlimited, which is fundamentally indeterminate and capable of incompatible determinations of simultaneity or successiveness, of one or many. But this indeterminacy means that it makes no sense to think of this as something other than the atemporal possibility of a temporal world. In the second paragraph of section four, Kant introduces the notion of change as flowing continuity (MSI, AA 2:399). Since 1747, Kant had been using the law of continuity in various forms and arguments. But he has said precious little about the idea except that there are no leaps in nature. He does articulate the notion in 1758 as an inescapable “auxiliary hypothesis” that “mechanical philosophers” require to make sense of motion (NLBR, AA 2:21). He says that this principle, in “its logical sense,” is perfectly acceptable for making judgments and for claiming that physical changes, such as the change from rest to motion, take place through “infinitely small stages” (NLBR, AA 2:22). But he is clear that this principle can neither be proven nor disproven. It is a sort of fiction that remains an inescapable aspect of “the received concepts[s] of motion and rest” (NLBR, AA 2:22). But if taken not just as a logical rule but as a metaphysical thesis, the infinite division of any temporal set of changes would mean, by a Zeno-like paradox, that no change ever takes place. Kant’s “new concept of motion and rest” shifts the discussion to “the external phenomenon” or “changes” in “external state with respect to the space in which they find themselves” rather than what occurs directly between two acting bodies (NLBR, AA 2:23–4). As already discussed, Kant’s approach was to essentially consider everything as moving and hold that all rest is relative to a frame of reference, which itself can be considered as moving. We must eliminate “absolute rest” from the picture and consider any two interacting bodies as in relative motion to each other, in relative rest to certain spatial frames, and what takes place through mechanical interaction is a reconstitution of those relations, velocities, and frames. In effect, Kant’s new doctrine is to regard all change as flowing

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continuity from the start, thus avoiding having to explain any absolute change of state. This is clear in his lectures on cosmology where the law of continuity becomes central for the sensible world. This same sort of dilemma is the topic of the third paragraph of section four, where Kant attempts to show that the Leibnizian cannot account for continuous movement along an angled line. While continuity may be part of Leibniz’s philosophy, it seems that an absolute change of direction at a vertex, for example, from northeast to southeast, requires that there be a state of rest where it is neither moving in one direction or the other. If at the “moment of the presence” of something moving along the vertex of the angle, it is either moving northeast or southeast, but it cannot be in both states at once, so it switches from one state to the other. But that happens at different times, which means that there is always a continuous expanse of times between those moments. If change does take place, there would be rest rather than continuous movement through the vertex or else Zeno’s paradox emerges. This leads Leibniz to say that “a body does not change its direction in a motion which is continuous” except along a curved line (MSI, AA 2:400).26 Of this argument, Lambert in his letter to Kant says that it is commendable to insist on “the true concept of continuity,” which the monadology and its vision of “simple entities” cannot fully accept (Br, AA 10:106). We might say that Kant’s point is that there is an ontological smearing caused due to time or that there are no gaps in nature, which is the implication of true continuity, that is, the idea that between any two units of time, there is an “intervening time” that is an “infinite series of the moments of that time” (MSI, AA 2:399). This smearing or “flow” is stated as the fact that “the substance is not in one of the given states, nor in the other, and yet it is not in no state either. It will be in different states, and so on to infinity” (MSI, AA 2:400).27 Kant’s view then is that there is no ultimate or in-itself truth of the states in which a thing is in time, because there can be no reduction to simples at single instances. This means that the demarcation of moments can only be the marking of relations from a specific perspective, relations that are always infinitely divisible into further states.28 So while we want to state that something happened at some specific moment in an absolute sense, that is, at some B-series relation relative to other positions, Kant’s point is that there is no such simple moment. The present is not only subjective in nature, but neither it nor any other moment is truly simple, which means that all designation of B-series relations is from such-and-such perspective. Should a critic want to say that while absolute precision is not possible, the

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general temporal truths that e1 happened earlier than e2 or that the decomposition in which they are separable is a true fact of nature in itself, Kant’s response must be that as long as you are assuming the perspective of a being that can compose and decompose temporal moments through change (A-series relations), and so on, this is obviously true. But in the absence of such a being, for example, from the hypothesis now called “the Block Universe” or eternalism, the statement that e1 happened earlier than e2 is either meaningless or is just a counterfactual referring to the possible experience of beings such as ourselves. Section five of the discussion of time makes the claim that “time is not something objective and real, nor is it a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation” (MSI, AA 2:400). Now it may seem that Kant has asserted that time is actually made of relations, for example, when he says that “but by means of time it [the continuous] is nothing but relations which are thought” (MSI, AA 2:399). Yet, we can clarify what Kant means. Particular continuous temporal expanses are sets of B-series relations that are “thought” or marked-off by the introduction of a metric and a temporal perspective. But if this is so, then time is not just “relations” as is held in the relationist viewpoint: it is also the introduction of a metric through the A-series, which makes relations possible. This is what he means when he says that “time is rather the subjective condition which is necessary, in virtue of the nature of the human mind, for the coordination of all sensible things in accordance with a fixed law” (MSI, AA 2:400). As section five caused a lengthy response from Lambert in his letter to Kant, we might better understand Kant’s claims by contrasting them to Lambert. Lambert reads the import of Kant’s view to be that time belongs to and is necessary for all human representations of objects. He grants that it is “pure intuition” rather than “a substance” or a “mere relation” (Br, AA 10:106). But then Lambert introduces a distinction between time and duration, and says that “time” is pure intuition, not “duration,” because “time” is merely a time or a “particular determination of duration” (B-series relation), whereas duration is the objective flow of time itself (the A-series) (Br, AA 10:106).29 Thus, Lambert thinks of a “pure intuition” (“time” rather than “duration”) as merely an empirical subjective  (or inner) B-series determination. He thinks that about all we can say is that “time is time,” because of its fundamental connection to all representation (Br, AA 10:106). He considers “duration” (not “time” understood as “pure intuition” in the sense of empirical, psychological marking of an expanse) to be a realistic notion of indeterminate time, a flow of time that

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has no beginning or end and is not simply a temporal demarcation of events. This is the idea of the A-series as an objective feature of the universe. For Lambert, the flow of change itself is real and so duration is real: our “pure” intuitions (as he calls them) are just subjective markings of that objective reality. This is the so-called neglected third alternative that scholars use to criticize Kant, although it seems unlikely that he neglected it. Lambert uses “eternity” or the entire flow of infinite duration to indicate that which is temporally realistic and not simply a representational demarcation of a temporal expanse. This is in conflict with his putative acceptance of Kant’s denial that time is a substance. Thus, Lambert seems to be advancing the idea that Kant openly rejects, namely that the objective reality of time is “some continuous flux within existence” that is yet independent of “any existent thing” (MSI, AA 2:400). This is clear when Lambert says that “duration appears to be inseparable from existence” (Br, AA 10:107).30 That is the first of the subreptic axioms, to which Lambert objects and tries to escape from in his letter to Kant (Br, AA 10:109). Lambert attempts to argue that (1) if change is real, then time is real; (2) change is real in our representations, as they have determinate beginnings and endings; and (3) therefore, time cannot be thought of as ideal or unreal. Therefore, Kant is wrong that time is “only a helpful device for human representations” (Br, AA 10:107). Kant repeats this argument as offered by “insightful men” in the first Critique (KrV A36/B53). Kant’s response is “I admit the entire argument,” which is to say that the argument misunderstands Kant’s point (KrV A37/B53). Kant explains that this objection is offered because of a skeptical mindset that thinks that external objects and space may be doubtful, but the inner self and time is not (KrV A38/B55). Kant denies this and thinks that everything in time, including myself as being at a present moment in time, “belongs only to appearance” (KrV A38/B55). The simplest way to characterize Kant’s response is that pure intuition is merely formal (the phenomenological grasping of the “now” and the past and future) and that all actual determinations of temporal relations utilize both B- and A-series relations, and that includes my own determination of myself. This is to say that time is not just a helpful device that is part of the mental processing and construction of representations as Lambert states. Calling it the form of intuition is not to locate it in the mind. Instead, what the individual mind brings to reality is the transcendental form of all possible, sensibly intuitive relations in which even outer objects and events stand. It introduces the metric (temporal simple) and rules (mathematical/quantitative and directional/

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qualitative) that constitute nature as the field of possible connectivity relative to a given perspective. As Kant states it, time as the form of intuitions establishes “the field of their validity,” which stretches to all possible time-­ determinations and positions that others and I may occupy within it (KrV A39/B56). What Kant has said in section 5, which Lambert has misunderstood, can be stated as follows: The pure intuition or “concept of time” is “the principle of form” and is prior to the notion of objects, substances, accidents, B-series relations, and whatever else populates the field of experience and understanding (MSI, AA 2:400). Kant then tells us that relations and connections confront the senses, but those relations alone cannot tell us whether they are simultaneous or successive to other non-given relations (MSI, AA 2:400). In other words, the problem is not what many claim, that is, that perception does not offer spatio-temporal data. It is that whatever data it offers requires placement within the frame of the spatio-­ temporal whole, which includes all the relations outside of present experience. This does not mean that time is unreal in the sense of be a mental fantasy as Lambert worries. In his letter to Lambert when he sent him a copy of the Dissertation, Kant says that “space and time … are, with respect to empirical knowledge and all objects of sense, very real” (Br, AA 10:98). Thus, when he says that time is “not something objective and real” in the Dissertation, he clearly means that it is not something that exists in-itself independently of the perspective of the subject. Kant dismisses Lambert’s view and any sense of absolute time as an “absurd fiction” and spends a paragraph criticizing a Leibnizian view in which time is real but an abstraction from the internal states of substances. The problem here is that the Leibnizian takes this internal change of states to be primary and the nature of time is determined from it (MSI, AA 2:401). Kant believes that the Leibnizian view is a circular definition of time and that it eliminates the notion of simultaneity. It is circular because the sequence of changes of state inside the monad is clearly temporal and therefore cannot actually explain time any more than a sequence of changes outside of it. The claim about simultaneity is harder to penetrate. He may mean that the elusiveness of the present (constantly flowing) and the enclosure of the mind within itself would lead to a pure, internal succession incapable of any empirical time-determination. Leibniz’s world would not only be a series of independent “world-lines” without any connection and, thus, without the possibility of even determining whether something

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was simultaneous, but it would also not even have successiveness. Kant begins his criticism with an extensive note on simultaneity: Simultaneous things are not simultaneous because they do not succeed one another. For if succession is removed, then some conjunction, which existed in virtue of the series of time, is, indeed, abolished; but another true relationship, such as the conjunction of all things, does not instantly spring into existence as result. (MSI, AA 2:401n)

Simultaneity is not simply the negation of succession. To eliminate the one does not automatically leave us with the other, as McTaggart assumes when he believes that if we abstract away from the successive, directional B-series relations of before and after (by recognizing that the A-series is unreal), we do not automatically ascend to the eternal “now” of the C-series. Kant denies that this would be so because the C-series—a sort of absolute, directionless, changeless series of events—would essentially be the divine as temporally extend at each point, which is why he worries about such absolutist notions resulting in Spinozism in the lectures. The conjunction of all things is the idea of all existing things being simultaneous, envisioned as the whole of space or the “phenomenal world” on a single perpendicular line intersecting the line representing the pure order of successiveness (MSI, AA 2:401n). This is how the “Block Universe” is represented. But because monads do not successively follow each other, the Leibnizian universe would lack universal succession and there would be no eternal now connecting them either: there would be no unity or “ubiquity” of time in which “all the things which can thought sensitively are at some time” (MSI, AA 2:401n). In other words, the Leibnizian universe renders the question of whether events within different monads are happening at different times entirely impossible to answer. Kant believes that the Leibnizian view means that time is essentially gathered through the experience of time, either perceptually (which must be a sort of sensory confusion) or internally though the series of changes within. This would mean that we read off time from motion or from inner activity. The idea that time is found merely in inner processing leads to the problems of the previous paragraphs. But we also do not read time off of motion. After all, Kant holds that it is our intuitive sense of the form of time that determines the laws of motion (MSI, AA 2:401). Kant admits that we do calculate and measure the quantity of time (B-series relations) through empirical metrics and motion. He also holds that mere internal

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time-consciousness requires enduring outer objects to be determinate rather than depending simply on the momentary awareness of the present held on to only by our fading memory. So while it is true that the quality (A-series) of time and the designation of the present moment are “an internal law of the mind,” we must institute that law objectively using stable metrics and not just the vague sense of the “now” (MSI, AA 2:401). In other words, the inner and the outer must work together. We do not read off time from motion nor is it entirely found in mental activity as an “innate intuition” of time itself (MSI, AA 2:401). The former would render time itself and the laws of motion into empirical observations and, so, “the certainty of our rules is completely destroyed” by making them inductive (MSI, AA 2:401). As should be clear now, the internal law of the mind initiates a temporal simple (the essentially indexical “now”), which creates a relative simultaneity of outer events, and creates a qualitative, directional temporal perspective-relative to which there can be change, motion, and succession both in the world and in the mind. It is easy to see how scholars have misinterpreted Kant’s claim that what is at issue here is “the action of the mind in co-ordinating what it senses” (MSI, AA 2:401). What they have not noticed is that there are different ways of understanding that  remark. Scholars have internalized and disembodied this entire process. In so doing, they have continued to follow the interpretative path set out by Lambert, Mendelssohn, and Sulzer, who appeal to the reality of time as the sequence of representations. But there is a different way to understand what it means to say that time the action of the mind in coordinating what it senses. The internalist viewpoint holds that Kant is discussing how sense-data in the head are given spatio-temporal properties so that we have perceptions of objects and events in relations. But the alternative, externalist viewpoint is that the coordinating action of the mind means that it senses or perceives spatio-temporal relations and objects and must coordinate those or frame them within the whole temporal universe far outstretching the immediate experience and pointing to the full scope of empirical, intuitive, and mathematical constructions. On the former view, outer experience is just the occasion for delivering a raw matter to be given spatio-temporal properties, something which inner imagination and thought can also do. If one adopts that view, then inner mental life has a certain primacy that seems free of skepticism about the reality of time, whereas time outside of the mind seems dubious. But on the latter, externalist view, outer experience and persistence in perception is essential in

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order to mark, order, and measure the quantitative and qualitative relations of the temporal universe. The temporal relations between events and objects outside of the mind are no less certain than our own self-intuition because to intuit ourselves is to continually place ourselves within the context of those outer relations. If there were not such outer relations, the self would be nothing more than the ever disappearing present, continually losing itself in the flow of time.31 We can now see how Kant’s idea of a law of the mind is also the idea of that which connects and unifies a world. As he says, “the principle of the form of the sensible world is that which contains the ground of the universal connection of all things, insofar as they are phenomena” (MSI, AA 2:398). To locate time in mental representation and say that it is just the time-stamping of sensations is to identify it with a psychological law that unifies only the mental world of my representations. This leads to Kant being interpreted as a phenomenalist and of isolating time inside subjects, which is to encounter the problem that he is criticizing in Leibniz. We know that Kant believes that the concept of form and the interconnection of the parts of the world are ontological in nature or world-constructing. What the mind senses are objects and relations that are coordinated in the world in first experiential and then scientific and mathematical B-series relations. But there only are such experiential and measurable relations because there is the possibility of measurement, which the subject as the cause of the A-series brings to reality. This leads to the concluding sections six and seven, in which he claims that absolute time is an “imaginary being” but says little more about this rejection (MSI, AA 2:401). When he discusses the rejection of absolute space, I will return to this. He also states that time, as an “immutable law of sensible things as such … is in the highest degree true” rather than an imaginary sensory confusion (MSI, AA 2:401). It is not clear to me that any other interpretation of Kant’s view, other than the one I have provided, can make sense of the claim that time is “a condition, extending to infinity, of intuitive representation for all possible objects of the senses” (MSI, AA 2:401). If one simply makes it an epistemic or psychological claim, then the idea of a condition of intuition “extending to infinity” is nonsense. But if we think of it as a law that exists because of the fact that we create a quantitative and qualitative metric for temporal ordering by our very existence, then these mysterious claims make sense. This metric is that which gives rise to a “formal whole” that we can call “the phenomenal world” (MSI, AA 2:402). And it is only because of it that there “can be

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objects of the senses” (MSI, AA 2:402). These are rather strong ontological claims not only about time, but about the importance of the mind as that which causes there to be this formal principle that determines the field of the possible and, thus, the actual, determined individuation in nature outside of the mind. We can call this Kant’s anthropic principle. But rather than saying that the laws of the universe must be attuned to the conditions that support conscious life, Kant’s view is that the existence of the mind establishes the conditions for determinate relations of simultaneity and succession and for the demarcation of the world into determinate and determinable events and sequences of change.

Conclusion While the revolutionary changes that take place in the Dissertation have been well noted by other scholars, the precise way that it undermines Kant’s previous metaphysics has not been adequately explored. This is easy to explain because the Dissertation is oftentimes dismissed as being pre-­Critical for retaining a problematic metaphysics. That dismissal is usually part of a larger dismissal of the pre-Critical philosophy as Leibnizian and rationalistic. Properly understanding what Kant believed prior to 1770 and why he rejects it sheds significant light on the Critical project and what his key notions will continue to mean going forward. While I believe that the analysis here of the subreptic axions and its consequences for Kant’s thought will be largely uncontroversial, except for those who believe that a host of transcendentally realistic metaphysical commitments remain even in the Critical-era, the account that I have offered of time will be shocking to many. While I will spend significant time contrasting my conception of “the forms of intuition” to traditional interpretations in the next chapter, it is worth pointing out how the externalist view offered here solves the most significant problem in Kant’s Critical metaphysics. That problem is sometimes called “the problem of affection” and involves puzzles about things-in-themselves and the metaphysical status of space and time. In essence, it is the fundamental problem of “the excessive baggage of transcendental idealism” (Allison 2004, p.  3). The problem is this: if space and time are thought of as simply the “mind’s mode or manner of being affected,” by which it takes received sensations and forms mental representations, then one is not able to characterize “the objects that affect us” as spatio-temporal objects (Allison 2004, p. 64). Instead, they must be taken in some non-empirical way. This is the problem that

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Jacobi raised about the metaphysical commitment to things-in-themselves being illegitimate on Kant’s own terms. It is the problem that leads Trendelenburg to argue that Kant cannot legitimately exclude space and time from the sources of affection. It is the problem of simply understanding the sense in which Kant sees space and time as subjective. It will of course seem like wild hubris to say that I have solved this longstanding and intractable problem of Kant interpretation. Some of the predecessors to my view will be discussed in the following chapter.32 But what would a solution to this problem even look like? Firstly, it is not enough to simply salvage the legitimacy of an empirically realistic commitment to spatio-temporal objects. Many scholars do that by inventing “patchwork” theories that allow troublesome passages to be ignored or they simply remove metaphysics altogether and convert Kant’s theory of space and time into a theory of “sensible conditions” of knowledge or a theory of reference and scientific judgment. Secondly, it is hardly adequate to simply commit Kant to a contradiction or to a sort of phenomenalist idealism that he explicitly rejects. So a solution to this problem would be able retain common sense realism that we are affected by material, spatiotemporal objects outside of us, while also keeping a robust metaphysical notion of the contribution of the subject that excludes the possibility of space and time as existing absolutely as a feature of things-in-themselves. The solution that I have offered does this. I have shown that there are aspects of time that are dependent on the existence of a cognitive subject. I have shown that these subject-dependent features are formal in the sense that they form the context within which any possible representation, whether an inner marking of time or an outer comparing of events, takes place. In other words, scholars seem to take the idea of the “form of intuition” to mean the structure of relations within mental representation. I take Kant to mean that the form of intuition is the perspective of the subject by which they occupy a simple moment in time and exist in an a priori intuitive, directional relationship to a past and future. The form of intuition is the form of temporal measurement. The pre-conditions of such measurement being realized in the world are the existence of an essentially indexical subject and its behavior. By showing how objective (intersubjective, non-mental, empirically real) relations between events can be shown to still be dependent on the existence of the subject’s perspective and combining that with the fact that nature itself is an infinitely divisible continuum lacking any intrinsic metric capable of individuating relata and establishing relations between them, the problem of affection can be

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solved. The objects that affect us are “appearances”—spatio-temporal, materially extended beings. Space and time, as empirically real, measurable relations between objects and events, exist, and we experience them. But they are still metaphysically dependent on the presence of an observer. While I believe that the operations of pure reason do continually raise their head in Kant’s discussions (and it is they that are ultimately responsible for thinking of objects as things-in-themselves and referring us to the intelligible grounds of the world), I do not believe that the notion of affection requires any sort of commitment to objects having a non-­ empirical nature. Thus, Kant’s transcendental idealism is a metaphysical view in which the spatio-temporal nature of the world outside of our minds is empirical real but subject-dependent. Kant’s metaphysics concerns the reality of space and time and of the objects in space and time, not just our cognition of them. It shows them to be dependent on the existence of a cognitive subject, but this is not a phenomenalism. It seems to me that this avoids many problems that have plagued Kant interpretation, while retaining a strong commitment both to the metaphysical function of subjectivity and to the reality of the natural world outside of the mind.33

Notes 1. While I largely disagree with his overall reading of the works prior to 1770, Seung argues for a turn to a sort of Platonism in the Dissertation (1994, chapter 2). On the influence of Plato and Mendelssohn on Kant in 1769, see Kuehn (1995) and Nuzzo (2001). This Platonism is not uncommon in the “ontological” interpretation of Kant in the German tradition. For example, see Wundt (1924, p.  162), Martin (1955), Heimsoeth (1960, pp. 17–19). 2. Kant says that “happening presupposes a time, consequently nothing happens in the noumenal world” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:923). 3. He continues to call his project a general phenomenology in 1772 (Br, AA 10:129). McQuillan says the 1772 letter is the first mention of the project that would become the first Critique, but I do not see why the 1771 letter to Herz or the 1770 letter to Lambert are not also pointing toward that project (McQuillan 2016, pp. 42–3). 4. The reader might go along with my approach by thinking that the Dissertation and the first Critique “two very contrary works,” although this is not really my own view (Falkenstein 1995, p. 52).

