Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century Philosophy

311 Pages·2022·2.501 MB·English

by  Catherine Wilson

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi
Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of
18th Century Philosophy
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi
Kant and the Naturalistic
Turn of 18th Century
Philosophy
CATHERINE WILSON
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930148
ISBN 978–0–19–284792–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847928.001.0001
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. Discoveries and Controversies 23
2. The Laws of Nature and the Origins of the World 51
3. The Background: Problems of Life and Matter 68
4. The Veil of Perception and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism 87
5. The ‘Physiologists’ and Material Minds 110
6. The Penchant for Determinism and Kant’s Response 132
7. Obligation and the Moral Sentiments 156
8. The Puzzles of Purposiveness 178
9. Kant on Humanity, Diversity, and Human Value 200
10. Civilization, Extinction, and Moral Effort 230
11. Futility and Transcendence: Kant’s Arguments of Hope 249
Epilogue 261
Editions Cited and Concordance of Translated Passages 269
Bibliography 273
Index of Names 295
Index of Subjects 297
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support and the resources made available
by a number of institutions for the completion of this book. I am especially
grateful to All Souls College, Oxford in 2017; the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin in 2018; the Max-P lanck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin in
2020; and the collaborative project on Human Abilities run from the Institute
for Advanced Study by the Freie Universität and Humboldt Universität in
Berlin in 2020–1. A Visiting Professorship at the Graduate Center, CUNY
afforded generous time for research, and my graduate students in the Fall of
2019 were stimulating discussants of much of the material presented here.
Editors, referees, and colleagues, amongst them Ursula Goldenbaum, Angela
Breitenbach, Michela Massimi, John Zammito, Abraham Anderson, Thomas
Sturm, and Alix Cohen, have helped me with comments, criticisms, and sug-
gestions, and my longtime OUP editor, Peter Momtchiloff, lit the way.
My gratitude extends further to institutions that provided online access to
texts and data for research in the pandemic years 2020– 1, when libraries were
closed, travel was restricted, and my own books were stuck in transit. They
include the University of Duisburg, which maintains the Bonner Kant-
Korpus; the University of York Library; the Bibliothèque Nationale; the Liberty
Fund; Google Books; Project Gutenberg; the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy; Wikipedia, and other open publishing initiatives that disdained
paywalls. Robot helping human—and somewhere behind it all human helping
human—brought me many moments of relief, not to mention discovery. My
husband, Gregor Koebel, lightened my hours in between with wit and energy.
This book is dedicated in a spirit of love and friendship to Alex Rueger who
has shared his expertise on Kant with me for over 30 years.
With the exception of the first item, the following previously published
articles and chapters of my own have been extensively reworked for this
volume. My thanks to the editors and to Cambridge University Press for
permission to use substantial portions of the first item verbatim:
‘Kant’s Almost Complete Rejection of British Moral Theory’. In Kant’s Moral
Philosophy in Context, ed. Stefano Bacin and Oliver Sensen, forthcoming from
Cambridge University Press.
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viii Acknowledgements
‘What (Else) was behind the Newtonian rejection of Hypotheses?’ In
Experiment, Speculation, and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter
Anstey and Alberto Vanzo, London: Routledge, 2021.
‘Leibniz’s Influence on Kant,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant- leibniz/ (accessed 26 January 2022).
‘Hume and Vital Materialism’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy
24:5 (2016): 1002–21.
‘Managing Expectations: Locke on the Material Mind and Moral Mediocrity’,
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 78 (2016): 127–46.
‘The Building Forces of Nature and Kant’s Teleology of the Living’. In
Michela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach, eds., Kant and the Laws of Nature,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016: 256–74.
‘The Presence of Lucretius in Eighteenth- Century French and German
Philosophy’. In Lucretius and Modernity, ed. Liza Blake and Jacques Lezra,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 107–32.
What was Kant’s Critical Philosophy Critical of? In Tamas Demeter,
Kathryn Murphy, and Claus Zittel, eds., Conflicting Values of Inquiry: Ideologies
of Epistemology in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 2015: 386–406.
‘Kant on Civilisation, Culture and Morality’. In Alix Cohen, ed., ‘A Companion
to Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014: 191–210.
‘Kant and the Speculative Sciences of Origins’. In The Problem of Animal
Generation in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Justin E.H. Smith, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005: 375–401.
‘Interaction with the Reader in Kant’s Transcendental Theory of Method’,
History of Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1993): 87–100.
‘Savagery and the Supersensible: Kant’s Moral Univeralism in Historical
Context’, History of European Ideas 24 (1988): 315–30.
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‘You, philosophers, support me: dare to speak the truth, and may
childhood not be man’s age forever.’
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Anti- Senèque
‘Enlightenment is the release of a human being from the immaturity
that they have imposed on themselves . . . Sapere aude! Dare to put your
own reason into operation. That is the motto of Enlightenment.’
Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question:
“What is Enlightenment?” ’