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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
C AT H E R I N E W I L S O N
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Catherine Wilson 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930148
ISBN 978–0–19–284792–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847928.001.0001
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 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii
Introduction1
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
Epilogue261

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-­Planck 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.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

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.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

‘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?”’
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 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

Introduction

Struck by the absence of love affairs, adventures, travels, and political

engagement in Immanuel Kant’s life, a noted commentator describes him as
unformed, to a degree surpassing all other philosophers, by challenging life
events. Declaring that Kant ‘can be understood only through his work in
which he immerses himself with unwavering discipline’, the writer evokes the
image of a body of writing demanding to be understood through text-­internal
analytical methods alone.1
The theme of the enclosed Kantian text is virtually irresistible. It dominates
in teaching practice and in a large percentage of the expository literature,
where Kant’s ideas are paraphrased in more, or even less transparent prose. It
is attributable to the fact that Kant is a difficult author, a fact that, despite his
scorn for popular philosophy, he knew and to some extent regretted. The
commentator too is apt to immerse him or herself in Kant’s writings with
unwavering discipline, leaving little time and energy for a study of Kant’s sur-
rounding context. Like Wordsworth’s Isaac Newton,2 whose innate powers
enable him to teach the truth to himself, Kant is seen as a walled-­off genius
whose innovations nevertheless reached the whole world. But Kant’s famous
domesticity and addiction to routine did not preclude contact with an exter-
nal world. His mind was formed—as was Newton’s, as is that of any one of
us—by his encounters with books and essays, by his exchanges with cor­res­
pond­ents and dinner guests, from whom he learned and by whom he was
provoked and challenged. The name index of the Academy Edition of Kant’s
works and the range of authors in the catalogue of Kant’s library books pub-
lished by Arthur Warda in 1922 leave no doubt as to the breadth of his per-
sonal and literary acquaintances.
My aims in writing this book are both constructive and critical. I aim first
to present a survey of Kant’s philosophy that cuts through some of the

1 ‘For Kant, even more than other philosophers, the real events occur in thought; Kant has no other
biography than the story of his philosophizing.’ Otfried Hoffe, Immanuel Kant, 7. Cf. Manfred Geier,
Kants Welt: Eine Biographie and most recently, Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography.
2 ‘A mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.’ William Wordsworth, The
Prelude, Bk III. Lines 34–5, 105.

Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century Philosophy. Catherine Wilson, Oxford University Press.
© Catherine Wilson 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847928.003.0001
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

2 Introduction

complexities of structure and terminology that impede a deep and intuitive

understanding of his thought. This is accomplished by showing Kant’s con-
formity to, and divergences from, the thought of his more readily in­tel­li­gible
predecessors and contemporaries. I distinguish as clearly as I am able amongst
authors whose writings Kant is known to have engaged with directly; those he
knew about mainly at second hand; and those whose thoughts amplify or
contrast with his own whether or not he was aware of their writings. Second, I
aim to bring into present consciousness the philosophical and moral virtues
of some of Kant’s most conspicuous eighteenth-­century op­pon­ents, philo­
sophers who worked from the naturalistic premise that human beings were
intelligent animals, driven by worldly desires and tender sentiments, and who
saw no need to posit divine creation, final causes, or providential care. My
enterprise requires demystification and indeed desanctification. Kant’s pos­
ition as a hero of the Enlightenment is only partially sustainable.
The most visible claim in Kant’s writings is that human beings are not or
should not be considered as enclosed wholly with the realm of nature. They
are not ruled or must not be considered as being ruled by the same blind
mechanisms. A second, less visible but equally central claim is that the human
species as a whole has or must be ascribed a destiny in the form of a pacific
and culturally developed future, whose outlines, though not its details, are
foreshadowed in the present. This destiny will arrive through developmental
processes that work at a deeper or higher level than individual human deci-
sions. By presenting the world as evolving through the operation of imma-
nent forces towards a better condition, rather than running down through
political, geological, or cosmological upheavals and attrition to a dead planet
or cosmic dust, Kant meant to stimulate moral and political effort. Although
he refused to give credence to claims for divine creation and governance,
Kant agreed with ardent deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus that the ‘enlarged
understanding’ of the human mind and its inescapable drive to thinking on
its future were incompatible with the thought of personal annihilation, and
that the ideas of perfection and immortality must correspond to more than ‘a
wild chimera or pleasing reverie’.3
Although these two claims, for human exceptionalism and for a glorious
destiny, are not among those found most appealing and worthy of develop-
ment by contemporary Kantians, they form the central core of Kant’s own
philosophy. Kant was a critical philosopher, but only in order to enter a plea
on behalf of transcendental ideas and concepts. His vision of the duties and