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5. It should be said that while Kant is referring to these beings as “immaterial” in 1770, it is not clear that this is Kant’s own preferred description of ­substances. It seems instead to be the terminology of those who bandy about these idle questions, such as how many angels can fit on the head of a pin (MSI, AA 2:414). When he turns to substances themselves, he simply says that he is not considering them either as material or immaterial (the “nature of the substances”) but just in terms of the form of the world they inhabit (MSI, AA 2:407). But even if this was his chosen language, the Platonic shift in which things-in-themselves are now regarded as principles or possibilia, is clearly a different sense of immaterial than the one criticized in 1766. 6. See Leibniz (1956, p. 75). 7. On Kant’s unjustified assumption of one-to-one correspondence between metaphysical simples and physical monads, see Buroker (1981, p.  42). Heβbrüggen-Walter points out that this subreptic axiom does seem to entirely eliminate the ability to place the soul (or other metaphysical substances) in space, but he does not mention the extent to which Kant still seems to be doing it. I would argue that Kant’s position is close to the weakest forms of localization (“representational” and “epistemic”) (Heβbrüggen-­Walter 2014, pp. 30–1, 38–9). 8. Falkenstein states that Kant argues that it would be absurd if “substances” (in the sense of bodies) were “infinitely divisible” because “any given part would be a composite—so that there would ultimately be nothing more to the substance than just this external relations” (Falkenstein 1995, p. 36). I take that to be Kant’s position exactly. But Falkenstein argues that Kant holds that this would be “absurd, since external relations are purely accidental” and such a thing would “have no essence” (Falkenstein 1995, p. 36). To make such an argument is to engage in the subreptic fallacy that there cannot be an infinitely divisible continuity without reduction to numerically distinct simples. 9. Falkenstein points to this passage (MSI, AA 2:389) three times to justify Kant’s continued acceptance of metaphysical simples (monads) composing objects (Falkenstein 1995, pp.  36–9). Yet, it is clear that Kant is merely saying that while arguments from the understanding (using the principles of the intelligible world) can be given for composition out of such simples, he is arguing against the legitimacy of such combination of sensible and intelligible systems. Falkenstein recognizes that Kant will not allow the sensible to infiltrate the intelligible, but he does not see that the intelligible cannot infiltrate the sensible and solve the “paradoxes of composition and division” (Falkenstein 1995, p. 39). Falkenstein requires this metaphysical realism to remain in place so that he can justify a phenomenalist approach

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to space and time, stripping them of any reality outside of the mind or, more precisely, “the sensory faculty” (Falkenstein 1995, p. 48). 10. For an overview of the Hume–Kant debate regarding causation and skepticism, see Guyer (2008) and Forster (2008). 11. For Hume’s views on time, see Baxter (2008) and Allison (2008). Tonelli argues that criticisms of the notion of substance played a role in Kant’s thinking in 1769 (Tonelli 1961, p.  298). Tonelli refers to R 3921 (AA 17:345) among many other notes from the late 1760s to show this. 12. For a discussion of this, see Forster (2008). 13. Heimsoeth has argued for the importance of Bayle’s Dictionary on Kant’s development (Heimsoeth 1960, pp. 264–5). 14. This is stated word for word in the lectures, which does not distinguish it as Kant’s own idea or Baumgarten’s (V-Met-L2/Pölitz, AA 28:570). 15. Höffe holds that Kant only looks at the temporal notions of being before, after, or at the same time (1994, p. 57). The notions of past, present, and future are discussed in the lectures (V-Met/Mron, AA 29: 29:842). 16. The B-series can be divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical relations (Rohs 1998, p. 40). I follow McTaggart in calling the asymmetrical relations (earlier and later) the B-series, although modern B-theorists focus on the symmetrical relations. These asymmetrical relations are dependent on the “arrow of time” (anisotropy). The symmetrical relations of simultaneity and existing between two points, for example, do not depend on the anisotropic nature of time. Whether to call this the B-series or McTaggart’s C-series depends on whether one believes change (and therefore time) exists in symmetrical relations. 17. “There is no such thing as the present, and consequently no past or future. These are concepts which belong exclusively to the human life world” (Wyller 2010, p. 22). 18. Stevenson is one of the only interpreters to point out the importance of making a distinction between “observer-relative conceptions of ‘the present’ (or ‘now’) and ‘this place’ (or ‘here’)” which he notes is relates to the A-series of time (Stevenson 2011, p. 43). Yet, he follows the path of deflationary conceptualists and, thus, fails to see this distinction as having metaphysical significance as opposed to merely conceptual significance. In other words, he fails to see how the reality corresponding to “global conceptions” of space is dependent on the possibility of observer-relativity features of space (Stevenson 2011, p. 46). 19. Kant does not stress the asymmetry of time as he does in incongruence cases in space, but it is surely an undeniable feature. See Prauss (2001, p. 161). 20. In the lectures Kant points out that time has protensive (successive), extensive (simultaneity), and intensive aspects (V-Met-L2/Pölitz, AA 28:567).

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The intensive aspect of time has to do with “reality.” Kant says nothing else about this distinction, but I would argue that the intensive aspect is tied to the subject as a priori intuitively generating the A-series, which is also tied to the notion of being in a “state” (intensive quality), which Kant identifies with “determination in time” (V-Met-L2/Pölitz, AA 28:564). Kant also links existence with duration in time (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:842). 21. In the lectures Kant says that “duration in the time of a thing is the measure of the magnitude of the existence of the thing insofar as it is a phenomenon” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:842). 22. By utilizing the notion of the A-series, we can see how it is a mistake to think that Kant was merely thinking of time as “before-and-after” (Sherover 2003, p. 38). 23. It is clear this is Kant’s largely negative point in the first metaphysical exposition of time in the first Critique (KrV B46/A30). 24. Melnick thinks of pure intuition in terms of behavior because “the very behavior which underlies and directs our capacity to be affected, can also be carried out and ordered independent of how one may thereby by affected along the way” (1992, p.  248). My only disagreement with Melnick is that he does not clearly identify what it is about our behavior (the A-series relations and their qualitative spatial equivalents) that is necessarily generated a priori by the subject. 25. Interestingly, Kant comes to conclude in his lectures that if we grant either space or time to be absolute, then we are stuck with Spinozism and all parts of the world are part of the divinity (V-Meta-L2/Politz, AA 28:567). This suggests that he has come to see that his own earlier grounding of an absolute set of temporal  positions that are unified and singular for all things would require a divine presence to all things. 26. Kant himself seems to adopt this doctrine in the lectures. 27. It is worth noting that my view owes a debt to the work of Arthur Melnick while also substantially disagreeing with it. For Melnick, “time … must be performance or behavior, and indeed attention-directing behavior” and is also said to be a “framing” of one’s sensory response (Melnick 1989, p. 20). This view is essentially a construction of behavior-based semantics which allows representation to directly relate to what is represented by actually constructing the continuous expanses of space and time that are the framework and bedrock of all representation. There are several problems with Melnick’s view, the main one being that it is not properly transcendental and, instead, believes that continuity only exists in the “flowing” action and attention of cognitive subjects (Melnick 1989, p.  11). This leads it to be an inadequate characterization of Kant’s actual ontology and his commitment to nature as being made up of flowing continuities, independent of our actual constructions but not independent of the actual

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existence of some cognitive subject. Because Melnick believes that what the subject brings to reality is the flowing (non-discrete) continuity of true extension, he never adequately characterizes what the subject actually brings to reality (A-series relations), although it is implied within his rich phenomenology of spatio-temporal action. 28. Falkenstein argues that Kant introduces the notion of continuity only to reject it and holds that he continues to essentially accept his past monadology (Falkenstein 1995, p. 38). But to think this is so is to make the very mistake that Kant is warning us of, namely, to combine sensibility and the understanding. Kant does say that he is not going to “plead the case” for the notion for the concept of continuity and infinity, but holds instead that while we have intuitions of infinitely divisible continua, we do not have an adequate concept of it available to the understanding. It is true that we do not represent an actual infinity in intuition nor a continuous manifold in which there is actual infinite complexity. But the sensible versions of the infinite and the continuous remain central to Kant’s project in the Dissertation. 29. Lambert’s distinction seems to derive from Newton (1999, p. 408). 30. Lambert’s view seems also to be Sulzer’s (Br, AA 10:112). 31. “The being experienced earlier would constantly be lost completely with each now, if it were not in general retainable” (Heidegger 1997, p. 127). 32. One work worth mentioning here is Martin’s Arithmetic and Combinatorics, which argues that Kant’s aim in the Critical period is “systematic ontology” and that at the heart of that is “synthesis in mathematics” which depends on the “pure perception of time” and the construction of series in time (Martin 1985 pp. 79, 124–5). This idea that time plays such an ontological function is of course found in Heidegger (1997, p. 36). 33. I mean for this to be stronger than the Heideggerian approach that sometimes retains the mentalistic or internalistic idiom, as when he describes pure intuition as giving “images” or “looks” of space and time (Heidegger 1997, p. 99). While it is on the right track to argue that the subject makes an “active contribution to the nature of any phenomenal appearance” and attempts to hold that this establishes the spatial and temporal character of all “which we could possibly apprehend,” some Heideggerian approaches tend to think of this creativity as simply taking place within “the act of receptive representation” and, thus, to be a claim about how things “must appear to our consciousness” (Sherover 1971, p. 53). Heidegger himself tends to give an ontological function to the intellectual power of imaginative synthesis and this turns space and time into “imaginary beings” (Heidegger 1997, p. 101).

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References Allison, Henry. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. ———. 2008. Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the Treatise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumgarten, Alexander. 2013. Metaphysics. Trans. C.  Fugate and J.  Hymers. London: Bloomsbury. Baxter, Donald. 2008. Hume’s Difficulty: Time and Identity in the Treatise. Oxon/ New York: Routledge. Broad, C.D. 1978. Kant: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buroker, Jill Vance. 1981. Space and Incongruence: The Origins of Kant’s Idealism. Dordrecht: D. Riedel. Falkenstein, Lorne. 1995. Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Faulk, Arthur. 2003. Time plus the whoosh and whiz. In Time, Tense, and Reference, ed. A. Jokić and Q. Smith, 211–250. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Forster, Michael. 2008. Kant and Skepticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gotz, Gerhard. 2001. Kants “grosses Licht” des Jahres 69. In Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX.  Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Bd. II: Sectionen I-IV, ed. V. Gerhardt, R. Horstmann, and R. Schumacher, 19–26. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Guyer, Paul. 2008. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1960. Atom, Seele, Monade: Historische Ursprünge und Hintergründe von Kants Antinomie der Teilung. Weisbaden: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. Heβbrüggen-Walter, Stefan. 2014. Putting Our Soul in Place. Kant Yearbook 6: 1–21. Höffe, Otfried. 1994. Immanuel Kant. Albany: SUNY Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1992a. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992b. Lectures on Logic. Trans. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Lectures on Metaphysics. Trans. and ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1999. Correspondence. Trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Theoretical Philosophy After 1781. Trans. and ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemp Smith, Norman. 1992. A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Amherst: Humanity Books. Knutzen, Martin. 2009. System of Efficient Causes. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials, ed. E.  Watkins, 54–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuehn, Manfred. 1995. The Moral Dimension of Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation: A New Perspective on the “Great Light of 1769”. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, ed. Hoke Robinson, vol. 1 Part 2, 373–392. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Leibniz, G.W. 1956. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Martin, Gottfried. 1955. Kant’s Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Trans. P.G. Lucas. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. ———. 1985. Arithmetic and Combinatorics: Kant and His Contemporaries. Trans. Judy Wubnig. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. McQuillan, Collin. 2016. Immanuel Kant: The Very Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. McTaggart, John. 1934. Philosophical Studies. London: E. Arnold. Melnick, Arthur. 1989. Space, Time, and Thought in Kant. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1992. The Geometry of a Form of Intuition. In Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. Carl Posy, 245–255. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Newton, Isaac. 1999. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Trans. I. Cohen and A. Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2001. Idea and Ideal in Kant’s De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis. In New Essays on the Precritical Kant, ed. T. Rockmore, 224–238. Amherst: Humanity Books. Prauss, Gerold. 2001. The Problem of Time in Kant. In Kant’s Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck, ed. Predrag Cicovacki, 153–165. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Rohs, Peter. 1998. Abhandlungen zur Feldtheoretischen Transzendentalphilosophie. Münster: Lit. Seung, T.K. 1994. Kant’s Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sherover, Charles. 1971. Heidegger, Kant and Time. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2003. Are We in Time? Evanston: Northwestern.

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Stevenson, Leslie. 2011. Inspirations from Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tonelli, Giorgio. 1961. Critiques of the Notion of Substances Prior to Kant. Tijdschrift voor philosophie 23: 285–301. Wundt, Max. 1924. Kant als Metaphysiker: Ein Beitrag zur geschichte der deutschen Philosophie im 18.Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Verlang von Ferdinand Enke. Wyller, Truls. 2010. The Size of Things: An Essay on Space and Time. Paderborn: Mentis.

CHAPTER 7

Kant’s Theory of Space in the Inaugural Dissertation and the Birth of Transcendental Idealism

Comparing Space and Time In this final chapter, I turn to Kant’s first articulation of the Critical theory of space. Having already discussed Kant’s Critical theory of time, the task of making sense of this theory is made significantly easier. If someone asked what time is for Kant, based on the previous discussion, we could simply say that it is the most basic structure of the given world. It orders events in relations of succession and simultaneity. As a system of order, it follows certain rules and requires a basic metric. Those rules and metric only exist because of the presence of a cognitive subject and his or her essentially indexical perspective. As empirical subjects establish and specify B-series relations through empirical intuitions, they are unfolding the temporal reality that their own perspective makes possible. Transcendental idealism is then the dual-perspective in which we see the world both as given to the empirical subject and as a result of determining ground of transcendental subjectivity. This idea is articulated in the first Critique in the following way: each principle bound up with the sensible and categorical structure of our perspective “has the special property that it first makes possible its ground of poof, namely experience, and must always be presupposed in this” (KrV A737/B765). The world in itself has no intrinsic chronometric individuation, metric, or rules, because these notions all rely on A-series relations and, thus, on the establishment of the “now” as a perspective-relative temporal simple with directional orientation.1 This

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means that time consists not merely of relations qua positions (the B-series), nor is it grounded in matter itself, substances, or God. It is, firstly, the form of chronometric activity (temporal determination and measurement), which, secondly, the whole world has, but only has because there are beings that experience the “now” in relation to a past and future. These A-series relations are pure (self)intuitions, and they introduce the qualitative, directional aspect of time into reality, upon which any designation of a B-series relations relies. We shall now see that this same picture applies to Kant’s theory of space.2 If we translate these ideas to the domain of space, we can say that what I called the “primitive, non-metrical directionality of sense,” which was found both in space in 1768 and in our bodily grasp of the intersecting, directional planes of three-dimensional space, is the spatial parallel of the A-series relations. The notion of metrical directional relations (A is 5 meters to the left of B) and non-directional, metrical quantitative relations (A is 5 meters from B) are the sorts of positional relations that constitute the equivalent of B-series relations. Both are determinate empirical relations, but the non-directional measure relies on the possibility of actual directional ordering and the designation of spatial points or limits. This means that both are dependent on an a priori intuitive sense of the difference between different directions. That is to say both forms of B-series, positional, and spatial relations depend on the A-series equivalent in the spatial domain, namely, the subject’s creation of the null-point of orientation and a directional field.3 If we recall that the 1768 article intended to show “the positions of the parts of space in reference to each other presuppose the direction in which they are ordered in such a relation,” then once directionality is seen as entirely dependent on the subject in 1770, then that means that any determinate metrical spatial relations presuppose the existence of the subject (GUGR, AA 2:377). The importance then of the subject’s self-affection and essential indexical “here” is that this simple element of experience designates a metric or sets limits by occupying a determinate position or, we might say, instituting a relata relative to which the field of really possible relations comes to exist.4 We, as a priori, self-­intuitive beings, institute a metric and the transcendental convention of “the sole field of its possible use, i.e. experience” (KrV A737/B765).5 This is how I will understand the subject-dependency of the spatial universe, which, importantly, is a metaphysical thesis and neither primarily a psychological one nor an epistemic one.6 It is those alternative interpretations that I want to discuss before elaborating Kant’s view in more detail.

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The Perceptual Account of Kant’s Theory of Space Because most scholars focus on space rather than time, I have reserved extensive commentary on opposing views for this chapter rather than the previous. The earliest and most longstanding interpretation of Kant’s view is psychological. By a psychological account, I mean that the fundamental thing being described in the sections on space and time in 1770 and 1781 is the perceptual processing of sensory data.7 While the idea that “forms of intuition” are a part of our “perceptual apparatus” is common to many different views, perceptual or psychological accounts translate the notion of “forms of intuition” into internal structures of the sense organs or the mind, depending on whether the account focuses on the physiology of receptivity or the activity of the processing mind. This view is found in some of the earliest reviews of Kant’s first Critique and is at the root of most of the early criticisms.8 One of many ways to divide up the interpretations of the forms of intuition is between an internalist and externalist position. As Broad puts it, the externalist holds that I am immediately aware of qualities and relations “at various places outside of me,” while the internalist holds that “a certain process performed by the mind upon its visual sensations” is responsible for giving the spatial predicates to the deliverances of sense (Broad 1978, p.  29). Broad does not believe that Kant can be an externalist because this would lead him to simply be an empiricist about space and time.9 Therefore, he argues for the idea that Kant believes that we receive qualities like colors with “no spatial characteristics” but possessing of a “non-spatial characteristic” that is the “space-­ locating property,” and that the mind then places that sense-impression in a region of our innate mental image of space (Broad 1978, p. 51). That is what I am calling the perceptual account. Caygill’s Kant Dictionary tells one that “space is an intuition, which means that it is, along with time, part of the mind’s passive coordination of objects of sense and thus inseparable from the receptive sensibility of a subject” (Caygill 1995, p.  371).10 This is rather similar sounding to Falkenstein’s view, which is that “since the function of the senses is to receive representations, and space and time are orders in which various elements can be disposed, it follows that our senses must be so constituted as to receive representations over space and time, and hence that space and time must be the ‘forms’ of sensory experience” (Falkenstein 2006, p. 147). This psychological account of the forms of intuition (space and time) has several different manifestations summarized by Hatfield as

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thinking of space and time as processes that “deliver material to the understanding” either as mechanisms and “rules for ordering the matter of sensations into spatial and temporal structures” or as “empty representations […] into which the matter of sensation is arranged” or as “orders of intuited matter” because the matter of sensation is received “in a spatiotemporal manner” (Hatfield 2006, pp. 85–6).11 Given that the only book-length study of Kant’s theory of space through the lens of such a perceptual account is Falkenstein’s, who seems to favor Hatfield’s third alternative, we can take his work as representative of this tradition.12 He regards Kant’s ruminations on space and time to be merely an account of “space-time cognition” called formal intuitionism. On this view, there are “bits of information” received by the senses (intuitionism), which the sense organs themselves give a “form” (formalism), namely, the form of spatio-­temporal relations, due to the fact that the information is physically (spatially and temporal) splayed across the surfaces of our organs (Falkenstein 1995, pp. 10–12; 2006, pp. 142–3).13 Falkenstein says that spatial form is given to sense-data by an “innate structure to the receptor system”; thus, “the specific locations that sensations have in space and time” are given empirically through sensation, because the data has location on the senses organs (Falkenstein 1995, p. 11).14 This is what he calls a presentational order.15 On the one hand, Falkenstein’s view is internalist and psychological (even physiological), but he would reject the idea that this is a “mental processing” view because he believes that sensation and order are inseparable within the sense organs. While the idea of a presentational order has found widespread acceptance in the field, the exact origin of that order widely differs leaving several important questions still up for grabs. Given what we know of Kant’s philosophy prior to and in 1770, this psychological reading seems implausible. For Kant to suddenly abandon his primary concerns for the sake of transcendental psychology and philosophy of the mind seems in total conflict with the unabashedly ontological account of the form of the sensible world in the Dissertation. Falkenstein admits that the goal he believes that Kant has of offering “an account of the basis of our knowledge of the spatio-temporal properties and relations of things” is never stated and not achieved, which leads one to wonder if this was ever Kant’s intention at all (Falkenstein 1995, p. xv). Nevertheless, this perceptual account is, for many scholars, the fundamental starting point for understanding Kant’s transcendental idealism.16 While the exact mechanisms, operations of the mind, and metaphysical implications (if there are any) remain open, few doubt that something like this doctrine is

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what the Critical theory of space and time is. While the idea of sensation having a “presentational order” does not necessarily force one into a realistic or idealistic view of what is causing sensation, the perceptual view does hold that all spatio-temporal information within perception is generated by the subject’s faculties. If we combine that with the idea that the output of that perceptual process is an “appearance” or “representation” of “empirical objects,” then it hardly seems possible that empirical objects (bodies with extension) can be the cause of our sensations.17 The common conclusion then is an idealism in which our sensations are caused by “noumenal objects,” and any sort of direct perceptual realism must be abandoned (Bennett 1966, p. 22).18 This Cartesian-like trapping of the subject in his or her own mind behind the veil of mental processing means that we are largely (if not entirely) ignorant of the “things in themselves” that affect us.19 Falkenstein takes it as obvious that the senses cannot be influenced by ordinary spatio-temporal objects, because “appearances” are “mental representations, logical constructs on mental representations, or the intentional objects of certain acts of the mind induced in us as a result of the cognitive process” (Falkenstein 1995, p. 314).20 This interpretation gives rise to “one of the worst thickets of Kant interpretation” (Parsons 1992, p. 83). Some of these problems are well known. Is noumenal causation (the idea that sensation is caused by things-in-­ themselves) compatible with the Critical restrictions on metaphysics? Do we not end up with a picture, as offered by Broad, that each of us is walking around with “his own private absolute space” and time (Broad 1978, p. 51)?21 If we are trapped in our perceptions, is it not possible that there is a spatio-temporality that lies behind our perceptions (i.e. the neglected third alternative objection or Trendelenburg Loophole), which means that space and time may be real and objective?22 These classic problems concerning the nature of what it is that affects us and what we can know of it tend to divide scholars into those who believe either (1) that Kant retains a metaphysical commitment to non-experiential objects (or, at least, non-experiential properties of experienced objects) that affect us, or (2) that he is a phenomenalist who holds that there is nothing but our representations, or (3) that he is merely describing the fact that our knowledge is bound by space and time and is not making claims about the natures of things at all (i.e. a deflationary account or epistemic humility).23 My own view is a metaphysical and idealist one, which solves the problem of affection by enabling the affecting objects to be spatio-temporal objects.24 Whereas the internalization of the forms of intuition (and all

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spatio-temporal data) in the mind forces the problem of affection and of things-in-themselves on internalist interpreters, the externalist position that I advance takes the theory of the a priori forms of intuition to be a transcendental theory of action, a theory of how the field of possible positions that we can occupy ontologically depends on our capacity to naturally establish limits, directions, and quantitative and qualitative rules of acting, first purely and then empirically.25 Such a view obviously depends on a conception of the material world lacking any intrinsic metric or having the rules of such action as an intrinsic feature.26 But once the determining ground of the subject exists, there is no reason to deny that we are simply affected by the ordinary objects and their forces. It is particularly clear in the 1770 Dissertation that Kant’s commitment to the existence of metaphysical substances or things-in-themselves is a feature of pure reason and the thinking of the ground of the possibility of the world rather than his account of perception and affection. While the interpretation of the forms of intuition as a form of mental processing of sensory data must have some support for it, I find that there is actually little textual reason, at least not in the 1770 Dissertation (and there is no significant difference from the account given in 1781), to deny that space as a form of intuition is the subject-dependent but nonmental relations that we occupy as cognitive beings who have direct, receptive, affective encounters with objects (appearances, forces, bodies, etc.). One of the deepest sources of the continual reduction of Kant’s philosophy to a theory of mental processing has to be confusion over the notion of a representation. We are in a position to see that this notion has always meant for Kant an internal state of a being, which is responsive to and that depicts states of affairs in the world. Representation takes place within a set of rules and within a context of the whole field of possible representational mind-world relations. Representation and the study of such “intensive magnitudes” were understood traditionally to be the domain of psychology (Mendelssohn 1997, p. 261). But representations need not be states of occurrent consciousness (KrV A320/B376). Moreover, if Kant is following Baumgarten, representation, for humans at least, is an embodied and positional act in the world: “I represent according to the position of my body in this universe” (Baumgarten 2013, §512). Rather than isolating us from the world, representation is the way in which internal states of a being relate to the world and are meaning-bearing in a way that directly depicts our situation. Yet, if we think of representation as simply the way in which sensory data is

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transformed in a conscious image of one’s world, then one is caught between two positions with regard to space and time, neither of which are capable of fitting with the text. As Falkenstein sees his options, space and time are either “grounded in the way that the world is, independently of us” or in the “constitution of our senses” (Falkenstein 2006, p. 147). Like most other scholars, he chooses the latter. My own alternative is that space and time are the form of spatializing and temporalizing behavior.27 In a sense, this has always been Kant’s view. What has changed is what counts as a substance. His earlier view was that the structure of the interconnections of substances manifests by their sharing an a priori intuition of the full scope of their possibility and via their spatializing and temporalizing behavior (as force). External relations of space and time were thought of explicitly as the product of form-giving representing beings who construct nature. Space and time have always been for Kant an order that representational beings bring to the world rather than a form of mental processing of sensation. What is different in 1770 is that his conception of what a representational being is has changed. While we do represent space and time, to call space and time the forms of intuition is to make the metaphysical claim that they are the order of relations that come to exist in the world because there are intuiting beings. There are admittedly many passages in the Dissertation and the first Critique that have mental-language, representation talk, and even occasional mentions of the order of sensations, which has led generations of scholars to believe that Kant is providing a theory of perceptual processing. The best response to this tradition of interpretation is simply to show that the reading that I propose is consistent with the text and superior to alternatives. Since one of our primary concerns is Kant’s pre-Critical development, it is worth noting that Kant has only offered a brief account of perception in Dreams and nowhere else, including the Dissertation. He argued there that we distinguish “chimeras” or “waking dreams” from reality, because we see them as “being in ourselves,” whereas “other objects” are represented as being outside of ourselves (TG, AA 2:343). There is something fundamental about “the relation in which the objects are thought as standing relatively to [oneself] as a human being, and, thus, relatively to [one’s] body” (TG, AA 2:343). The sensation that the “body creates, by means of outer sense” stands in contrast to illusion due to the fact that former is directionally situated within the scope of spatio-temporal relations and objects outside of the mind (TG, AA 2:343). Besides “the clarity with which the

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objects are represented” in outer sense (the content), there is something else important here: “the place of these objects in our sensations” (TG, AA 2:344). I take this to mean the place of the given objects within the entire field—past, present, and future—of our sensory experience. Such placing “constitutes a necessary condition of the sensation, and if it were not satisfied it would be impossible to represent things as external” to ourselves (TG, AA 2:344). Thus, four years prior to the Dissertation, Kant clearly thinks of perceptual experience as an act of embodied cognition in which we locate ourselves and objects within a spatial and temporal field of possible affections and orientations. And he also offers what I take to be a fundamental point: without the activity of framing (directionally) what is presented to us within a world, we would not represent things at all. What is given to us in the present only has meaning insofar as it has directional orientation in both space and time. That is to say, I must be cognitively present to myself, at least intuitively, as a point in the world in relationship to lines of convergence and divergence indicating directions in the world and in A-series relations in time (TG, AA 2:344). In 1766, the locating of objects as given in the field is aided by “the direction in which the light-rays enter the eye” and lines “which are caused by the object and that indicate the direction of the impression”; yet, we also construct a “focus imaginarius” and actively place the object outside of us in response to affectations of the body (TG, AA 2:344).28 Kant postulates that vibration and stimulation in the body may give us a sense of the direction, and so the object is represented as being in such-and-such B-series relations from us. In 1766, Kant did not yet fully appreciate the apparatus of a priori synthetic knowledge and pure intuition, but there is no reason to think that this basic model of how perception works does not remain. It has a projective, a priori element (focus imaginarius), which allows the empirical spatial relations (such as those of the light rays) that we perceive to be experienced as being at a distance from us and within the field of all possible encounters.29 Kant never says in 1770 that we do not perceive some spatial relations as possessed by materially extended objects: we just do not receive all of information about space from perceptions of objects, and the part that we do not receive is essential for us to receive any at all. While the spatial and temporal properties that belong to objects are outside of our head and perceived by us, they are still ontologically dependent on the human perspective and, thus, subjective.30 Space and time are not the forms of mental processing but are the forms of order that come to be by our perspectival, directional position. The view that I advocate is similar to some remarks

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offered by Brittan. He recognizes that we must begin from Kant’s metaphysics, which says that all of nature is essentially relational, that quantities are objective, and that quantities lack an intrinsic metric (Brittan 2001b, pp. 78–9).31 Kant’s transcendental idealism amounts to the idea that “the metric … is in certain ways ‘contributed by us’” and that the possibility of a serial-order using that metric requires operational rules that we also contribute (Brittan 2001b, p.  79). Our contributions are not arbitrary or dependent on our wills, but Brittan says little more than that they are defined by “possible experience.” I take it that our “contributing” is a function of the very existence of an essentially indexical, directionally oriented perspective of the cognitive subject.32 I should also note that the directly realistic account of perception in 1766 is stated in the first Critique: From our experience it is easy to notice that only continuous influence in all places in space can lead our sense from one object to another, that the light that plays between our eyes and the heavenly bodies effects a mediate community between us and the latter and thereby proves the simultaneity of the latter, and that we cannot empirically alter any place (perceive this alteration) without matter everywhere making the perception of our position possible; and only by means of its reciprocal influence can it establish their simultaneity and thereby the coexistence of even the most distant objects (though only mediately). Without community every perception (of appearance in space) is broken off from the others, and the chain of empirical representation, i.e., experience, would have to start entirely over with every new object without the previous one being in the least connected or being able to stand in a temporal relation with it. I do not in the least hereby mean to refute empty space; that may well exist where perceptions do not reach, and thus where no empirical cognition of simultaneity takes place. (KrV A213-4/B260-1, also A28/B44)

Although this and other passages in the first Critique can support my view, I do not want to draw too heavily on that work for the sake focusing on the pre-Critical works. But here we see clear evidence of the following claims: (1) perception is of empirical objects (extended matter, appearances) in space, (2) the cognitive subject’s orientation in space and time is essential to experience, (3) Kant still thinks of space in nature as filled with a material influence, and (4) rather than assembling data into representations, we are engaged in orienting our empirical representations of singular experiences into the framework of the whole world, thus making a

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“chain” that can reach to the whole of possible experience. Quotes such as this are used, for example, by Westphal, to show that Kant is inconsistent and, against his own promotion of idealism, is a sort of transcendental realist (Westphal 2004, pp. 80–1). But such a reading is dependent on the assumption of the “sensationist” thesis that “sensations are nonintentional mental states that do not, of themselves, present objects to the mind” and, thus, do not present us relata in spatio-temporal relations, except insofar as the mind interjects judgments that these sensations constitute an object (Westphal 2004, p. 13; George 1981, pp. 236, 240). Only if space and time are relegated to mental states and to the product of our own processing will this empirical perceptual realism seem at odds with Kant’s transcendental idealism. For Kant to be empirically and directly realistic about the fact that perceiving relations of simultaneity and succession, before and after, next to, and so on (B-series relations), it is required that material forces impinge on us and for us to occupy a relation within that field. What Westphal misses is that transcendental idealism stems from the fact that the capacity of our essentially indexical, directional, A-series relations is what makes possible there even being any determinate individuation of nature into affecting, determinate cells of material force. It is the framing that individuates the relata that we then experience. Independent of that, there is only the possibility of infinite determination of any number of framings and individuations of the vector space.33 But even characterizing it as a vector space in the absence of a cognitive being is misleading because that is predicated on the assumption of a set of rules that define a perspective of some determination of other (cognition). More accurately, this field in itself is the mere possibility of the formation of determinate relata and the relations between them.34 That possibility, as we know from Kant’s past metaphysics, could be entirely ideational. All we can say about the world absent the assumption of any such possible finite, sensible cognitive framework is that it is a “transcendental object” or objects (KrV A288/B344). [This object in itself] is the cause of appearance (thus not itself appearance), and … cannot be thought of either as magnitude or as reality or as substance, etc. (since these concepts always require sensible forms in which they determine an object); it therefore remains completely unknown whether such an object is to be encountered within or without us, whether it would be canceled out along with sensibility or whether it would remain even if we took sensibility away. (KrV A288/B344)

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While it is obvious that we are thinking  of this transcendental object through general concepts from pure reason that do not “determine an object,” such thinking is problematic rather than assertoric. Undoubtedly, Kant believes there is a ground that is the possibility of spatio-temporal objects. We know that Kant’s metaphysical vision has always been that this is the divine idea of a possible world and the essences that he creates. Of course, in the Critical era, he admits that we cannot affirm this metaphysical vision. We cannot even say whether this ground could be encountered outside of us, through some form of contact, or within us, as would be the case if it were a Platonic or divine idea accessible through tapping into our connection with God. Such a placing of things-in-themselves inside us sounds bizarre as long as one is thinking of them as the sources of affection or the objects outside of us under a different description. While many scholars continue to advance the idea that there are intrinsic properties of substances that are the ground of appearances in the Critical Era (Langton 1998; Allais 2015, p. 231; Van Cleve 1999, p. 150), I believe that such talk relies on applying notions of number, determinate individuation, and distinctions such as external-internal to things-in-themselves, which the subreptic axioms do not allow. If the description offered by scholars of things-in-themselves and their properties is such that they cannot be ideas and, in fact, cannot be ideas in the mind of God (i.e. the real in all concepts that make up the divine schema of a (best) possible world), then scholars have continued to utilize subreptic axioms. In any case, the view that I have offered with regard to time does what Allais says is needed to avoid implausible interpretations of Kant’s idealism: it denies that appearances are mental entities but “still captures a significant sense in which appearances are mind-dependent” (Allais 2015, p. 127). Although Allais has a subtle account of “mind-dependence” in terms of “essentially manifest qualities” that objects have the power to produce in us but which require reference to the possible experience in which they can manifest, she continues to hold that “space is the form in which we need to arrange sensations to represent objects” or “the structure in which we organize the sensory input in our representation of the world” (Allais 2015, p. 188). She explains her view in terms of a person looking through a clear but curved glass, giving rise to a perceived feature of things (curvature) that they do not have on their own, independent of their being experienced, but which is not, she claims, simply in the perceiver’s head.35 To reiterate, my response to this and any such perceptual reading of Kant’s theory of space and time is that it misunderstands the

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transcendental nature of mind-dependence. Space, time, and the individuation of motions and forces are mind-dependent not because we arrange sensations to represent objects. They are mind-dependent because the perspective of a cognitive subject establishes a frame, a metric, and a set of rules for altering that frame which determines the possibilities of what will count as relata, relations, and affective force.36 Perhaps the following metaphor will help. All perceptual accounts of Kant’s theory of space and time believe the issue to be how we assemble a single image, like a painter arranging color on a canvass. There is the sensory data (the paint) that has to be given form so that the end product is a picture of something within the frame. Leaving the analogy aside, maybe this is an automatic function of the sense organs, a pre-processing function of the mind, or a conceptual, judgmental function of the intellect, but it is still focused on the construction of a representation. To return to metaphors, I maintain, instead, that Kant thinks of us more as directors of a film. Kant’s theory of space and time is about how the director’s camera and its frame establish a world outside of the frame, but the camera (or the senses) just directly captures what is within the frame. Kant has come to understand that the camera does more than determine the outline of the picture that will end up on individual frames of film. By establishing a frame, the camera establishes what are the given and possible relata, the filmed and the filmable, and sets up determinate relations between them, even if they are off-­ screen. The camera has a frame rate that determines the simple moment of time, and it contains the rules for its own continuous transformation in space and time through action (its possibilities of movement). It functions transcendentally to establish the real possibility of all such enframings.37 Thus, it individuates and establishes relations outside what is presently given within its frame. Now, of course, the film camera does this within the empirical world of already individuated objects. So, we depart from the analogy when we think of nature as continua that are capable of infinite individuation, which means that nature itself has no individuation into relata, no determination into quantitative relations, and no qualitative or directional distinction.38 Absent our determining perspective, we are left with “the transcendental ground of this unity” that is the world, which we know Kant has previously been committed to as a sort of monadology, but which he calls in the first Critique a “mere something, about which we would not understand what it is even if someone could tell us” (KrV A277/B333).39 Any attempt to describe that realm is inevitably from the point of view of a possible,

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sensibly intuitive observer of some sort or else it would be from a perspective of a “faculty of cognition entirely distinct from the human not merely in degree but even in intuition and kind” (i.e. God) (KrV A277-8/B333). What the world is like in itself remains one of “those transcendental questions, however, that go beyond nature” and that “we will never be able to answer, even if all of nature is revealed to us, since it is never given to us to observe our own mind with any other intuition than that of our inner sense” (KrV A278/B334). That last remark does not mean that we are trapped behind the screen of our own mind. I take Kant to be saying that we can never outstrip the original upsurge of the cognitive subject, that is, being essentially indexical and oriented within the A-series relations of time and space. This (self)intuitive activity of the living cognitive being is the “mystery of the origin of our sensibility,” in the specific sense that we, unlike mere infinitely divisible, moving matter and composite bodies, constitute a determinate spatio-temporal simple and orientation (KrV A279/B335).

The Deflationary Account of Kant’s Theory of Space In one of the earliest detailed studies of Kant’s theory of space in English, Garnett argues, with very little textual evidence to support him, that a three-stage transformation takes place around 1769. First, he claims that Kant comes to the conclusion “that space is a pure intuition and a pure form of empirical intuition” from Euler’s comments in his Reflections (Garnett 1939, pp.  124, 119; Euler 1967, §14–5). Personally, I see no way to arrive at this thesis based on Euler, given that his view seems to be that we do arrive at the idea of space through reflection on and empirical abstraction from sensible bodies themselves and not just their properties. Garnett then believes that Kant supplements this view with a theory about the synthetic nature of “geometry and mechanics” (Garnett 1939, pp. 119, 120). But one could legitimately find multiple sources of this idea in Kant’s own writing of the 1760s.40 Garnett wishes to divide Kant’s theory of space up into separate stages so that he might exclude what he takes to be the mistaken third stage of development, in which space is said to be unreal (Garnett 1939, p. 139). I mention this because we can say that Garnett’s aim is to eliminate from Kant’s theory any metaphysical claims and, thus, to make him into an empirical realist. The threat of

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subjectivism and phenomenalism, which haunts the idea that space and time are mental forms of processing, motivates Garnett to search for the “realistic implication of his theories of space,” which is, in effect, to deflate his theory into an epistemic thesis that establishes that our knowledge of objects in space is necessary (Garnett 1939, p. 203). He claims that space is independent of the self and the conditions of the act of perception, and thus by its very nature guarantees that in perception the mind is contact with an order of things external to, and independent of, itself and whatever subjective conditions the act of perception may involve (Garnett 1939, p. 204)

This a bold revision of Kant’s view that of course cannot hold up textually, leading Garnett to argue that there is a patchwork of views at work in the Critical era. Ultimately, Garnett’s path shares with Allison the aim to “deontologize” space and to make Kant’s doctrine into “the conditions of knowledge” (Allison 2004, p. 121; Garnett 1939, p. 216).41 Yet, in spite of his attempt to eliminate any metaphysical notion of mind-dependence, I am largely in agreement with Garnett’s avoidance of phenomenalism and acceptance of a realism about space, objects, and our perception of them. That is to say, he is right, although for the wrong reasons, that we should not take the individual subject’s act of perception (thought of as the processing of sensory data) to be the reason why space is said to be subjective. What is of interest to Kant is the framing that our human perspective in general and the cognitive subject in particular brings to the world by being in the world as an active being.42 From that perspective, space is not independent of the (transcendental) self and is the form of the perspective of all cognitive subjects that are spatial and temporal as we are. Of course, that transcendental perspectivism should not ignore the fact that some actual cognitive subject as the instantiation of that perspective is needed as literally providing the form (the metrical and rules of ordering) of the world. Ironically, it is through this most metaphysical of approaches to the notion of mind-dependence that perceptual, direct realism can be salvaged. Not all epistemic approaches attempt to excise the metaphysical implications of Kant’s views. For example, Buroker recognizes that if space and time are understood as subjective ways of ordering data, then absent “perceivers with these forms of intuition, space and time would not exist” (Buroker 2006, pp. 40, 59–60).43 Buroker’s approach nevertheless maintains the deflationary line of thinking in which Kant’s theses are converted