3 Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Principal Truths, tr. Wynne, 428.

 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century 3

destiny of the special species was pursued with unparalleled philosophical

ingenuity. By arguing that the Newtonian science of matter and motion,
though exact, was not a representation of ultimate reality, and that material-
ism was a speculative, rather than a hard-­headed empirical doctrine, Kant
intended to deprive the naturalistic image of the human being, as it was being
shaped by his opponents, of its substance. By finding signals of species-­level
progress, not only in human history and the European self-­imposed civilizing
mission, but in the building forces of nature, Kant intended to answer the
civilizations-­critics and those demoralized by the bloodshed and wreckage
perpetrated by the rivalrous princes of Europe and by colonial oppressors.
I can explain the genesis of this study by briefly describing my own early
encounters with texts and interpretations. In my first introductory course on
Kant’s philosophy in the early 1970s, we undergraduates read his 1783
Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, a shorter work intended to clarify his
1781 Critique of Pure Reason, which he had good reason to think had been
poorly understood. As presented in the editor’s introduction, the central
question with which Kant was concerned in his critical philosophy was ‘What
assurance do we have that our a priori (rational) thoughts have in reality a
relation to objects that exist apart from us? . . . And how is the mind to lay out
real principles regarding the possibility of things such that our experience
must truly agree with these principles even though such principles are inde-
pendent of immediate and particular sensations?’4 We students were then
introduced to the problem of how a priori synthetic judgements could be
­scientific. The Transcendental Deduction was presented as the crowning
achievement of Kant’s whole philosophy.
From this course of study, I took away what Kant himself would have
described as historical knowledge. I learned that he thought that space and
time were ‘forms of sensibility’; that we are aware only of experiences con-
structed by our own minds, but that there existed ‘things in themselves’, nou-
mena, that were unperceivable, but that in some way affected us in perception.
This was said to be a problem because ‘causality’ was supposed to be a cat­
egory pertaining to phenomena. I learned that Kant had found that, although
free will couldn’t be proved, we had to assume it existed to ‘make sense of ’
moral judgements. What this had to do with synthetic a priori judgements
like 7 + 5 = 12 that was supposed to be the model of the synthetic a priori; and
what it meant for metaphysics to be a ‘science’, was not explained to me, and I
did not manage to figure any of this out on my own. With the Transcendental

4 James Ellington, ed., Preface, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, vii.

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4 Introduction

Deduction, the situation was even worse: I learned that Descartes had said
there were innate ideas; Locke had said everything ultimately comes from the
senses, and Kant had reconciled them by figuring out that the Categories were
the conditions of all possible experience. This was presented as a major break-
through, but (perhaps not being fully clear on the meaning of the term ‘tran-
scendental’), I couldn’t see what was Transcendental about the Deduction and
especially what it had been deduced from.
From time to time, I came across attempts to explain Kant’s overall project
in general terms. He was described as having furnished foundations for
Newtonian science, as having reconciled empiricism and rationalism and
physics and freedom, and as having shown how morality is based in reason.
Later still, I found Kant presented as an advocate for liberty and equality, as
insisting on universal human dignity and inviolable human rights, as well as
on universal obligations. There were some who found certain Kantian pos­
itions exaggerated, unsavoury, or scientifically untenable,5 but their contribu-
tions did not make it into the mainstream of Kant scholarship, so I did not
pay them much attention either. They were seen as maliciously focussed on
Kant’s forgivable susceptibility to the prejudices of his time which were
thought unrelated to the core elements of his philosophy. Meanwhile, the
philosophical anxiety that was revealed in Kant’s reference to the ‘utter indif-
ferentism . . . the mother of chaos and night’ affecting his learned con­tem­por­
ar­ies, leaving their efforts ‘dark, confused, and useless’(A x) was absent from
received presentations.
Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs—as well as pity for students
struggling as I did with Kant’s convoluted prose—led me to try to present his
crit­ic­al philosophy in a manner closer to his own concerns and intentions
as he stated them and to assess them against the alternatives available to
philo­sophers in the second half of the eighteenth century. Gerd Buchdahl’s
Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, which I encountered in his Cambridge
Kant seminar of 1980, offered a point of departure; here was Kant presented,
not as the sacred monster to be understood in his own terms and only in his
own terms, but as a participant in a long conversation about appearance and
reality, causality, the laws of nature, abstract concepts, and scientific hy­poth­
eses. I have benefited since then from the wealth of old and new scholarship
that has helped me to understand to and for whom Kant was writing, what he