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into an account of “the nature of space and time cognition” (Buroker 2006, p. 36). A shift from “the ontological status of space to the nature of spatial experience” supposedly takes place (Buroker 1991, p.  327). So rather than offering a positive ontological thesis about the reality of space and time, its “empirical reality” is converted into the claim that spatio-­ temporal truth claims are “objectively valid” for us (Buroker 2006, p. 60). If pushed to explain why this validity is only “for us,” epistemic interpretations tend to revert toward the psychological readings and claim that “virtually all aspects of experience, both sensible and intellection, are transcendentally ideal, or contributed by the subject rather than the object known” (Buroker 1981, p. 77). In some sense, the epistemic-deflationary approach thrives because of the ambiguity of the notion of appearance— sometimes being something “fundamentally mental” and other times being “the empirical object we experience through the sensible data of intuition” (Buroker 2006, pp. 42, 44, 59). This ambiguity is thought to be not pernicious because it maintains a single cognitive referent and is merely shifting the description. Against such an approach, Paul Guyer has offered a lasting criticism. Are these views not simply deflating transcendental idealism and subject-dependence into “anodyne conceptual analysis” that amount to the uninteresting analytic claim that objects, as truthfully judged and conceived by us, are bound by the conditions of human truth claims (Guyer 1987, p.  338)? It would seem so. Another advocate of the deflationary approach argues that Kant’s account amounts to just such a “truistic-seeming proposition that we can only know things in so far as our knowledge is limited by the conditions imposed upon it by our faculties” (Winterbourne 2007, p. 140). Allison attempts to defend this anodyne analysis by saying that others, such as Leibniz, have denied. But that does not mean that it is not still trivially true. Collins’s work similarly tries to eliminate any sort of metaphysical notion of idealism. His interpretation is intended to basically have no other ontological commitment than to appearances (objects of possible experience). He believes that, in order to do that, he has to eliminate the ontological distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances and make it, like Henry Allison, into two descriptions of the same object (Collins 1999, p.  173; Allison 2004, p.  23).44 He believes that this is essential in order to eliminate phenomenalism, because, it would seem, if we grant unique ontological status to things-in-themselves, then this degrades the world of appearances into mere mental states or illusions (Allison 2004, p.  4). Having looked at the pre-Critical writings where

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there is a robust division between worlds, it is worth noting that Kant never believed such a degradation of appearances was inevitable, but perhaps that was only because he was able to ground space and time in substances. After he adopts the idea that space and time are the forms of human intuition, then that language seems to threaten phenomenalism. Collins’s goal is to show that “the objects of perception” or “outer things … are not just ideas” (Collins 1999, p. 23). Of course, I agree that appearances are “spatiotemporal, enduring, nonmental, physical, and public things” (Collins 1999, p.  24). Yet it seems to me that Allison’s and Collins’s deontologizing move has the exact opposite effect than the one that they intend. Neither seem able to break away from the idea “things-­ in-­themselves are the realities that originally affect us” (Collins 1999, p. 28). Although they would say this is just an alternative semantics and not an ontological distinction, the sticking point remains the doctrines of space and time. If those doctrines are taken to mean that “we apprehend nonmental things by spatializing them” and this means that “things-in-­ themselves affect us and, as a consequence of the receptive component of our cognitive constitution, things-in-themselves appear to us as objects in space,” then some commitment to the same objects that we experience having natures other than how they appear to us seems inevitable (Collins 1999, p. 55). Collins is clear that what affects us cannot be said to endure in time or have extension, but, in a sense, ontology stays bound to knowledge and reference (Collins 1999, p. 55).45 Still, Collins’s remarks should strike us as odd. Affection is relational, physical, and spatio-temporal. Things-in-themselves do not consist of forces; they consist of inner relations and, presumably, some intelligible form of connection, like their relation to God, which is fundamentally other. Therefore, they are not what affect us. If one wants to say that the outer appearance of things-in-­ themselves—their virtual presence as motions, forces, and bodies—affect us, this is obviously permissible in the pre-Critical works. But Kant must move away from that language because it implies that things-in-themselves generate the forces of nature through their own power. Upon recognizing that such a claim was utilizing a subreptic axiom, Kant can no longer endorse it. Therefore, he must switch to speaking of things-in-themselves as the “entirely unknown” ground that “would still never be known through the most enlightened cognition of their appearance” (KrV A42-3/B59-60). Such an idea will stem from reason (what Kant confusingly calls “understanding” in the Dissertation) and not from perception (intuition) or understanding (categorical judgment in the first Critique).

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Deflationist scholars have tried to find a position that does not require any ontological commitment to strange or spooky objects that degrade the ontological status of the world.46 Ironically, I find that the best way to avoid that degradation is to recognize the fundamental ontological divide between the idea of things-in-themselves and appearances. If things-in-­ themselves are the mere rational idea of the ground of the spatio-temporal world, then it becomes so “entirely unknown” that it can only be a regulative principle, an article of faith, rather than a full-fledged ontological commitment. In other words, by attempting to deontologize the distinction between things as we experience them and things as they are in themselves, scholars inevitably vacillate between two positions. Firstly, the deflationist would like this distinction to be an epistemic distinction between things considered as possible objects “subject to the sensible conditions of cognition” versus “the same things as they are in themselves,” the latter being an empty referent (Allison 2004, p. 24). This is intended to convert the form of intuition into a methodological or metaphilosophical reflection on the conditions of “warranted assertability relativized to a point of view” (Allison 2004, p. 48). Secondly, in their attempt to preserve some sort of realism, what the deflationist must remain committed to is something like the ultimate reality of the relata outside of us and independent of the subject-dependent relations of space and time. This leads scholars inevitably to say that there is a “similarity or analogy between our ‘human space’ as a form of sensibility and a ‘real’ space pertaining to things as they are in themselves” (Allison 2004, pp.  130, 471–2). According to Westphal, Kant is committed to something like these noumenal analogues, which he takes as evidence for his hidden transcendental realism (Westphal 2004, p. 55).47 There is wide variation on how to characterize these relata, but it is felt that they must remain mind-independent so as to keep Kant from phenomenalism. I believe that this is false: no such preservation of ultimate (transcendentally realistic) relata is needed to keep Kant from phenomenalism. If we recognize nature in itself as consisting merely of the indeterminate possibility of different relations, lacking in any ultimate relata, then the construction of those relata and relations, outside of the mind, by our presence and perspective is actually more successful in overcoming the ontological degradation of the natural world and resisting phenomenalism than any deflationist account. There are many problems with the deflationist account that have been detailed in the literature (e.g. Allais 2015). My concern is what does it mean for that view to say that space and time “come from us” or that “the

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system of spatial predicates is imposed by the subject” (Collins 1999 pp. 72, 65)? It has something to do with our “cognitive constitution” and our representational apparatus for Collins, but in order to keep this from becoming phenomenalist, it must be deflated into claims merely about the scope of knowledge. In other words, Collins divides Kant’s theory of space into an epistemic and cognitive theory of representing space and into an objective (metaphysical) theory of space that remains largely untouched. Thus, he clearly moves toward Garnett’s empirical realism when he concludes that “the reality we perceive … would exist even if the human understanding and human experience did not exist at all” (Collins 1999, p. 143). The subject-dependent aspect of Kant’s theory pertains to only how we “our transient, disorganized, and simple elementary representations are developed by our mental powers into representations of stable objects of perception” (Collins 1999, p. 143). This leads Collins to advocate for what he calls a “subjective relational theory” of space, which is just a relational theory of space (Collins 1999, pp. 70, 192). It seems to me correct, as Melnick argues, that both deflationary approaches to Kant’s idealistic aims and the “cognitive processing interpretations” inevitably reduce space to a secondary quality like color or have to appeal to “space also existing objectively” (Melnick 2004, p. 4). There is a final deflationary approach that I will mention only briefly, as it is less an account of Kant’s theory of space and time as an abandonment of the significance of these notions altogether. This approach has two different sources—one historical and one contemporary. In contemporary terms, it is what might be called “conceptual scheme” internal realism or conceptualism. Its historical source is the Marburg School of Neo-­ Kantianism, exemplified by Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience, which argued that the 1770 theory of space and time was not yet true transcendentalism. Cohen believed that 1770 theory of space and time was a psychological account of perceptual imposition, but that the first Critique overcomes this problem because the categories and the judgments containing them are involved at the most fundamental level of experience. Rather than a theory mental processing, Kant offers a theory of scientific judgment. In Cohen’s words, the perceptual view is merely an account of the “psycho-physiological organization of the human,” whereas he argues that transcendental method as a theory of judgment and science only begins when there is conceptualized experience (Cohen 2015, pp. 108–9). This school of interpretation is found, for example, in Cassirer:

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The transcendental philosophy does not have to do primarily with the reality of space or of time, whether these are taken in a metaphysical or in a physical sense, but it investigates the objective significance of the two concepts in the total structure of our empirical knowledge. It no longer regards space and time as things, but as ‘sources of knowledge.’ (Cassirer 1923, p. 411)

Thus, “critical thought” looks “backwards at the origin and foundations of knowledge” and reflects on the “conditions of scientific production” or the “functions in the construction of empirical reality” (Cassirer 1923, p. 210). In this way, “metaphysics must be the metaphysics of the sciences, the theory of the principles of mathematics and natural knowledge” (Cassirer 1981, p. 154). This approach is similar to the interpretation of Kant offered by contemporary “anti-realists” and the conceptualist attack on the dogmas of empiricism. The anti-psychologism of the Neo-Kantian reading is quite easily aligned with the spirit of Abela’s criticism of the empiricist prejudice of the division between “organizing scheme” and “informative content” and his attempt to recover empirical realism within Kant’s philosophy (Abela 2002, p.  3). Abela offers significant criticisms of other deflationist approaches, for example, showing how their formalist and epistemic approaches focus so much on the mind that they lose any meaningful sense of the world and the empirical object (Abela 2002, pp. 32–42). He is, I believe, right that Kant’s empirical realism requires a robust notion of empirical objects not only as epistemic references but also as affecting objects. This rejection of the so-called Myth of the Given (the organizing scheme added to informative content model) and the psychologism of mental construction of empirical representation is essential to avoiding many interpretative problems. Abela’s alternative is what he calls the Priority-of-Judgement approach, which he describes as the view that “the perceptual act begins and ends within the context of object-oriented judgements” (Abela 2002, pp.  50–1). Abela’s deflationism holds that there are “no judgement-free entities,” and therefore, any non-empirical objects and any sort of significant idealism can be eliminated (Abela 2002, p. 52). Like the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, Abela’s Priority-of-­ Judgement view sees a sort of transcendental grammar as being the subjective-­contribution to experience. Kant can remain agnostic about any metaphysical commitments beyond empirically real objects, because everything that arises in experience does so within the context of a set of beliefs or judgments about the world. Rather than the empiricist scheme-content

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model, in which data is received and ordered to form representations, Abela sees Kant as focusing a “second-order activity” of a system of objective reference and the truth conditions of judgment.

The Constructivist Account of Kant’s Theory of Space In this section, I want to discuss two so-called constructivist approaches to Kant’s theory of space. The first one is essentially what I have just termed the deflationary conceptualist approach, so I will be brief when discussing it. Rockmore describes constructivism as the thesis that “a necessary condition of knowledge is that the knower construct, constitute, make, or produce its cognitive object as a necessary condition of knowledge” (Rockmore 2007, p. 9). This alone does not distinguish constructionism from numerous other views, particularly given the ambiguity in the notion of the “cognitive object.” Rockmore is actually interested in “constructivist epistemology,” by which he means the sort of conceptualism that rejects the meaningfulness of any appeal to the “real” outside of what is internal to possible experience and rejects any sense in which representation either directly or indirectly connects us to a “real” (mind-­independent) world (Rockmore 2007, p. 15).48 I have called such views deflationary in that they attempt to reduce the nature of Kant’s ontological commitments. Abela calls such a view “epistemic humanism” as a sort of “anti-­ realism” that pins knowledge, reference, and, thus, reality to our epistemic capacities (Abela 2002, p. 17). In Rockmore’s terms, a deflationary, anti-­ metaphysical, constructionist approach holds that we have “knowledge of no more than the empirical world as it is given in experience without further reference to or claims about the mind-independent world” (Rockmore 2007, p. 201). There are two things to say about this conception of constructionism. Firstly, Rockmore does not think that Kant actually embodies it. Instead, he believes that Kant continues to hold that representations constitute the relationship between the mind and “mind-independent objects” (Rockmore 2007, p. 203). He does believe that Kant’s conception of the Copernican Revolution in philosophy leans toward constructivism, but he does not believe that he developed that idea distinctly into what is known as anti-representationalism. Secondly, constructivism, according to Rockmore, only truly appears in German idealism when we arrive at an intersubjective, linguistic, and social account of the

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development of knowledge. One serious problem such accounts (epistemic, social constructivism) is that if it takes too serious the idea of the theory-dependence of the “objects of cognition,” then its ontology is beset with arbitrariness and its knowledge threatens to become relativistic (Brittain 2001b, pp.  77–8; Rockmore 2007, pp.  228–235). This is the problem Abela discusses in terms of the inadequate concern that epistemic interpretations pay to the empirical object and its unity. This all suggests that Kant is an unlikely fit with constructivism so defined, which is why this tradition is known as being more Neo-Kantian than Kantian. But there is a constructivist approach to Kant’s thinking that is rather different than the previous account.49 It has been developed by Arthur Melnick and has been an influence on my own account. In an early articulation, Melnick argues that intuitions can be thought of as demonstratives (this, that), which can be thought of as my indicating “what goes on around me (here) now” (Melnick 1983, p. 339). On the relational and absolute theories of space and time, the designation of the “here” and the “now” indicates preexisting relations that belong to things (either objects or their places). Melnick proposes that rather than thinking of intuition as revealing the “here” and “now” that is intrinsic to objects, places, or events, such objective reference “is replaced by spatial behavior introduced by the subject” (Melnick 1983, p. 339). In effect, Melnick’s behavioral constructivism creates a parity between representation and behavior in the sense that the semantic or referential function of representation is the actual spatio-temporal behavior of the subject. While he retains the language of representation, the reference of those representations is essentially the operations that we perform or “construct,” that is, our moving about, being affected, and demonstratively indicating “this” or “that.” The result is that he is not thinking of representation as discursively mediating and picturing an external reality. It is a purely procedural account of representation. Melnick also regards this as a theory of what space and time is: If I draw or construct a line, an actual individual expanse is thereby made present without sensory affection by objects. If we take expanses of space to exist in such constructions, we have one way of understanding how there can be pure intuition. A constructivist view, then, is at least consistent with Kant’s characterization of space and time as given in pure intuition, so long as we note that it is by our constructing that they are thus given. By a constructivist view of space and time, I mean a view parallel to the constructivist

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account of numbers in mathematics, according to which numbers exist only in procedures; say as termini of possible countings. (Melnick 2004, p. 4)

My concern with this account is that the notion of an “ontology” is equated with a “theory of reference”—the “referential-ontological form of language” (and, thus, representation) is “operationalized or schematized in terms of behavior” (Melnick 1983, p. 353).50 There are several intriguing and problematic aspects to this approach that are worth discussing. Melnick intends to offer not just an account of how our representations have reference to the world by being operationalized in terms of physical motions and mental shifts in attention, but to support the ontological claim that space and time have no objective reality and are “nothing but” the form of our capacity to construct relations and be affected (Melnick 1983, p. 344). Part of his justification for the latter claim concerns the continuity of space and time. Melnick claims that it is “only the flowing nature of spatial production or construction that can characterize space as a continuum” (Melnick 1989, p. 5; 2004, p. 22).51 He argues that mere sensory reception cannot perceive spatial continuity and that the only way for space not to be thought of as discrete relations, points, or places is to recognize that it is a “flowing construction” that is “not composed out of parting (segmenting) constructions” (Melnick 1989, p. 193). It would, I believe, be odd if this was Kant’s motivating concern as the notion of continuity is “not even pronounced in the Transcendental Aesthetic” (Vuillemin 1969, p.  142). In fact, it seems fairly clear that the underlying motivation for Kant’s theory of the subjectivity of space and time is that the experience and mathematics of these two fields show them to be infinite and continuous.52 My sense is that Melnick has the motivations for the subjectivity of space and time reversed. It is not the case that Kant infers to the subjectivity of space and time, because it is only within our own flowing constructive activity that continuity can be preserved. That argument is actually question begging, because isolating continuity to our own actions seems to assume the subjectivity of true space and time, which is supposedly the conclusion. It seems to me that Kant’s thinking runs the opposite direction. Space and time as given in the world (in material extension and the relations between extended bodies) are continuous. We are faced with the unquestionable and mathematically certain labyrinth of the continuum. We do perceive it, and mathematics proves it. But because of this continuity and infinite divisibility, there are no ultimate relata or intrinsic determinations. The

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perspective that we take to divide up and mark as what counts as a simple point or limit is what brings about determinacy and individuation. Thus, Kant’s thought runs from the phenomenological and mathematical certainty of continuity to the subjectivity or perspective-dependence of natural relations. By assuming that only subjective, constructing behavior fulfills the demand for continuity, Melnick excludes continuity from the rest of nature and from perception without justification. What is important within Melnick’s view is that it does recognize that the contribution of the subject is its addition of something to reality and to the world, something that the world would otherwise not have and which is essential for there to be the natural objects and their relations. That truly metaphysical, world-constitutive function of the subject is one that all views entirely avoid except for the phenomenalists. The problem is that Melnick does not discover the right subjective contribution to reality, and the aspects on which he focuses fail to plausibly be solely a contribution of the subject. As we know from the 1768 argument and from the discussion of time, it is the qualitative, directional aspects of space and time that necessitate the subjective turn. Melnick’s constructivism, like epistemic constructivism, intends to avoid any significant commitment to things-in-themselves. He argues that we cannot think of objects existing objectively in space and time waiting for us to reach them via our constructions. This exclusion of objects from position and even existence outside of the course of subjective, empirical constructions is ultimately, I think, an untenable position. Insofar as Melnick is making the deflationist claim about a mere theory of reference, then he is not wrong. Our references and representations contain an intrinsic reference to subjective behaviors of moving about and being affected. And any reference to some potential representation takes place within the scope of such behavior. But Melnick seems to mean more than this. The worry, as Brittan argues, is that “the reduction of quantities to measuring operations” is “tantamount to empirical idealism” (Brittan 2001b, p. 78). Melnick attempts to avoid this by interpreting empirical idealism as complete phenomenalism or the idea that space exists only in my sensations and mind rather than in behavioral constructions (Melnick 1989, p. 468). Yet, it surely is a form of empirical idealism that objects only exist and have position insofar as they actually appear to cognitive subjects in the course of constructions (behaviors). Berkeley did not actually think that objects are only in our minds because he had appeal to God to preserve them in their positions outside of human experience. So Melnick’s view does avoid

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a slide into a phenomenalism of the mind, but the problem reemerges as a phenomenalism of behavior. That problem is seen in Melnick’s attempt to capture the relational and subject-dependent reality of “appearances” by saying that they are “things whose entire existence is in their ‘showing up’ or being manifest,” and then trying to avoid the phenomenalist implication of that by calling their essence “presentability” rather than being actually present, a move not unlike the deflationist appeal to counterfactual necessity (Melnick 2004, p. 148, my stress). On the one hand, from the perspective of natural-scientific consciousness, Melnick is absolutely right that phenomena have no “intrinsic existence beyond, or in addition to, their properly entering into relations of presentation or manifestation,” but, on the other hand, he is mistaken that this means that we cannot say that objects are “waiting to affect us” (Melnick 2004, pp. 148–9).53 Appearances, as a field of infinitely divisible force relations, do only exist relative to the perspective of the sort of cognitive spatio-temporal subject who can bring determinacy to that field. Otherwise, abstracting from the perspective of such a being, we have merely what Kant calls an idea of reason, an idea of the ground of possibility of such relations. The indeterminately relational universe may just as well be regarded atemporally or eternally (simultaneous, as if the whole of the universe filled a single moment) rather than successively. It may just as well be regarded as a single point or as an infinite single expanse, for even the point (i.e. the tiniest thing we can measure) still contains an infinity of relations. It is conceivable that there could be a being located within what we take to be a simple point, whose perspective and system of measure would find the interior of that point to be an infinite or unending process of measurement. As Kant’s lectures note, “a drop of water has as many parts as the solar system” (V-­Met/Dohna, AA 28:662). Or the universe may be regarded as the mere principles or ideas that the intuitive intellect (God) elects to realize. Everything, ontologically speaking, depends on the determinacy of perspective. The view I advocate for might be called a transcendental constructivism in that it believes that the existence of such a determinate perspective individuates and constructs the whole of the universe, changing mere logical possibility into real possibility. The specification of one determinate relation and the coming-tobe of a set of rules determining the possibilities of transforming and extending that relation brings determinacy to the entire field. It determines what counts as the simple elements of space and time, individuates the forces relations vis-à-vis the physical presence that is “here” and

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“now,” and those force relations then determine the rest of the field because they are interconnected to it. For this reason, and contra Melnick, we can very well say that objects are sitting there waiting for us and that we perceive the spatio-temporal relations in which they stand. But absent any cognitive subject, who is capable of an oriented “here” and “now,” then we have no reason to assume that this possible world is actualized.54 There are several reasons why Melnick’s constructivism cannot license the existence of objects being in spatio-temporal relations waiting for our actual, empirical spatio-temporal behaviors to reach them. Melnick believes that space and time are nothing but pure intuitions and that our own spatio-temporal behavior is pure intuition. This strikes me as a mistake for two reasons. First, while there is an a priori intuition of space, Kant is clear that that alone is not all of space: it is the A-series. Secondly, spatial behavior (motion) and temporal behavior (awareness) are themselves simply appearances. They are in space and time like everything else. That is to say, they are empirical and positional. Our experience of our own behavior (actions) has the same ontological status (appearance) as everything else. What Melnick’s view gets right is that there is something within the experience of our activity that is our own addition, that is not received, and that cannot be found merely in the motions of bodies. But it is not kinesthetic awareness of movement or our constructive behaviors. It is the essential indexical “now” in relation to past and future and the “here” in relation to the directional orientations (left-right-front-back-up-­­ down) that allow constructive behaviors. We can better understand the motivations for the behavioral constructivist theory when we recognize that Melnick’s early work was a functionalist account, more akin to traditional conceptualism, in which space and time were identified with the cognitive functions that they played in the formation of an “ontology” (by which he means our theory of the world and, thus, a theory of reference or semantics) (Melnick 1973, p. 143). In that work, the givenness of space in pure intuition was called a “pre-intuition” that acted as a “background” to all determinate experiences (Melnick 1973, p. 11). But Melnick’s early work was largely an account of the structure of our concepts. Thus, the problem of the reference of cognition to the world in a non-discursive way was not solved, which led Melnick to turn toward behavioral constructivism. His early theory, like the deflationary accounts, attempts to render the contribution of the subject (and transcendental idealism in general) into the anodyne statement that meaningful reference essentially contains

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a reference to the subject of a possible experience (Melnick 1973, p. 161). So Melnick’s constructivist developments are a unique path away from conceptualist internal realism to a practical, behavior-based idealism. While it places space and time outside of the purely mental and outside of the sense organs, it does not have a strong enough version of empirical realism or of our relationship to non-mental objects, because space and time seem to only be found in the subject’s actual practices.