5 Amongst them, Robin M. Schott, Cognition and Eros; Gerard Edelman, La Maison de Kant;
Hartmut and Gernot Boehme, Das Andere der Vernunft.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century 5

was trying to communicate, and what he hoped to prevent and to facilitate.6

There are many more such conversations to be explored, especially in the his-
tory and philosophy of the life sciences and the social sciences.
In neither his first nor his second Prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason
did Kant describe his aim as that of mediating between rationalism and
empiricism as general categories.7 He did, however, invoke a related and more
fundamental distinction that guided much of his thinking. In passages near
the very end of the Critique of Pure Reason (A 853–­5/B 881–3), he compared
Plato and Epicurus to Leibniz and Locke. He understood the Leibniz-­Locke
controversy, as Leibniz had, as another version of the age-­old conflict between
Plato and Democritus, between transcendental philosophy and materialism.
This conflict was of supreme importance for morality, always Kant’s overrid-
ing concern. The materialist Epicurus, Democritus’s successor, Kant said, held
strictly to the doctrine that the senses are the basis of knowledge, and his ‘pre-
sumptuousness’ in denying the existence of anything beyond the objects of
sensory experience and scientific enquiry created ‘irreparable detriment to
reason’s practical interest’ (A 471/B 499). Plato, by contrast, produced a fine
moral philosophy but only by proposing ‘ideal explanations of natural appear-
ances’ (through the Forms), neglecting physics (A 472/B 500).
Nor did Kant say anything in his Prefaces about a need to provide founda-
tions for Newtonian science, or to overcome scepticism about the existence of
an external world, or to discover how the human mind structured experience,
though he referred in passages in the ‘Doctrine of Elements’ that followed
them to the general difficulty of understanding ‘how subjective conditions of
thought could have objective validity’(A 89–90/B 122), to, in other words, the
general difficulty of understanding how knowledge of mind-­independent
entities and states was possible. Instead, he wrote in the Preface to the first
edition about the worry he and his contemporaries were experiencing over
their inability to answer metaphysical questions and his desire to write, some
day, a speculative Metaphysics of Nature, ‘incomparably richer in content’
than the present work. To that end, he would need to ‘establish the sources
and conditions of the possibility of that system’ (A xxi).

6 V. Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’.

7 Only in the Critique of Judgement (1790) (5: 346) and the essay ‘What Real Progress has
Metaphysics made since the time of Leibniz and Wolff?’ (1793) (20:275), does a statement directly
supportive of the rationalism vs. empiricism interpretation appear. Kant’s use of the anglicized (?)
term ‘Rationalism’ (not ‘Rationalismus’), in contrast to his more frequently appearing ‘Empirismus’, is
puzzlingly neologistic; the term does not seem to have been in general philosophical use in Britain.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