The Dependency of Space on the Subject The previous sections have outlined some common interpretations of Kant’s Critical theory of space. It also engaged several of the thornier problems of Kant’s Critical metaphysics, although in a far too limited way. But rather than delve too deeply into multiple centuries long debates, I need to make the textual case for my own account of the Critical theory of space, at least as it is articulated in 1770. The opening lines of the Dissertation begin with an introduction of the part-whole relation and a new definition of analysis and synthesis. Analysis divides “substantial compounds” or “wholes” and aims toward simple parts, whereas synthesis moves from parts to the whole and aims toward complete synthesis of “a world” (MSI, AA 2:387). Neither process reaches these goals. Kant then introduces another division of method: our philosophizing can take place by general concepts or by a construction that provides an instantiation of the concept “to oneself in the concrete by a distinct intuition” (MSI, AA 2:387). Division by general concepts leaps ahead of concrete, distinct intuitions and posits either an actual infinity or a simple by using the purely rational notion of “composition.” This method, we must acknowledge, is subreptic in nature, and not actually representative of the purely rational method utilized in theorizing about the intelligible world. That is, legitimate pure metaphysics in 1770 does not attempt to totalize the sensible world through rational concepts to arrive at simples or the world-whole. Both analysis and synthesis proceed in time and only ever through a finite series, whereas Kant is clear that we are nevertheless confronted in every expanse with infinity or, at least, inexhaustibility of possible analysis and synthesis. Thus, unlike the Transcendental Aesthetic and the opening of the first Critique, Kant does begin the Dissertation with a discussion of continuity.55 So it seems quite clear, contrary to Melnick’s argument, that we are confronted by continuous magnitudes. The continuous and the infinite are ideas that Kant has utilized in his earlier works, and he always

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believed that the notions held deep problems for Leibnizians. He never seems to have accepted the notion of physical points or of atoms and the void. The discrete has had no place in nature. When reflecting on the idea that we are confronted with “the never to be completed series” both in the universe and in any given magnitude, we see that the demand for totality from the understanding (the simple, the whole) is in conflict with the world as empirically given and as a priori intuitively given (MSI, AA 2:391). It is this confrontation that leads Kant to see that these notions of continuous space and time do not belong “to the understanding but only to the conditions of sensible intuition” (MSI, AA 2:392). Before turning to the explicit discussion of space, it is worth providing an anti-psychological reading of section two of the Dissertation, where the initial discussion of the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible takes place. The mistake of internalizing Kant’s entire theory of sensible intuition, except for the reception of raw data, has been called, as I have mentioned, the “internalist interpretation” by Saugstad, to which he contrasts his own “externalist interpretation” (Saugstad 1992, p. 381).56 Sensibility is defined by Kant as our capacity to be “affected in a definite way by the presence of some object” (MSI, AA 2:392). Following Melnick, I take intuition to be understood bodily and behaviorally.57 “Moving about, circumscribing, and being affected is a Kantian intuition (outer intuition). Our capacity to be affected is just such moving about” (Melnick 1983, p. 340).58 It is already evident in Kant’s formulation that what is also essential to our being affected by some object is our presence to it and its presence to us. This determination of our external situation is obviously of central importance and, as we know from the pre-Critical philosophy, establishing this external connection was always what Kant meant by establishing the capacity of one substance to be affected by and receptive to other entities. While cognition that is purely intellectual is without any situational information and, instead, penetrates to the timeless essence of a thing, sensible cognition is defined as being “dependent upon the special character of the subject in so far as the subject is capable of this or that modification by the presence of objects” (MSI, AA 2:392). Again, while the majority of scholars regard this in internalist and psychological terms as our ability to receive sensory data from without, there simply is no reason to not conceive of this as the ability of the subject to stand within a field of force relations and have them physically impinge upon us. After all, Kant has argued since 1747 that we need a body to have such internal changes of state. Thus, our cognition clearly depends on embodiment.

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One of the more psychological sounded passages in the Dissertation is the following: [1a] In a representation of sense there is, first of all, something which you might call the matter, namely, the sensation, and [1b] there is also something which may be called the form, the aspect namely of sensible things which arises according as the various things which affect the senses are co-­ ordinated by a certain natural law of the mind. [2a] Moreover, just as the sensation which constitutes the matter of a sensible representation is, indeed, evidence for the presence of something sensible, though in respect of its quality it is dependent upon the nature of the subject in so far as the latter is capable of modification by the object in question, [2b] so also the form of the same representation is undoubtedly evidence of a certain reference or relation in what is sensed, though properly speaking it is not an outline or any kind of schema of the object, but only a certain law, which is inherent in the mind and by means of which it co-ordinates for itself that which is sensed from the presence of the objects. [3] For objects, do not strike the senses in virtue of their form or aspect. [4] Accordingly, if the various factors in an object which affect the sense are to coalesce into some representational whole there is needed an internal principle in the mind in virtue of which those various factors may be clothed with a certain aspect, in accordance with stable and innate laws. (MSI, AA 392-3)

While it is clearly possible to translate all of this into a theory of mental processing, and Kant’s own language certainly lends itself to that, I believe it can be read entirely consistent with an externalist approach and according to the theory of perception seen in 1766 and 1768. That means that what is at stake is the orientation of objects in space and time relative to the body. Here is what an externalist translation of this passage would look like: [1a] To be able to contact and be affected by objects requires that we be susceptible through the senses to the force relations of objects to which we are present. [1b] And we also have to be able to orient those forces within the world, at the focus imaginarius, relative to the here and now, the future and the past, and the directions of the body. [2a] The matter, such as the force relations or light rays in the world, are obviously relativized in the sense that responsiveness to the quality of force depends upon our physical ability to contact it. So we can think of the matter that we empirically sense to be the ordinary objects and natural mediums that affect us. Alone or synchronically, the matter points to “something sensible” because it only

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becomes “a chair five feet from me” when it is directionally oriented in the world. [2b] This orientation of the thing in the world takes the relations in what is sensed and, according to a “natural law of the mind,” they emerge in a location and direction relative to the “here” and the “now,” which are constructed by the subject’s presence itself. Undoubtedly, the positional relations that we establish between ourselves and objects, which have directional orientation in space and time, do indicate a “reference or relation” among objects, but these are not functions of the schema of the objects themselves. It is instead a function of our own position and perspective in the world and our  directional possibilities. [3] But while the “matter” or forces and their effects on us are how objects “strike the senses,” the “form or aspect” is not given empirically. It is an a priori aspect of experience dependent on self-intuition of the “now” and “here.” [4] To say that we “clothe” the “various factors in an object” in order and that we have a meaningful representational whole related to the whole of representation does not mean that we drape spatial and temporal properties on naked data. Instead, it means that we frame the given object and its present relations within a system of stable laws of spatio-temporal order, orientation, and transformation.

The fact that two competing descriptions of Kant’s view are possible is rarely noted. The fact that Kant tended to use a language that was more internalist than externalist helps to explain why scholars have ignored the latter for the former. But there are aspects of both views in Kant’s language and so we have a choice: we need to translate Kant’s language into one or the other views so that it is unambiguous. While most render it unambiguously internalist, the alternative is possible. We must recognize that even though the internalist reading has been dominant, there are many reasons not to simply accept it. The position is fraught with conceptual problems already discussed, and it cannot accommodate the aspects of Kant’s view and his language that are not internalist, whereas the externalist view is able to accommodate everything that appears in the internalist idiom. The transcendental realist within us wants to claim that the perspectival ordering of given objects into the field of possible experience is simply a subjective, representational mapping of an order that exists among objects themselves. It is essential to better understand why that is not so and why the order of the world we experience is the work of what Kant is calling a fixed law of the mind. The fundamental issue is the infinite, which Kant says that he is not making a case for, although he argues against the

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reasons given to reject it (MSI, AA 2:388–9). In fact, he gives a defense of the notion and proposes we understand it as follows: Suppose they conceive of the mathematical infinite as a magnitude which, when related to a measure treated as a unity, constitutes a multiplicity larger than any number; and suppose, further, that they had noticed that measurability here only denotes relation to the unity adopted by the human understanding as a standard of measurement, and by means of which it is only possible to reach the definite concept of a multiplicity by successively adding one to one, and the complete concept, which is called number, only by carrying out this progression in a finite time, then they would have seen very clearly that things which do not accord with a fixed law of a certain subject do not, for that reason, pass beyond all understanding. For there could be an understanding, though certainly not a human understanding, which might distinctly apprehend a multiplicity at a single glance, without the successive application of a measure. (MSI, AA 2:389n)

While Kant is arguing that the infinite clearly goes beyond anything we can intuit and requires a sort of being that could grasp either the infinite expanse of the whole of space or time in a single glance, it is not for that reason impossible or a paradox. But notice that the idea of “a fixed law” of the subject and of the mind is here understood as the designation of a metric and the physical possibility of a measuring procedure.59 Thus, the infinite is to be understood in relation to the finitude of our measuring behavior. Here we have a clear example of Kant taking what may seem like a psychological notion and translating it into the externalist viewpoint. And while we are tempted to reify the individuation and the order that the measuring procedure enacts, Kant is clear that we ought not do so. It is clearly said to be relative to the unit of measure. “Is there not something that is measured? Are there not relata already determined?” the realist will ask. Kant denies that this is so.60 I now turn to the five-lettered paragraphs (A–E) that make up Kant’s arguments that culminate with the claim that space is “subjective and ideal” (MSI, AA 2:404). Paragraph A intends to show that “the concept of space is not abstracted from outer sensations” (MSI, AA 2:402).61 Often scholars take this argument and its repetition in first Critique to be supporting the psychological idea that spatial properties are entirely contributed by the subject to their own representations and that we receive absolutely no spatial data in perception. Yet, Kant’s point is simply that I cannot have derived my concept of space entirely by receiving perceptions

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of objects and then abstracting from them. Prior to receiving any particular sensation, I am already locating it or “placing it outside of me by representing it as in a place which is different from the place in which I am myself” at the focus imaginarius (MSI, AA 2:402). For this to happen, I have to have an intuitive grasp of myself as “here” and “now” and oriented in a field of possible relations. Kant’s view can very well accept that we perceive places or the positional, quantitative spatial relations of, for example, this object being some measure of distance from this other object. Our notion of space cannot be merely empirically derived from the observation of such positional relations, because those positional relations always require reference to directionality—of something being “outside me” (beyond the “here”) and, thus, to be either in front or back of me, left or right of me, and so on. What this shows is how receptivity—having internal states that give us information about the world—requires us having a prior concept of the available, formal possibilities of order. Thus, to experience an object we must fit it (or it must appear) within that form (of the world): as being “there” relative to “here,” and so on. Thus, he remarks that “I may only conceive of things outside one another by locating them in different place in space” and that the very “possibility… of outer perceptions as such presupposes the concept of space” (MSI, AA 2:402). Given that the externalist reading is fundamentally opposed to the internalist tradition of interpretation, we will not learn much from an analysis of the literature on this argument as it appears in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique. Instead, I think it worth reflecting on why Kant has always believed that representational beings have to have a conception of the world in order to have outer relations, whereby the forces impinging on such a being are not merely causing other external motions and vibrations but are, instead, taken as providing information about the world. In a way, Kant is telling us that to be an intentional, cognitive being requires that one have both a sense of oneself and a sense of the world, so that the deliverances of the world can be regarded as being about the world. It is also the case that the fact that we only receive partial and limited information about the world, which is a function of our own finite perspective, means that we have to be able to see that information as partial, as being a fragment of a larger view. That is to say that in order to be able to have a perceptual view on the world, one has to be able to grasp the finite deliverances as part of and oriented within that larger frame.62 In many ways, Kant is showing how consciousness of the world requires what phenomenologists have called a sense of distance and separation of the self from the world in order to

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confront things as separable objects from us. Without this situational framing of experience, then the concern is that we would not have the sort of separation from the immediate sensory nature of experience that is required for it to be meaningful. So, in a way, the internalist view is not wrong to say that what is at stake here is the ability to represent objects. But rather than this being a psychological account of how the mind processes data in order to form images of objects, Kant takes for granted that we receive information about “things which are in space” and their relations. What he shows is that in order for that to be possible we must already, prior to affection, have to be able to construct (and not merely mentally) the spatio-temporal world and our place and orientation within it, so that such information can be referential in the first place. This self-locating in the world and the determination of directions wherein “this” and “that” will spring up has a fundamental priority over anything that might spring up. Although there is no reason to doubt that I perceive spatial objects (this and that) or determinate spatial magnitudes, Kant already firmly believes that such positional knowledge cannot give us knowledge of direction. Without a sense of direction  that comes from being embodied “here” and “now,” I could not locate sensations in places around me. Whereas paragraph A was an early version of the first metaphysical exposition of space from the Transcendental Aesthetic, paragraph B is a version of the third, B-edition metaphysical exposition. It states that “the concept of space is a singular representation embracing all things within itself; it is not an abstract common concept containing them under itself” (MSI, AA 2:402). This seems related to Euler’s claim that “space and position” are not “abstract ideas” like “genus and species” (Euler 1967, §14). As we have seen in the discussion of time, to call space a singular representation is to treat it as a representation of an individual like our cognition of the person of Plato or the city of Rome. Whereas the representation of Rome indicates an expanse of space and everything contained within it (even across time), our singular representation of space is of that which embraces all things. Fundamentally, Kant’s idea here is about the unity of space. As Kant will call it in the Aesthetic, these expositions of space are about its metaphysics and structure. Kant captures the unity of space by noting that when we talk of “several places,” they are, in fact, all considered to be “only parts of the same boundless space related to one another by a fixed position” (MSI, AA 2:402). While it is puzzling what this fixed position might be if space is merely the order given to sensations in the head, it is clear for the externalist that this position is in the first instance the “here.” From the

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“here,” it is a phenomenological truth that space, as a unified whole, is such that when I represent or contact or inhabit parts, relations, fields, or positions, then these are all interconnected to all such possible relations. Now, I would argue that not only is Kant’s language here not at all psychological, but the psychological account cannot do justice to what is being asserted. The idea of space as a unity is reinforced by the idea that “you can only conceive to yourself a cubic foot if it be bounded in all directions by the space which surrounds it” (MSI, AA 2:402). Now Kant has said two years earlier that one can imagine a universe containing nothing but a solitary hand, and while it was thought that it had to be left or right, it was not thought that it had to be bounded in all directions by space. I think what is crucial here is the subjective perspective: that you must conceive of a cubic foot (or any other spatial expanse or object) to yourself, which is to say as present to you and as something that you might experience. But then it must appear surrounded by space in all directions, because the progress of my experience extends along continuous paths in all directions. Thus, it is the nature of rigid continuous movement and the directionality of such motion, once a determinate metrical starting point (“here”) is established, that makes possible the unity of space as the singular ground of all possible experiences. While it is true that Kant has long contemplated the logical possibility of entirely discontinuous spatial worlds created by God, this was an intellectual point separated from the phenomenology of experience. Once we root ourselves within the sensible world, it would seem that all spaces and times must be reachable through synthesis or analysis (measuring behaviors). Kant’s argument about the unity of all expanses—their connectedness and boundedness within boundless space itself—is similar to the classic Epicurean argument for the infinity of space. The Dissertation has no separate discussion the infinity of space, but one will be added in the first Critique.63 Lucretius’s most famous arguments for that thesis are that (1) “nothing can have an extremity, unless there is something on the farther side to bound it” and (2) at every possible boundary of space we can imagine launching a spear beyond that boundary, so “no escape will ever be found from the limitless possibility of flight” (Lucretius 1969, 1:952–1021). The idea that any cubit foot of space, by having a boundary, must also have space surrounding it on all sides and that every particular space must stand related to every other by a “fixed position” in the same whole is essentially a recipe for infinite space. It also easily lends itself to recreating Lucretius’s argument, an argument which depends on our embodied

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action, that is, the determination of my own place, the fixing of the coordinates of a field of space, and the throwing of a spear. Again, nothing in Kant’s argument necessitates that space and time are schema in the mind, orders among sense-data in the sense-organs or the mind, or any other sort of internal structure. To call “the concept of space” a “singular representation” is not to say that space is a mental image, which, after all, could hardly be said to “embrace all things within itself” (MSI, AA 2:402).64 The internalist interpretation has to say that Kant is speaking of some representation or structure, within which all things must fall insofar as we presently intuit or sense them. But that merely potentially embraces all things and only actually embraces all immediate sensations of a particular subject. That is a rather implausible account of Kant’s actual words and examples. Paragraph C begins with a statement that seems like a conclusion from the previous two paragraphs: “The concept of space is thus a pure intuition, for it is a singular concept, not one which has been compounded from sensations, although it is the fundamental form of all outer sensation” (MSI, AA 2:402). By recognizing that when we intuit space, we intuit it singularly and as a unity, Kant has shown, in paragraph B, that it is essentially something attached to intuition and not to our conceptual faculty. It is not that we do not have the concepts of unity or unique individuals. But, as Kant has argued, our conceptual faculty requires completeness or totality of analysis and synthesis. Our experience of space, however, is such that it is whole or a unity, even without reaching a rational totality. Every limit is contiguous with more space and thus further divisible. By calling space a “singular concept,” Kant is saying, in fact, that it is not an ordinary empirical concept. Of course, we do have the concept of space; otherwise, we could not theorize about it. The concept that we have is that it is the fundamental form of all outer sensation or the principle of the entire sensible world. But the singularity of space and its being the form of outer sensation are notions that are intimately tied up with the singularity of the “here” and the “now” and with the singularity of the sphere of all possible such demarcations of space relative to a cognitive subject. The intuitive singularity of space, which makes it quite unlike regular empirical, objective concepts, is the fact that it is the structure of all possible essential indexical self-locations. Thus, the conclusion at the start of paragraph C does seem to follow from the previous paragraphs: space is the form of all outer sensation in the sense that it is what allows there to be a determinate position relative to which all possible outer sensations are oriented.

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Kant then goes on to trace certain features of space and argue that they cannot be “derived from some universal concept of space” and, instead, “can only be apprehended concretely, so to speak, in space itself” (MSI, AA 2:402–3). This, of course, makes little sense on internalist and psychological accounts of the forms of intuition. In our minds, we work with a general concept of space, and it is not the case that mere orderings of sense-data in perception (in a sort of inner Cartesian theater) reveal space in three dimensions or the nature of movement between two points and a whole host of geometric truths. Mental representations (images of objects and their field) do not have direction and they are not three-dimensional. They are fragments of the whole of experience that depend on our embodied, directional, three-dimensional movements for context and meaning. Thus, when Kant says that “which things in a given space lie in one direction and which things incline in the opposite direction cannot be described discursively nor reduced to characteristic marks of the understanding by any astuteness of mind,” then he can only be pointing out the external, embodied nature of spatial experience and the fact that its directional features are dependent on the situated perspective of a cognitive subject (MSI, AA 2:403). Kant’s argument seems to be that it is a matter of our intuitive perspective in the world that some things are to the left and some are to the right, and this is something that cannot be grasped by discursive concepts or by the understanding. In effect, he is returning us back to the Leibnizian idea of a mind in a point, with a spatial intellect, but with no grasp of the difference of direction. Such a difference in direction is not given internally the mind: it is given because of our concrete, intuitive, and embodied situation, which is made possible our being active (having rules of action) and our being  essentially indexical. A purely mathematical geometry that strips away the kinematic conditions of construction and comparison of objects may be able to describe the distance between two objects, but the idea that one is to the left of the other is senseless. These arguments are obviously closely connected to those from 1768. Thus, it is not surprising that he turns to the phenomenon of incongruent counterparts. He makes the point that “everything which may be expressed by means of characteristic marks intelligible to the mind through speech” tells us that the incongruent counterparts can be superimposed on one another, but that this is obviously not the case (MSI, AA 2:403). It seems to me that this notion rules out internalist interpretations of the forms of pure intuition. If we are thinking of these forms as simply ordering sense-data and resulting in a representation of an object or of a scene

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in the world, then there would only be the positional relations between what is given. Presumably, what internalist interpreters mean by a representation, as the outcome of intuition ordering sense, is something like a view of the night sky. In the essay “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?”, Kant imagines the possibility of the night sky reversing directions. Is there anything in representation according to the internalist picture that can distinguish the night sky and its mirror image? In some sense, the internal spectator on such models can only be the Leibnizian “seeing mind” concentrated to a point. Should the internalist attempt to actually explain the representational content of perception, then they would have to recognize that the use of directional notions in the mapping and orienting of the features of the night sky has an ineliminable reference to something external to the mind, namely the body and its feeling of left and right (WDO, AA 8:135). This would spell doom for Kant’s project if it were an internalist one, because it would mean that we could only actually represent space and time (i.e. use a priori intuition to give form to data) if we have external spatial information from the body, which is an appearance and, supposedly, just another internal representation in the mind. This problem is faced with what Vinci calls the “coordination” problem, which concerns how the depiction of space in our heads is coordinated with the world. Vinci uses the imagery of maps and, in particular, of an “indexical map,” which has a “transparent point” in which ostension designates a point as “both a symbol and its designated site” (Vinci 2015, p. 59). He describes this as an act where one says, “this is this” by “pointing to the place of the map” and then “pointing to the region mapped” (Vinci 2015, p. 59). In addition, orientation is needed, such as, “this is north” along with the metric or “scale” (Vinci 2015, p. 59). But of course, this cannot take place in one’s head. It must take place in behavior in the world. The internalist picture is in a difficult position, because it cannot admit a “causal relation” between “the symbols and the things denoted by the symbols” (Vinci 2015, p. 58). The internalist believes that all spatial properties are added to the sensory content by the mind: the mind is like a “blank page” on which the map is written, with an “intrinsic spatial structure” that imparts that spatial form to the representation (Vinci 2015, p. 60). What Vinci called the transparent point of the map may be thought to be a “brain state that represents itself” in modern cognitive science, but he believes that no such representation of the self is possible for Kant and, thus, the map analogy must be implemented “without the

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transparent-point solution to the problem of coordination” (Vinci 2015, p. 60).65 The internalist needs “some nonarbitrary, empirically grounded way of determining a you-are-here point on the map that does not require extensional relations between representational elements and represented elements” (Vinci 2015, p. 61). Vinci’s solution is to appeal to “the center of the visual field,” which of course we can see as the focus imaginarius doctrine that Kant offered in 1766 (Vinci 2015, p. 61). I take this as no solution at all to the problem for the internalist. Besides the fact that it would mean that human beings without visual fields were incapable of representing the world, the institution of the focus imaginarius is simply the indication of a position or point like any other in the field. There is nothing intrinsically or essentially indexical about it, which would allow it to act as a “you are here” point, except indirectly. But that indirect relation is not available to the internalist who only has the given sensory field with which to work. To be clear, the language of coordinating an internal map of spatial relations (i.e. a local map or visual field) with “the intended objects” of the symbols of the map through a “real relation” is being said to take place through an arbitrary designated site within the visual field (a local map) as the “center.” But how are we to make sense of such coordination if “space is nothing more than a structure within the resources of our mind” (Vinci 2015, p. 23)? How can there be a pointing to a region mapped that is not simply another symbolization of another position on another internal, local map? These problems have not stopped the internalist picture of Kant’s forms of intuition from becoming the dominant one. The externalist picture tells us that a priori intuition is the constitution of a determinate perspective in the world at a directional axis. This is an act of the subject, and it is what allows for a set of spatial determinations (metric directional relations) that are capable of distinguishing incongruent counterparts. Remember that part of the question of incongruence is whether we could explain handedness to a being without a body, for whom geometry is purely mathematical or algebraic, and who has no appeal to physical space and concrete intuitive constructions. This strikes me to be Harper’s point against Bennett, when he points out that communication of the difference of left and right following the fall of parity is still going to force those who receive to communication to “appeal to non de dicto knowledge de se” and to their own bodies in a shared space to figure out, even when using our directionality free method of, for example, building a neutrino detector, how we use the notions left and right as compared to their use (Harper 1991, pp. 304–305).

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Kant’s criticism of purely rational notions of geometry, while also maintaining that geometry is “indubitable and discursive,” points us to the fact that the subject is needed as a condition of the possibility of geometric measurement: It [Geometry] is the only evidence there is in the pure sciences, and it is the paradigm and the means of all evidence in the other sciences. For, since geometry contemplates relations of space and since the concept of space contains within itself the very form of all sensory intuition, nothing can be clear and distinct in things perceived by outer sense unless it be by the mediation of the same intuition, the contemplation of which is the function of the science of geometry. But geometry does not demonstrate its own universal propositions by thinking an object through a universal concept, as happens in the case of what is rational; it does so, rather, by placing it before the eyes by means of a singular intuition, as happens in the case of what is sensitive. (MSI, AA 2:403)

Geometry rests on propositions that it cannot prove and which rest on the sensitive nature of the subject, its presence, and directionality. Geometry is a rational-intellectual abstraction that examines the form of our presence in the world and must return to that presence to acquire the intuitive, sensitive features of directionally oriented, continuous, infinitely progressive, and divisible existence. If we take this demonstration of geometric truth and of the very form of space and sensible intuition to be a mental picturing or imagining, then not only will we lose directionality, but this would make geometry subject to the limits of our imagination as Reichenbach has criticized Kant’s theory (which of course he took to be internalist). It is certainly not obvious that one can singularly intuit three-­ dimensional space in the mind. The internal spectator of those constructed images cannot move relative to them, and the imagination of space and movement is surely simply a reconstruction of our active, motor-body. So while Kant does not yet establish the metaphysical implications of his view in the first three paragraphs, we can say that what he has in fact been doing is arguing against the very view that he is almost universally interpreted as offering: the internalization of space. Paragraph A argues that space cannot just be derived from the content of sensory representation because that representation itself requires the framing perspective of the subject itself, as an indexical position oriented externally  or in-the-world, to be meaningful. Paragraph B argues that the unity of space and other features

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of it are not given rationally or by concepts but by the fact that our perspective and the rigid continuous movements of which we are capable of define a unified field. Paragraph C reveals that the directional pre-­ conditions of measurement of any space are not given in purely rational concepts, in anything accessible to language, or in images given to the internal, one-dimensional flow of consciousness. Instead, the meaningfulness of geometry depends on our embodied, intuitive perspective in space, with its unique access to directional features. Paragraph D offers the conclusion that “space is not something objective and real, nor is it a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; it is, rather, subjective and ideal” (MSI, AA 2:403).66 Kant asserts that space “issues from the nature of the mind in accordance with a stable law as a scheme, so to speak, for co-ordinating everything which is sensed externally” (MSI, AA 2:403). Statements such as this surely appear to support the psychological and internalist approaches to the idea of space being a form of intuition. But if we do not isolate this statement from what has been said in the previous three paragraphs, then we can interpret it as follows. Having a position at the center of intersecting axes of direction, which indicate the paths of rigid movement that I can take and around which everything that I may ever sense is coordinated, is an act of the essentially indexical mind. That act of self-intuition carries with it the “stable law” or “scheme” relative to which all determinate spatial relations can be ordered. This coordinating is not simply a subjective order that maps or traces a pre-existing spatial order that would be there if there were no such position and specification of the rules for all possible spatial determination. But it must be said that Kant has not explicitly explained why this is so, although it stems from his discussion of infinity and continuity. He has been arguing that continuous manifolds lack anything like determinate simples or points. All that exist are limits, which are established by a measuring perspective. He has also shown that geometric relations require subjective instantiation in sensitive intuition, because space is such that it is a singular unity in which directional features are necessary for any metrical relations. But rather than elaborate these ideas and conclusions, paragraph D shifts purposes and attacks the opposing views, Newtonian absolutism and Leibnizian relationism. Against the absolute view, Kant says little more than that the idea of an “absolute and boundless receptacle of possible things” is an “empty fabrication” that “invents an infinite number of true relations without there being any beings which are related to one another” (MSI, AA 2:404). He

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also complains that the view puts a “slight impediment in the way of certain concepts of reason,” because it would basically make God’s omnipresence actual rather than virtual and, thus, would suggest also that spirits too are actually in space (MSI, AA 2:404). Kant then argues, as he did against the Leibnizian notion of time, that the relationist view of space is circular when it says that space is “the relation itself which obtains between existing things, and which vanishes entirely when the things are taken away” (MSI, AA 2:403–4). Presumably, the circularity is that the notion of existing things is taken to be spatially extended bodies. Kant’s main complaint with the relationist view is that it makes geometry an empirical or inductive science, which is an odd suggestion given that the Leibnizians regarded it as purely rational. I doubt that either of these criticisms is definitive, so I will not dwell on them at length. The debate about relationism and absolutism is one that is far more sophisticated than Kant’s dismissive remarks suggest. Nevertheless, his comments help us to see what it means to say something is objective and real versus subjective and ideal. Both views that he is criticizing presumably hold space to be objective and real, although the relationist view sometimes holds space to be unreal. It is clear that in this context Kant means that “reality” pertains to space being a feature of things-in-themselves, whether those are conceived of as points, bodies, or God. “Objectivity” pertains to knowledge, which seems to be properly universal, mathematical, and certain for the absolutist, but is only objective in the sense of being inductive for the relationist. Thus, by calling space “ideal”, he means to say that it does not pertain to points, bodies, or God in themselves, because points are abstractions, bodies are infinite continua that in themselves are the mere possibility of determinate relations, and God is not spatial at all. “Ideality” seems to mean that space is an emergent phenomenon, which comes to be because of the perspective that defines the field of possible relations. Finally, “subjectivity” must refer to the way in which it is known. While a purely rational account would be “objective” and non-empirical, the subjectivity of space must refer not only to the fact that it is known non-empirically but that it essentially involves something of the subject’s unique presence, which is in accessible to a more abstract and purely rational-mathematical account of space. The final paragraph (E) continues the previous discussion by saying that it is “imaginary” that space is an “objective and real being or property.” He clarifies that his own view is that space and its description are “in the highest degree true” and “the foundation of all truth in outer

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sensibility” (MSI, AA 2:405). This is interesting because, by the internalist viewpoint, we receive data like colors of which claims like “blue happening” would still be true even without spatial reference. Yet, Kant says that even for something like blue to appear to us, the pure, intuitive enactment of spatial position and direction is needed. Thus, he says that “things cannot appear to the senses under any aspect at all except by the mediation of the power of the mind which co-ordinates all sensations according to a law which is stable and which is inherent in the nature of the mind” (MSI, AA 2:404). It is not clear that this is even so for the internalist perspective, in which colors and data are “received” prior to spatial form, at least on some views. Of course, that issue runs into the debate about whether there is anything like non-conceptual content and the Myth of the Given. From the externalist perspective, that debate is irrelevant to Kant’s concerns. What he says is that without a priori intuition of our own spatial position and orientation, which then provides the metric and measuring rules that define the field of possible spatial relations, we literally would not have anything “appear to the senses.” This is so because we ourselves would not occupy a perspective in the world that differentiates objects and orients them as outside of us. Such opening to the world is a pre-condition for physical vibrations and the data of sensation to be meaning-bearing. It is certainly possible to render Kant’s discussion in this paragraph to be a deflationist account. His language of objects conforming to and according with the “fundamental axioms of space and its corollaries” can be taken to simply be limiting knowledge to such objects and, thus, having no idealistic metaphysical implications (MSI, AA 2:404). But such a view has little relation to the criticisms of absolutist and relationist views of space. Kant is very clear that the intuitively given nature of space, which reveals its features as a function of our sensitively perspective and not pure rational geometry, is said to be “the subjective condition of all phenomena” and not just our knowledge of them (MSI, AA 2:404). So when Kant says that “space is an absolutely first formal principle of the sensible world” and is what enable “objects of the universe” to be “phenomenon,” he is saying that a priori intuitive space plays this ontological role of determining the real, formal possibilities of nature and establishing the entire set of possible metrical, positional relations (MSI, AA 2:405).67 Space is defined by the set of rules of basic geometric (Euclidean) axioms and by the even more fundamental principles of unity, of unceasing progression in continuity, and of the metric of the “here” in a directional nexus, which reveal

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the nature of space to be a function of the subjective perspective in the world. In the concluding corollary, Kant points out the metaphysical fact that enables phenomena to be dependent on the subject. Unlike the rational idea of substances that has dominated his pre-Critical philosophy, “the simple parts” within our “singular intuitions” of space and time do not “as the laws of reason prescribe, contain the ground of the possibility of a compound” (MSI, AA 2:405). This is because the closest thing to a simple part is a “limit,” and it is not actually a simple. Instead, for sensible reality, “the infinite contains the ground of each part which can be thought” (MSI, AA 2:405). This is a significant metaphysical point, which is essential for understanding the Critical turn and Kant’s transcendental idealism. Both pure reason and pure-analytic mathematics construct a model of the world of simples, be they substances or points. Certain features of space and time are inaccessible to both and are merely inductively available to the empiricist. However, the topology and principles of space and time are the essential pre-condition of experience. The world, given as infinite manifolds, simply does not have the sort of individuation that comes from simples, and interpretations that keep the ontological primacy of individuated objects, points, things-in-themselves, or transcendental objects fail to recognize that the primary ontological grounds of nature are these infinite continua. These continua are only real possibilities of determinate position (rather than a mere abstract possibility) insofar as there is the perspective of a determinate subject that has the features of essential indexicality, directionality, progressive iterability, and unity. Unlike substances, any point in space or moment in time is inconceivable unless it is also “conceived of as being in an already given space and time as the limits of that same space and time” (MSI, AA 2:405). These facts are said to be such that they “cannot in any way be explained by the understanding” but are also the “underlying foundation upon which the understanding rests” when it “draws conclusions from the primary data of intuition” (MSI, AA 2:405). Here we see Kant already anticipating the way in which the categorical understanding depends on and is critically limited to the forms of intuition. Yet perhaps the most significant feature of this corollary is the primacy that is given to time. Kant makes abundantly clear that the A-series relations and the fact that they are a subjective feature or “law of the mind” that give sense to the notion to the directional notions of earlier-­ than and later-than are at the foundation of this new metaphysics of phenomena. The “quantity of space” is intelligible only though numerical

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measurement and so it depends on this progressive, temporal perspective with a past and the future (MSI, AA 2:406). Counting is a temporal process. The act of relating things to a “measure taken as a unity” is perspective-­ relative, and we cannot say that the pure potential for both unity and multiplicity has this metrical determination intrinsic to it (MSI, AA 2:406). Instead, we bring determination to the world and, thereby, we constitute the world. This is Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Conclusion I want to stress that in spite of how radical Kant’s subjective, metaphysical turn is, his view is also continuous with his earlier thought. Firstly, he has always thought that representational beings were endowed with an infinite representation of the universe, which we can now see as the a priori intuition of space and time in ourselves. Secondly, he has always believed that this idea, given to each substance, played a metaphysical role. It determined the nature of the principles of interaction that gave rise to the natural world, which is to say that he always seems to have argued against the Newtonian idea that space and time could, apart from substances, have its own intrinsic metric. Thirdly, he has long held that the natural world is made up of nothing but divisible relations and has been exploring the relation of continuity to our perspective since 1758. Fourthly, since at least 1764, he has argued that mathematics and geometry depend on sensible constructions because they assume things about the nature of space that can only be revealed by constructions in the world.68 Fifthly, since at least 1766, he has held that sensory perception was an operation in which we orient objects in the world in relationship to ourselves and to lines of directional progression. Sixthly, he has held since 1755 that representational minds must be attached to bodies and that they have a finite perspective on the world. And finally, in 1768, he argued that objective, quantitative, and positional relations are metaphysically dependent on qualitative directional ones. Combined, these claims nearly establish the Critical theory of space and time. The problem is that he continued to hold that the simple substances underlying matter contain an intrinsic metric that individuates and gives form to the world. This meant that they produced space and time as “objective and real” features of nature itself. Upon rejecting that possibility, he was nearly left with the Critical theory of space and time. He simply had to have a better grasp of how the essentially indexical first-person perspective and the rules of its rigid motions

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were metaphysically responsible for the determination of the infinite possibilities of relational reality. But this suggests that the failure to seriously consider the pre-Critical philosophy and the necessary background that it provides to the most vexing issues of the Critical works has been one of the biggest hindrances in properly interpreting Kant’s shift to transcendental idealism.

Notes 1. Metrical relativity is mentioned by Kerszberg who writes about the infinity of space and time, but his point applies to any measure of space or time. “Any attempt to fix the absolute magnitude would remain dependent on the chosen unit, which of course is arbitrary. In other words, the arbitrariness of any mathematical synthesis owes its very arbitrariness to the fact that, when mathematized, the infinite space and the infinite time of experience lose their fixed givenness” (Kerszberg 1997, p. 41). While Kerszberg’s point seems to be to drive a wedge between mathematical science and experience, which I take to rather untrue to Kant’s own view, he is not wrong to say that any concretization of spatial and temporal relations is dependent on specification of a perspective-relative metric in a measuring process. 2. A predecessor of my view is Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, which notes the ontological function of the subject and their a priori intuition: they “make possible that things as such show themselves and appear as extant here, there, now, and then” (Heidegger 1997b. p. 79). Heidegger’s characterization of outer experience of objects is not of the coordination of sense-­data: it is the intuition that “the thing itself is now here, in its entirety, in certain coordination to other things—now here, now there, tomorrow smaller and over there, etc.” (Heidegger 1997b, p. 71). “What is glimpsed” via the prior (a priori) representation of space, is “the unified whole” of space which “makes possible the ordering according to [which things can be] beside-, under-, and in back of one another,” that is, this prior representation of space “allows what is intuited in [space] to spring forth” (Heidegger 1997a, p. 33). 3. I borrow the notion of the “null point” from Keil (2011) and Wyller (2010, p. 77), who point out the centrality of self-localization to Kant’s philosophy. 4. In different (more epistemic) language, “it is only through its integration into the indexical system of subjective positions that what appears to be purely objective localization acquires the status of localization” (Wyller 2010, p. 75).

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5. If the present work explored the Critical philosophy in more detail, I would link my view to Kaulbach’s idea that Kant is offering a theory of ­“transcendental motion” rooted in the unity of the I, the idea of “synthesis” as a sort of motion, and of the subject as spatio-temporal being (Kaulbach 1965, p. 135). 6. To those familiar with the German literature, the view that I advocate is clearly related to the “field theoretical” interpretation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy offered by Rohs: “Kants Idealismus enthält die These, das seine unabhängig von uns vorhandene Wirklichkeit von uns zur Erscheinung gebracht wird und deshalb nur in Erscheinungen erkant warden kann” (Rohs 1996, p. 26). This view recognizes the importance of the observer for the four-dimensional field of space and time and does so without placing these relations merely “in uns” (Rohs 1996, p. 27). 7. For example, it is held that the theory of intuition is an account of how “sensations are not simply replicated but processed” (Höffe 1994, p. 55). Similarly, the “raw data for cognitive operations comes to us as in some way order-deficient,” and we have a sort of mental spatiotemporal “container” so that the data “acquire an order once they are placed in, or correlated with, positions in this container” (Vinci 2015, p. 11). 8. It is articulated by Garve, Tiedmann, and Feder, among others. See Sassen (2000, pp. 61, 83, 139). Jacobi famously offers a psychological or internalist interpretation that claims that intuition is an act of “inner elaboration or digestion” of raw sensory data that makes those sensations into objects using the forms of space and time (Jacobi 1994, p. 337). 9. There are not many unambiguously externalist account in the Kant literature but Vuillemin offers one in which space is recognized as the “subjective form of exteriority” or, simply, mathematics (Vuillemin 1969, p. 144). 10. See Strawson (1966, p. 53). 11. Hatfield endorses a psychological account (Hatfield 1990, pp.  87–96). The second view is the “Container View” of a priori intuition in which space and time are merely “a structure in which the mind can construct objects or receive impressions, for example, images” (Vinci 2015, p. 9). 12. Other advocates of the psychological approach are Waxman (2019) and Kitcher (1990). 13. While Falkenstein sees this as more passive due to it being a feature of the sense organs themselves, others see it more actively and name it synthesis (of apprehension). For example, Brook (1994, p. 35). 14. This doctrine is endorsed by Allison (2004, p. 114). 15. Even imminently reasonable interpretations that aim to avoid many classical problems, such as Allais’s recent work, are problematic because they hold that “intuitions are the product of sensory input being ordered using our forms of intuition, space and time” (Allais 2015, p.109).

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16. “Kant was an idealist because he believed that knowledge involved an act of synthesis by which the mind made or put together the object known by us. Like so many of his predecessors he found it impossible to conceive of relations as given by sensations, and therefore he attributed them to the mind” (Ewing 1934, p. 81). 17. Strawson says that this is “beyond any possibility of doubt,” although I not only doubt it, I think it to be entirely wrong (Strawson 1966, p. 53). 18. As Ameriks remarks, “even though the manifest spatiotemporal features necessarily characterize our experience, they cannot be self-standing, and hence there must be, underlying that experience, some more fundamental and non-spatiotemporal features, the transcendental real features of things in themselves” (Ameriks 2011, p. 38). 19. As Sherover puts it, if what the Critical theory is about the imposition of form of “raw perceptions,” then we are likely caught in a “subjective ‘prison’” (Sherover 1971, p. 19). 20. See also Van Cleve (1999, p. 11). The phenomenalist tradition of interpretation is central to Kemp Smith’s famous commentary (Kemp Smith 1992, pp. 83, 157). 21. “The notion of individuals each with their own private space and time is quite foreign to Kant’s thought” (Melnick 1973, p. 137). 22. See Gardner (1999, pp. 107–110). 23. A nice survey of the main contours of this debate and the positions major interpreters like Allison, Guyer, Wood, Ameriks, Langton, and Van Cleve can be found in Schulting (2011). 24. See Rohs (1996, p. 29). This view (“affection by appearances alone”) is dismissed by Robinson as being “one sided,” but I gather he understands such a view as a dismissal of idealism for a sort of scientific realism (Robinson 1992, p. 335). 25. See Rohs (1998, p. 139). I prefer this formulation over Wyller’s formulation of the idea that “directional space can only be understood intentionally,” but of course, intentionality is a part of action and he will call it “a space of actions” (Wyller 2010, pp. 84, 97). 26. On the intrinsic indeterminacy of relational beings and the failure of the “completeness principle,” see Brittan (2001a, pp. 543–6). See also Wyller: “The objective localization of things in space is based on directions and distances, the latter consisting of a definite number of units of counting. Any such unit is an extended empirical object of a determinate size. Hence the singular distance between places presupposed a system of things with an objective singular size. Taking ‘objective’ to mean non-indexical, I maintain that there simply is no objective, singular size. Any seemingly objective size of things is general or conceptual, the only genuinely singular size being indexical, i.e. subjective. If I am right in this, then just as in

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transcendental idealism, spatial size turns out to be an essentially human phenomenon” (Wyller 2010, pp. 171–2). 27. Although I do not fully agree with Melnick’s belief that Kant’s arguments are best thought of as a semantics (i.e. an answer to the question of how we represent the full scope of the world) and I believe his view lacks an adequate account of the transcendental nature of the subject-dependence of space and time, my own alternative owes a debt to claims that he makes such as this: “Space and time remain throughout for Kant mere performance or activity” (Melnick 1989, p. 25). 28. The connection between this doctrine and the Critical theory is made in the lectures, where it is said that “I can know how they [objects] will affect me—for they are not things-in-themselves, e.g., I will not see a body except when light rays from a point of the body strike on a point on my retina—that I can comprehend a priori” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:832). 29. Thus, I hold that Kant has a “direct realist or relational” conception of perception as opposed to a “representationalist or indirect account” (Allais 2015, p. 13). 30. Thus, I agree with Martin that “the spontaneity of pure knowledge [intuition] generates not merely the objects of mathematics but goes further and generates the objects of natural science” (Martin 1955, p. 37). 31. See also how the notion of constructability is tied to the introduction of a metric in Brittan (1986, pp. 65–66). “If space and time were discrete, then their metric would be intrinsic, for in that case we could count the parts of which spatial or the ‘moments’ of which temporal intervals were composed and assign magnitudes to them. In such a case we can say, with Riemann, that ‘the principle of metric relations is implicit in the notion of this manifold.’ If, on the other hand, space and time are continuous, as classical physics conceives them, then no such counting procedure is possible and the metric has to be ‘introduced.’ It is in this sense that space and time are, for Grünbaum, ‘metrically amorphous,’ a fact that, he thinks, implies that the metric of continuous manifolds is ‘conventional’” (Brittan 1978, p. 100). 32. Hanna uses essential indexicality and embodiment to account for Kant’s theory of intuition, representation, and reference (Hanna 2001, pp. 213–218, 239). Harper utilizes the embodied nature of ostensive construction, which is a key component of Melnick’s view (1989), and the idea of “non de dicto knowledge de se” for discriminating spatial position (Harper 1991, pp. 272, 300–305). 33. “A quantum through whose magnitude the multitude of parts is undetermined is called continuous ; it consists of as many parts as I want to give it, but it does not consist of individual parts” (V-Met-L2/ Pölitz, AA 28:561).

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34. My view is meant to align with Martin’s account of Kant’s identification of the sensible world with appearances and of Euclidean geometry with the human-centered, ideal form of that world, which stands against a backdrop of many other logically possible worlds and geometries (Martin 1955, pp. 37–41). Yet, I disagree with Martin’s conclusion that transcendental idealism amounts to saying that all natural scientific knowledge is a “model.” This shows the influence of Cohen and Marburg Neo-Kantianism on him, which is to say that my disagreement with him stems from his leaning toward a conceptualist account of Kant’s notion of construction (Martin 1955, pp. 94–5). 35. I take it that Allais’s view is quite similar to Collins’s earlier approach (Collins 1999, p.  17). Both appeal to the notion of color as something subjective or mind-dependent in its very conception (a two-place relation) that nevertheless has reality outside of the head (Collins 1999, p. 12). And yet, it seems to me that as long as one regards Kant as saying that “space and time are not apprehended via the input that generates experience” and that they “do not characterize the reality that first stimulates” the subject, then one has not given an account of the subject-dependence of space and time that overcomes the manifold problems of the perceptual account (Collins 1999, pp. 12, 15). While I agree with Allais’s retention of a sense of direct realism in perception and of Kant as an “ontological idealist,” I simply do not think that a relational account of affection and processing account of the forms of intuition can escape the metaphysical problems that then emerge (Allais 2011, pp. 92–3). 36. The view offered here is a refutation of the intellectualizing of Kant’s theory of sensibility found in Todes (2001). He argues that Kant “imaginizes perception” and the body by making sensation into a mental, intellectual, and imaginative processing (Todes 2001, p. 95). Todes mistakenly believes that the neglected third alternative is a definitive criticism of Kant’s view, although his criticisms certainly expose the problems with nearly all traditional interpretations of Kant (Todes 2001, p. 159). 37. In effect, we can say that Kant understands our own existence as embodied beings (with “heres” and “nows” and rules for directional synthesis) to be the addition of “coordinate definitions” that “lend an objective meaning to physical measurements” (Reichenbach 1958, pp.  35–36). Although Reichenbach certainly intends to be describing an epistemic conventionalism in which “subjectivity” infiltrates the starting points of scientific research, Kant has a more radical form of conventionalism in mind. 38. The objection may be raised that Kant cannot mean that “the mind literally makes the world” and that we perceive appearances (or what we make), because this would mean that the mind makes something exist that it then perceives, which seems circular (Parsons 1992, p. 83). It would have to be

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“intuited prior to its existence” (Parsons 1992, p. 83). I hold that this is possible because it is our essentially indexical being-in-the-world (the ­occupation of a perspective) that does the “making,” while our empirical intuiting of objects is not what does the “making.” 39. It should be pointed out that remarks such as this show that Kant does not overlook a “third alternative,” in which things-in-themselves may be spatio-temporal. As Melnick has argued, “Kant does not overlook this possibility; he rejects it” (Melnick 1973, p. 138). 40. While it is difficult to know exactly what motivated the changes in 1769, the Reflexionen from 1768 to 1769 give us some idea. Kant was clearly rethinking the notion of freedom during these years, and he came to place a stress on the pure intuition of the “I,” which he had not done before and which he came to see as the only source of our notion of substance (Refl, AA 17:345–6). He begins to explore the material-synthetic principles of knowledge—among them are “arithmetical, geometrical, and chronological principles” (Refl, AA 17:348)—and, therefore, comes to hold that “the representation of all things is the representation of our own condition and the relation of one representation to another in accordance with our inner laws” (Refl, AA 17:351). The task of elucidating these was regarded as ontology (Refl, AA 17:352). Thus, Kant came to see the synthetic principles of space and time as “subjective” and as pertaining to the “laws of experience” rather than a “law in the objects,” but these principles were objective for experience (Refl, AA 17:363). Outlining the pure concepts of reason and what he calls the pure “intuitive concepts” is clearly an essential part of metaphysics, and he held that they belong to “the nature of the mind” as opposed to being derived from the senses (Refl, AA 17:365). While there is much more to be said about Kant’s Reflexionen during this transitional period, I think we can see how these notions are emerging fairly organically from Kant’s earlier philosophy. For a discussion of other Reflexionen of this era, see Kanterian (2018, pp. 345–388). 41. So a “weak” or deflationary version of transcendental idealism merely says that space and time are epistemically primary and the form of all our cognition (Gardner 1999, p. 100). 42. I stress the “our” to point toward the notion of transcendental subjective and that “space and time are forms of our intuition collectively” (Melnick 1973, p. 137). Presumably, this is what Kant means when he says that his theory does not concern the relation “of our cognition to things” or the relation of empirical subjects to objects, rather it only the general relation of things “to the faculty of cognition” (Prol, AA 4:293). As Collins notes, “Kant is interested in subjective features of experience that are common to all subjects who share our human forms of receptivity” (Collins 1999, p. 38).

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43. By contrast, when Collins imagines the removal of subjectivity, he continues to think about the world as having features that “would have looked a certain way had some perceivers turned up” (Collins 1999, p. 18). 44. As Heimsoeth notes, “to overlook this distinction between the two kinds of substances [spiritual and material] would have to lead to overt materialism” or some form of transcendental realism (Heimsoeth 1967, p. 189). 45. Allison agrees and remarks that “this something that affects the mind cannot be taken under its empirical description (as a spatiotemporal entity)” (Allison 2004, p.  67). Once again the reason for this is that it is simply taken for granted that Kant’s account of spatio-temporal intuition is about “what is given to the mind as the result of its affection by external objects,” which then “becomes a part of the content of empirical cognition only by being subjected to the a priori forms of sensibility” (Allison 2004, p. 68). This leads us back to the psychological interpretation. Allison continually rejects that his account is psychological, but what he means by that is that is not a merely empirical-causal account and, instead, is a transcendental account of the “ground of the ‘matter’ of human cognition as a whole,” but it seems clear that the latter, if deontologized as Allison intends, is still a psychological account in a broader sense (Allison 2004, p. 70). 46. Allison (2004, p. 68). 47. For similar criticisms, see also Buroker (2006, p.  66); Guyer (1987, pp. 342–43). 48. Contrary to Rockmore, I would say that a true constructivist view is one that endorses the idea stated by Brittan: “What form the world has depends on which curves are constructible and this in turn depends on what operations and instruments are admitted and on what relations are decidable” (Brittan 1989, p. 65). 49. One source of a constructivist account is Kaulbach’s notion that what transcendental philosophy and subjectivity as constructability provides is not a theory of objects or mental representations, but the “objecthood” of “objects” or the means  by which there can even be objects (Kaulbach 1978, p. 41). 50. In other works, he calls this a “procedural output theory” (Melnick 1997, p. 9). 51. Melnick’s view shares this feature with Maimon’s interpretation of the Critical philosophy. Maimon argues that we ought not to think of objects “as having already arisen” but, instead, “as arising” or “as flowing” within the course of constructions as the enactment of rules (Maimon 2010, pp. 22–23). 52. But the notion of continuity is quite prominent in the lectures. “In the world there is no smallest appearance, because there is no thing [that is] smallest in space and time, but rather everything proceeds in an infinite

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continuity” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:863). “Everything in the world is according to the law of continuity ” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:921). 53. Melnick ends up in the position that Martin calls nominalism (Martin 1955, p. 157). 54. “In a certain sense a world without people is therefore a world beyond both time and space” (Wyller 2010, p. 150). 55. He also affixes a footnote to his discussion of space that says it is easy to show that all spatial expanses must be seen as continuous magnitudes (MSI, AA 2:404). 56. Svare’s book (2006) is an expression of this externalist tradition and obviously influenced by Saugstad. His work is focused on the claim that Kant believes that the subject of the first Critique is an embodied active agent. Svare does not show that the main premises of Kant’s transcendental philosophy depend on the subject’s embodiment. Nor does he have any account of the metaphysical dependency of space and time on the embodied subject. His “embodied theory of space” is merely a theory of the epistemic dependency of our cognition of space on our being embodied (Svare 2006, p. 62). Svare points to Kaulbach as a precursor to this line of embodied externalist interpretation in the German tradition and recognizes Melnick (1989) as a radical figure in this line of interpretation (Svare 2006, p. 141). 57. Admitting to this, as Nuzzo does, is not sufficient to reject the internalist interpretation. She still asserts that space and time (as the forms of intuition) are “the structure of order in which different sensations are organized” and that “what fills up space and time is nothing but sensation” (2008, p. 29). I simply reject the idea that what “fills up space and time is nothing but sensation”—what fills space and time are objects (phenomena) (Nuzzo 2008, p. 31). 58. Heidegger takes intuition to be “a comportment (comporting oneself to what is intuited, perceived)” (Heidegger 1997b, p. 58). 59. The existence of a metric and the possibility of measuring are tied explicitly to intuition in the lectures. “Measure is a magnitude that we can cognize intuitively” (V-Met/Mron, AA 29:837). 60. The transcendental constructivist and conventionalist line that I accept is anticipated somewhat by Brittan. “The temporal and spatial properties that objects have involve measuring operations that we carry out, and so are relative to us. Two considerations are at stake here. One is that our measurements presuppose a standard of measurement, a rigid rod in the case of length, chosen by us. The other consideration has to do with the choice of units, yards or meters in the case of length, and is clearly arbitrary to within a constant factor. Without a standard, and the designation of a unit, it

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makes no (empirical) sense to say that a particular object is so and so many meters long. It is in this way that the so-called ‘metrical’ properties of objects are also relational” (Brittan 2001a, p. 542). 61. An externalist approach to this argument as it appears in the first Critique is found in Wyller, who states that what Kant is doing is connecting “our very concept of space to our bodily position in space” (Wyler 2010, pp. 69–70). Baum also stresses the role of the body in this argument for the priority of space (Baum 1992, pp. 305–7). 62. While I sometimes use the language of a “frame”—primarily in the sense that the local, empirically given spatial field is framed by the larger field of spatial possibilities that are not presently given—I would neither call this a “Container View” nor say that the larger frame is given simply by the mind or by rules in the mind for connecting inner representations (Vinci 2015). I maintain that bodily presence, behavior, and spatial orientation are the metric and transformation rules and that they are a feature of our capacity to act in the world rather than rules of mental representation. The debate about whether sensation is two-dimensional and how we can generate three-­dimensional representations in the mind is, I believe, a serious problem for all internalist views (Vinci 2015, pp.  20–1). Vinci thinks his “Container View” allows for the generation of three-dimensional representations, although I do not see how he succeeds in recovering a notion of “empirical space” that is outside of the head. 63. It is mentioned in the “corollary” to space and time (MSI, AA 2:405). 64. On the idea of the “indexical direction space we inhabit” being “universal and unlimited” in this sense, see Wyller (2010, p. 84). 65. While the reasons given for this by Vinci concern the unity of apperception as a sort of contentless “I,” I would also argue that the internalist can see no way to account for a representation of self that is not just another picture on the map. That is to say, the realm of intuition has been reduced to a sort of inner screen or Cartesian theater (a “blank page”) on which “the constructing mind” assembles the world (and so also the self) (Vinci 2015, p. 61). But this means that the embodied nature of the intuiting subject, its spatial and temporal orientation, and its essential indexical self-location are all eliminated. So Vinci claims that there is no “intrinsic metric” to intuition, while I hold that pure intuition of ourselves gives such a metric (Vinci 2015, p. 63). 66. Strangely, Allison believes that the Dissertation does not mention the possible that space might be an accident (Allison 2004, pp. 97–98). 67. This metaphysical component of my view is lacking from Nuzzo’s account of transcendental embodiment. Her account of the a priori form of the body as the form of action is continually framed in terms of our “cognitive

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organization of the external world” or as concerning “the space of our experience” rather than space itself (Nuzzo 2008, p. 11). 68. This is to say that pure mathematics depends on applied mathematics (Martin 1955, p. 34).

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Index1

A Abela, Paul, 2, 235–237 Affection, 12, 29, 218, 222, 227, 232, 237, 248, 262n24, 264n35, 266n45 Ahnert, Thomas, 51n66 Alberg, Jeremiah, 145n32, 146n37 Alexander, Peter, 168n3 Allais, Lucy, 3, 6–8, 102n39, 105n64, 227, 233, 261n15, 264n35 Allison, Henry, 2, 3, 7, 189, 207, 211n11, 230, 231, 233, 261n14, 266n45, 268n66 Ameriks, Karl, 126, 145n35, 262n18 Analysis, 26, 196, 242 Analysis situs, 155, 158, 168n9 Anderson, R. Lanier, 96n1, 97n13, 143n12 Appearances, 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 23, 66, 67, 69, 79, 81, 82, 96, 99n20, 101n32, 114, 136, 137, 209, 225, 232, 240, 252

A priori intuition, 11, 96, 118, 191, 197, 201–203, 212n24, 213n33, 223, 224, 229, 237, 241, 250–253, 257, 260n2, 261n11, 265n40, 268n65 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 89, 90 Aristotle, 33, 162 A-series, 13, 191, 194, 195, 198, 201, 202, 204–206, 211n18, 212n20, 212n22, 212n24, 213n27, 217, 218, 224, 226, 229, 241, 258 Atomism, 19, 29, 33, 37, 47n21, 91, 184 B Baker, John, 34 Baumgarten, Alexander, 9, 25, 27, 28, 33, 45n11, 47n30, 47n31, 47n33, 49n48, 64, 70–73, 75, 76, 81, 82, 86, 99n24, 100n27, 102n45, 116, 179, 189, 211n14, 222

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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275

276 

INDEX

Baxter, Donald, 211n11 Beck, Lewis White, 45n7 Beiser, Frederick, 126, 145n32 Bennett, Jonathan, 221, 253 Berkecker, Sven, 171n23 Blumenberg, Hans, 42, 50n60, 50n61, 51n65 Body, 24, 178, 185 infinitely divisible, 185 not infinitely divisible, 84 simple parts of, 92 Boscovich, Roger, 45n5, 86–88, 102n42 Brittan, Gordon, 46n17, 225, 239, 262n26, 263n31, 266n48, 267–268n60 Broad, C. D., 142, 170n19, 190, 219, 221 Brook, Andrew, 261n13 B-series, 13, 191–198, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206, 211n16, 217, 218, 224, 226 Buchdahl, Gerd, 32, 97n7, 103n49 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 170n20 Buroker, Jill Vance, 20, 46n20, 46–47n21, 143n6, 143n10, 210n7, 230, 266n47 Butts, Robert, 20, 46n13, 47n23 Byrd, Jeremy, 168n3, 170n20 C Calinger, Ronald, 47n21, 49n44, 102n43 Callanan, John, 143n2 Caranti, Lugi, 99n17, 144n18 Carpenter, Andrew, 23, 47n23 Carrier, Martin, 20, 86, 105n63 Caruso, Francisco, 47n22 Cassirer, Ernst, 126, 234 Categories, 186 critical theory of, 177, 258

Causality, theory of, 129 Caygill, Howard, 219 Chaos, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41, 50n53 Circumscriptive ubeity, 36, 89, 93, 130, 134 Clarke, Samuel, 44n3, 170n20 Cohen, Hermann, 234, 264n34 Collins, Arthur, 231, 234, 264n35, 266n43 Compass points (Weltgegenden), 157, 165 Consciousness and distance, 247 as one-dimensional, 251, 255 Construction, 119, 121, 199, 212n27, 251, 259 as creating continuity, 238 Constructivism, 13, 236, 241, 266n48, 267n60 Continuity, 12, 43, 59, 109, 114, 143n5, 199, 200, 210n8, 212n27, 213n28, 238, 239, 242, 255, 257, 259, 266n52, 267n55 Continuous movement, 200, 249 Conventionalism, 13, 218, 264n37 Copernican Revolution, 180, 195, 236 Cosmology, 19, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 47n21, 48n37, 49n44, 50n56, 50n57, 50n59, 51n68, 51n69, 52n76, 52n82, 71, 79, 82, 112, 122, 141, 146n43, 147n48, 162, 165, 187, 200 Critical turn, 6, 60, 74, 110, 114 Crusius, Christian August, 64, 65, 99n18 C-series, 191, 198, 204, 211n16 D De Bianchi, Silvia, 46n12, 47n27, 49n44 De Risi, Vicenzo, 45n3, 104n60, 170n15

 INDEX 

De Vleeschauwer, H. J., 145n33 Definitive ubeity, 89, 93, 94, 130, 134, 180 Deflationism, 8, 211n18, 231, 233, 236, 265n41 Descartes, René, 134, 161, 165, 168n8, 171n21 matter, 33 on space, 22 Determining ground, 27, 62–65, 68, 69, 97n6 Direction, ultimate ground of, 157 Directionality, 13, 37, 39, 44, 53n88, 154, 156–158, 161, 162, 164–167, 168n3, 169n11, 169n14, 171n21, 171n23, 239, 251, 255 general notion of, 156 Directions (Gegenden), 157 Direct realism, perception, 225, 230, 263n29, 264n35 Du Prel, Carl, 145n24 Dualism, 1, 2, 5, 23, 62, 82, 84, 96, 128 Duarte, Shane, 50n52 Duration, 63, 183, 185, 190, 192, 196, 201, 212n20, 212n21 E Earman, John, 20, 50n62, 157, 167n2 Edwards, Jeffrey, 5, 6, 20, 45n4, 46n19, 47n26, 47n32, 48n35, 51n72, 52n76 Embodiment, 70, 72, 157, 166, 224, 243, 251, 255, 259, 267n56, 268n67 Empirical idealism, 7, 239 Empirical realism, 208, 235, 242 Empiricism, 194 Epistemology, as focus of the Critical philosophy, 178

277

Essential indexical, 12, 14, 189, 191–197, 205, 208, 217, 218, 225, 226, 229, 241, 250, 251, 253, 255, 258, 259, 263n32, 265n38, 268n65 as “here,” 13, 218, 237, 240, 241, 245, 247, 249, 250, 257 as “now,” 12, 13, 191, 194, 196–199, 202, 204, 205, 217, 218, 237, 241, 245, 247, 250 as self-intuition, 206, 245, 247, 255 Eternalism, 201 Ether, 33, 38, 39 Euler, Leonhard, 38, 39, 46n17, 51n71, 53n87, 229, 248 Ewing, A. C., 262n16 Externalism, 11, 205, 207, 219, 222, 243–248, 253, 257, 261n9, 267n56, 268n61 F Falkenstein, Lorne, 144n12, 168n4, 190, 196, 209n4, 210n8, 213n28, 219, 221, 223, 261n13 Fatum Christianum, 141 Ferrini, Cinzia, 46n12, 48n37, 51n69, 103n48, 104n62 Findlay, J. N., 49n44, 99n18 Firestone, Chris, 135, 145n24 Fischer, Kuno, 168n4 Focus imaginarius, 224, 244, 247, 253 Force active, 23–25, 28, 29, 37 attraction, 24, 33, 35, 37, 41, 94, 178 moving, 23, 26, 28, 29, 37, 46n18, 70 repulsion, 33, 37–39, 94, 178 Force-shell atomism, 90 Form of intuition, 202, 208, 222, 233, 255

278 

INDEX

Forster, Michael, 143n3, 145n32, 211n10 Frederick, Robert, 170n17 Freewill, 64 Friedman, Michael, 5, 21, 42, 47n24, 49n44, 52n81, 143n5, 143n10 G Gardner, Martin, 160 Gardner, Sebastian, 15, 49n44, 146n38 Garnett, Christopher, 20, 45n8, 100n30, 168n4, 171n25, 229 Gaukroger, Stephan, 171n21 Geometry, 103n47, 104n61, 116, 119, 121, 155, 159, 160, 164–166, 168n3, 169n10, 254, 255, 259 Euclidean, 178, 257 George, Rolf, 154, 160, 162, 166, 171n22, 226 God, 5, 6, 9–11, 19, 32, 36, 40, 42, 43, 45n10, 50n57, 52n79, 52n81, 52n83, 53n84, 53n86, 60, 62–66, 74–83, 87–89, 92, 95, 97n6, 98n14, 98n15, 100n28, 100n29, 101n32, 101n36, 102n37, 102n41, 103n49, 103n52, 113, 116, 117, 119, 122, 128, 136, 137, 140, 145n30, 170n20, 177, 178, 181, 182, 188, 227 omnipresence, 42, 52n81, 52–53n83, 53n84, 103n52, 256 Gotz, Gerhard, 175 Grant, Edward, 49n46, 52n82, 103n50 Gravity, 32, 35, 37, 40, 44, 52n80, 79, 84, 92, 113, 137, 157 center of the universe, 43, 165 Grier, Michelle, 145n28

Gueroult, Martial, 104n60 Guyer, Paul, 143n11, 144n19, 211n10, 231, 266n47 H Hahmann, Andree, 99n24, 102n38, 104n59 Handedness, property of, 153, 154, 156–159, 161–167, 167n2, 171n23, 193, 253 Hanna, Robert, 2, 263n32 Harmless effects, 31, 34 Harper, William, 253, 263n32 Hatfield, Gary, 20, 219, 261n11 Heat, 37, 39, 44, 49n51, 51n72, 52n75 Heβbrüggen-Walter, Stefan, 104n56, 146n42, 210n7 Heidegger, Martin, 213n31, 213n32, 213n33, 260n2, 267n58 Heimsoeth, Heinz, 5, 15, 24, 45n9, 52–53n83, 53n84, 60, 61, 67, 85, 95, 97n8, 98n14, 102n44, 103n48, 103n52, 112, 144n14, 146n41, 209n1, 211n13 Heinz, Marion, 145n26, 146n44, 146n46 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 133, 146n44 Herz, Marcus, 177, 178, 209n3 Hoefer, Carl, 167n2, 170n18 Höffe, Otfried, 211n15, 261n7 Holden, Thomas, 86 Hope, 128 Hume, David, 118, 186, 211n10 I Idealism, 1, 8, 63, 96, 125, 193, 195, 198, 226, 227, 231, 235, 262n24 Ideal/real distinction, 256

 INDEX 

Idea of reason, 240 Immaterial spirits, 123, 125, 130, 131, 136, 138, 181 Impenetrability, 22, 38, 91, 121, 132 Incongruent counterparts, 156–158, 160–162, 170n20, 171n23, 251, 253 Individuation, 8, 9, 12, 13, 195, 198, 217, 226–228, 239, 246, 258 Inertia, 23, 24, 28, 33, 37, 46n17, 47n24, 47n34, 86, 113, 115, 143n10 Inner sense, 70, 229 Internalism, 4, 7, 11, 190, 205, 219, 220, 222, 243, 245, 247, 248, 250–255, 257, 261n8, 267n57, 268n62, 268n65 Intuition, as behavior, 243 J Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 208, 261n8 Jacobs, Nathan, 135 Jammer, Max, 162 Jauernig, Anja, 45n3, 96n2 Johnson, Gregory, 145n24 K Kaehler, Klaus Erich, 99n21 Kanterian, Edward, 5, 15, 23, 49n44, 52n79, 52n80, 65, 69, 99n20, 100n28, 100n31, 101n32, 102n41, 102n42, 104n54, 120, 125, 131, 143n8, 144n13, 144n17, 144n20, 145n23, 146n37, 146n45, 147n49, 265n40 Kaulbach, Friedrich, 44n1, 51n73, 51n74, 52n77, 53n85, 104n60, 144n19, 261n5, 266n49, 267n56 Keil, Geert, 260n3 Kemp Smith, Norman, 189, 262n20

279

Kerszberg, Pierre, 144n15, 260n1 Kitcher, Patricia, 261n12 Klemme, Heiner, 143n4 Knowledge, empirical limits of, 128, 130 Knutzen, Martin, 26, 27, 47n25, 48n39, 104n56, 117, 187 Koestler, Arthur, 13 Kuehn, Manfred, 46n16, 47n30, 100n29, 145n34, 209n1 L Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 122, 124, 176, 178, 179, 192, 202, 203, 205, 209n3, 213n29 Langton, Rae, 2, 3, 80–82, 101n36, 102n39, 102n40, 102n42, 227 Law of parity, 160, 167, 253 Laywine, Allison, 5, 23, 46n14, 101n33, 102n42, 111, 127, 145n36, 146n40 Leibniz, G. W., 4–6, 20, 23, 31–33, 44–45n3, 46n13, 46n17, 46n21, 48n41, 49n42, 49n45, 50n52, 50n55, 53n84, 59, 68, 74, 81, 82, 89, 90, 95, 96n2, 97n6, 97n13, 99n18, 101n36, 104n60, 123, 143n10, 144n12, 144n17, 153, 155, 158, 160, 166, 167, 169n10, 170n15, 170n20, 200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 210n6, 251, 252, 255, 256 Look, Brandon, 49n48 Lucretius, 249 M Maimon, Salomon, 266n51 Manolesco, John, 145n24 Martin, Gottfried, 45n3, 209n1, 213n32, 264n34, 267n53, 269n68

280 

INDEX

Massimi, Michela, 46n12, 47n27, 49n42, 49n44, 50n55, 50n59, 51n68, 51n70, 51n75 Materialism, 127 Mathematics, 38, 97n4, 98n13, 98n15, 110, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 142n2, 143n11, 166, 238, 261n9, 263n30, 269n68 Matter dead vs. living, 136 primary, 23, 33, 35, 36, 40, 41, 159 secondary, 33, 36, 40 McGlynn, Cirán, 145n32 McManus, Chris, 160, 168n5 McQuillan, Colin, 142n1, 144n19, 145n31, 190, 209n3 McTaggart, John, 191, 198, 204, 211n16 Measurement, 195, 208, 240 as behavior, 249 theory of, 155, 166 Melnick, Arthur, 45n6, 143n9, 212n24, 212n27, 234, 237, 238, 241–243, 262n21, 263n27, 265n42, 267n53, 267n56 Mendelssohn, Moses, 97n4, 98n15, 101n34, 124, 129, 131, 137, 205, 222 Mercer, Christia, 2 Metric, 12, 13, 154, 161, 162, 166, 167, 169n10, 206, 217, 228, 252, 259, 263n31, 267n59 Mind-body dualism, 9, 71 Monad, 15, 21, 23–25, 27, 30, 45n10, 49n41, 52n83, 61, 72, 73, 76, 81, 82, 84–86, 90, 91, 93, 96–97n3, 100n27, 102n42, 102n44, 103n49, 103n51, 103n53, 104n57, 123, 144n17, 145n21, 145n29, 146n41, 210n9 slumbering, 9, 126, 189 Motion, 24, 25, 112, 198, 204, 249 Myth of the Given, 235, 257

N Natura naturans, 22, 23, 28, 32, 34, 37, 38, 42, 53n84, 114 Natura naturata, 34 Neglected third alternative, 114, 202, 264n36, 265n39 Nerlich, Graham, 168n6 Newton, Isaac, 22, 33, 35, 48n40, 69, 112, 119, 121, 154, 213n29 Newtonianism, 32, 60, 111 Nuzzo, Angelica, 47n31, 145n36, 166, 168n4, 209n1, 267n57, 268n67 O Occasionalism, 136 One world metaphysics, 3, 6, 82, 128 Ontology, 3, 7, 9, 22, 23, 25, 48n40, 52n79, 61–63, 67, 85, 99n17, 142, 177, 179, 212n27, 213n32, 232, 237, 238, 241, 265n40 Optimism, 32, 38, 82, 127 Orientation, 13, 154, 156, 159, 167, 168n6, 199, 217, 218, 224, 225, 229, 244, 245, 248, 252, 257, 268n62, 268n65 Orr, James, 49n44, 49n49, 145n30 Ozma problem, 160, 162 P Palmquist, Stephen, 145n24 Panpsychism, 5, 124 Parsons, Charles, 20, 221, 264n38 Perception, 252 nature of, 259 Phenomenalism, 3, 4, 7, 14, 15n2, 71, 72, 95, 123–125, 128, 190, 206, 208, 209, 210n9, 221, 230, 233, 234, 240, 262n20 Phenomenology, 109, 110, 112, 117, 119, 121, 142, 176, 177, 179, 209n3, 213n27, 239, 249

 INDEX 

Physical influence, 5, 9, 25, 67, 70–74, 82, 83, 99n21, 100n28, 145n36, 180 Plato, 8, 16n3, 36, 41, 176, 181, 182, 184, 185, 209n1, 227 Points, 243 physical/geometric, 85 Pollok, Konstantin, 46n17, 103n47, 103n49, 104n57, 143n4, 144n21, 145n22 Polonoff, Irving, 20, 50n58, 50n64, 51n66, 51n67, 52n78, 97n9, 143n10 Pope, Alexander, 32 Popularphilosophie, 128 Positionality (Lage), 155–158 Prauss, Gerold, 211n19 Pre-established harmony, 5, 10, 25, 47n25, 48n38, 68, 70–74, 83, 90, 99n19, 99n21, 100n29, 100n30, 110, 123 Principle of co-existence, 66 Principle of conservation, 65, 118 Principle of contradiction, 61 Principle of succession, 65, 68, 71, 81, 175, 217 Problem of affection, 207, 208, 221 Property-dualism, 3, 9 R Receptivity, 60 Regulative idea, 185 Reichenbach, Hans, 254, 264n37 Relations, 12 internal, 28 reducible/irreducible, 80 relata, 12, 78, 80, 92, 198, 199, 207, 208, 218, 226, 228, 233, 238, 246 temporal, 196 Remnant, Peter, 154, 167n2, 170n18 Repletive ubeity, 89

281

Representation, 25, 26, 60, 69, 73, 123, 205, 222, 250, 252, 254 experience of, 126 nature of, 10 procedural account of, 237 Rest, 44, 112, 199 Reuscher, John, 97n6, 97n12 Riehl, Alois, 168n4 Rivero, Gabriel, 144n16 Robinson, Hoke, 262n24 Rockmore, Tom, 236, 237, 266n48 Rohs, Peter, 211n16, 261n6, 262n25 Rukgaber, Matthew, 49n47, 98n16 Rusnock, Paul, 154, 160, 162, 166, 171n22 Russell, Bertrand, 169n10 S Sarmiento, Gustavo, 86 Sassen, Brigitte, 261n8 Saugstad, Jens, 243, 267n56 Schönfeld, Martin, 5, 6, 15, 20, 23, 30–34, 48n38, 48–49n41, 49n43, 49n45, 50n53, 50n56, 51n72, 61–65, 69, 71, 85, 90–92, 104n61, 111, 124, 127–129, 140, 146n37 Schulting, Dennis, 262n23 Segner, Johann Andreas, 170n20 Semantics, 212n27, 232, 238, 241, 263n27 Sensation, 11, 194, 196, 206, 207, 219–221, 223, 224, 226–228, 239, 246, 248, 250, 257, 261n7, 261n8, 262n16, 267n57 Seung, T. K., 209n1 Severo, Rogério Passos, 167n1, 170n20 Sewall, Frank, 145n24 Shea, William, 46n12, 49n50

282 

INDEX

Shell, Susan, 23, 47n23, 48n37, 99n21, 102n37, 136, 142n1, 145n27, 146n39, 147n50 Sherover, Charles, 212n22, 213n33, 262n19 Simultaneity, 27, 178, 196, 197, 199, 203–205, 207, 211n16, 211n20, 217, 225, 226 Skepticism, 111, 128, 186, 205, 211n10 Sklar, Lawrence, 21, 22, 45n6, 164, 170n18 Slowik, Edward, 20, 46n15, 89, 90, 103n51 Smith, Sheldon, 49n44, 102n46 Soul, 70, 133, 134 Space absolutism, 19, 34, 92, 112, 157, 165, 255 asymmetry, 160, 161, 165 attraction points, 21, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 85, 154 Container View, 261n11, 268n62 Critical theory of, 217 empty, 22, 24, 30, 34, 35, 39, 42 filling vs. occupying, 86, 94, 120 force-based, 154 grounded on substance, 6 as having directionality, 154 infinitely divisible, 84, 91 infinity, 249, 255, 258 limits as simples, 255, 258 in the mind of God, 77, 79 molecules of, 30, 31 ontological role of, 257 origin of the notion, 247 perception of, 224 as plenum, 19, 31, 33, 38, 43, 45n4, 48n41, 49n42, 50n55, 113, 162, 171n24 as presentational order, 220 psychological account, 219

and quality of matter, 163 relationism, 19, 20, 31, 78, 91, 153, 256 as resistant, 30 as singular, 250 source of truths, 118 substantive vs. absolute, 113 three-dimensionality, 25, 121, 169n14, 251 unity of, 248 as virtual presence of monads, 88 Space and time and action theory, 222 as forms of behavior, 223, 237 as forms of intuition, 4, 7, 222 perception of, 11 psychological account of, 261n11 as real, 11 subjectivity of, 238 Spontaneity, 60, 64, 133 Stan, Marius, 47n28, 143n7 Stang, Nicholas, 98n16 Stevenson, Leslie, 211n18 Storrie, Stefan, 168n9 Strawson, P. F., 2, 16n2, 261n10, 262n17 Subject-dependence, 4, 7, 11–13, 179, 195, 209, 258, 263n27, 264n35 Subjective/objective distinction, 256 Subreptic axioms, 175, 180–184, 186, 188, 202, 210n7, 227, 232 Substance as body, 21, 75 community of, 75 contingent mode of, 9 harmony, 9 as immaterial, 27 informational, 70 interaction, 9 non-temporal, 180 preserved by God, 76

 INDEX 

as representing, 9, 19, 21, 69, 79, 125 simple, 9, 68, 73, 82, 88, 114, 119, 259 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 205, 213n30 Svare, Helge, 267n56 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 123–125, 127, 139, 140, 147n51 Synthesis, 26, 196, 242 T Theology, 52n79, 84, 98n16, 110, 122, 141 Things-in-themselves, 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 96, 137, 176, 198, 207, 227, 232 Thorpe, Lucas, 145n24 Time, 10, 119 absolute, 183, 189, 206 eternity, 202 experience of, 204 infinitely divisible, 200 infinity, 206 measurement behavior, 218 moments as limits, 199 not mental, 192 origin of concept, 194 the present, 196–197 as singular concept, 195 as subject-dependent, 180 unity of, 196 Todes, Samuel, 264n36 Tonelli, Giorgio, 50n57, 145n25, 211n11 Transcendental idealism, 3, 118, 179, 180, 186, 207, 209, 217, 220, 225, 226, 231, 241, 258–260, 263n26, 264n34, 265n41 Transcendental matter, 7, 12, 67 Transcendental object, 227 Transcendental realism, 6, 8, 15, 16n2, 62, 96, 105n64, 186, 233, 245

283

Transcendental subjectivity, 114, 217 Treash, Gordon, 142 Trendelenburg loophole, 208 Truth analytic, 61, 63, 97n13 a posteriori, 116, 118, 140 indemonstrable, 120 Two-world metaphysics, 3, 4, 7–11, 16n2, 52n79, 59, 63, 82, 83, 110, 128, 136, 142, 147n49, 176 V Vacuum, 42 Vaihinger, Hans, 170n20 Van Cleve, James, 2, 3, 7, 16n2, 102n39, 163, 227, 262n20 Van der Wall, Ernestine, 50n54 Vassányi, Miklós, 50n57 Vinci, Thomas, 253, 261n7, 268n65 Virtual presence, 61, 86–90, 92, 93, 103n48, 103n49, 103n50, 104n54, 116, 121, 123, 128–130, 132–134, 180, 182, 184 Void, 21, 30, 31, 34, 36, 38, 42, 48n41, 92, 154, 168n3, 171n24, 243 Voltaire, 141 Vuillemin, Jules, 238, 261n9 W Walford, David, 156, 162, 168n4, 168n7, 169n10 Warren, Daniel, 49n44 Watkins, Eric, 5, 28, 29, 46n17, 47n23, 48n36, 49n44, 49n49, 69, 70, 75, 77, 83, 86, 99n25, 103n51, 103n53, 104n55, 117

284 

INDEX

Waxman, Wayne, 261n12 Werkmeister, William, 44n2, 49n48 Westphal, Kenneth, 2, 16n2, 45n4, 226, 233 Wilson, Catherine, 49n51 Winterbourne, A. T., 231 Wolff, Christian, 26, 29, 31, 47n28, 48n39, 69, 99n24, 139, 146n36, 170n20 Wood, Allen, 145n34 World spirit, 34 World-whole, 242 Wundt, Max, 209n1

Wyller, Truls, 211n17, 260n3, 260n4, 262n25, 262–263n26, 267n54, 268n61, 268n64 X Xavier, R. Moreira, 47n22 Z Zammito, John, 142n1, 146n37, 146n44 Zeno’s paradox, 199, 200 Zerbudis, Ezequiel, 169n13