6 Introduction

The ‘subjective conditions of thinking’ embraced, on one hand, the sensory

‘ideas’ of Descartes and Locke and their philosophical contemporaries—
subjective experiences such as we have in seeing and tasting things; on the
other, the conceptual ideas of the long history of Western metaphysics—
supersensible entities and abstractions such as God, the soul, free will, obliga-
tion and Heaven. Not only was their separate relationship to reality puzzling
but also their relationship to one another. The mind seemed to be blocked
from the material world by the ‘veil of ideas’, and, at the same time, to be
blocked from the apprehension of supersensible entities. And now, if one
established the objectivity of knowledge acquired through the senses by
breaking through (or down) the veil of ideas, a most unwelcome possible con-
sequence presented itself for consideration: namely, that it was not ‘reason’, the
supposed complement to ‘experience’, that was apprehending the mind-­
independent in­cor­por­eal supersensibles and concepts, but the imagination
that was constructing them. The supersensibles and abstracta were then ‘mere
ideas’ that an enlightened person would want to discard from his or her reper-
toire of functional concepts. The material world, its actual social structures,
institutions and regulations, and the workings of the human mind were in
turn the only suitable objects of investigation. Metaphysics, as practiced since
the time of Plato, was not a science in that case, and one might as well accept
the situation: every mind-­independent object was material or composed of
material things, as was the mind itself, and the laws of nature reigned univer-
sally. There were no superhuman minds in nature, and nothing existed outside
of or above nature. Everything else was a work of the imagination.
Kant did not, then, consider his task to be merely that of showing how
knowledge of the external world was possible, or that of resolving a conflict
between Lockean sensation-­based epistemology, and Cartesian-­Leibnizian-­
Spinozistic apriorism. His target was broader, though not unrelated.8 He was
set on finding a third way between, on one side, atheistic materialism, com-
mitted to naturalistic explanations for all phenomena and to a moral philoso-
phy of self-­interest, pleasure, and social convention, and, on the other, the
appeal to ideal, sense-­transcendent objects to the disparagement of ‘physical
investigations’ (A 472/B 500), and a correspondingly aspirational view of the
soul and its relationship to the supersensible.9 Few of Kant’s contemporaries

8 Leibniz associated his own philosophy with Plato’s and Locke’s with Gassendi’s neo-­Epicureanism,
or, less accurately but also less pejoratively, ‘Democritean’ philosophy. New Essays, 47, 70.
9 In their Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood remark appro-
priately, ‘Less controversial [than the rationalism vs. empiricism framework] is the observation that
the Critique’s main intention is to find a middle way between traditional metaphysics, especially its
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century 7

were worried about whether their everyday experience was merely a dream.
And few of his scientifically active contemporaries were worried about whether
their mathematical physics or the results of their anatomical researches cor-
responded to reality. But a great many of Kant’s contemporaries were worried
about whether their ideas about the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and
the wrath of God corresponded to reality. A somewhat smaller number won-
dered whether conventional norms of morality corresponded to reality, and
these people were to be worried about. Kant’s writings were addressed to these
troubled persons, amongst whom he may have counted himself.
Until recently, commentators have been reluctant to interpret Kant in this
context. According to the influential scholar, Ernst Cassirer, writing in 1932,
eighteenth-­century materialism was ‘an isolated phenomenon of no charac-
teristic significance’.10 This view was, however, unsupportable, even at the
time of writing. Friedrich Albert Lange, described by the nineteenth-­century
Kantian Hermann Cohen, in his Forward to Lange’s multi-­volume history of
materialism, as the ‘apostle of Kant’, would have had to disagree. The later sec-
tions of this constantly amplified, reprinted, and popular publication first
appearing in 1865, make extensive reference to the German philosophical
reaction to the materialistic writings issuing from Scotland, England, and
France and to Kant’s own representations.11 Nearly a century’s worth of later
scholarship have amplified Lange’s findings. As H.B. Nisbet remarks, ‘It seems
that nearly every major writer in Germany around this time had his crises of
faith and doubts concerning Providence.’12
Though materialism had been demeaned since ancient times both as vulgar
and as impossible to take seriously, human intellectual curiosity refused to
leave the topic alone. Favourable as well as critical interest intensified with the
late fifteenth century’s rediscovery, translation, and republication of pagan
authors. Christian philosophers ‘went forth masked’ as Descartes had done;
philosophical writing even by such seemingly stalwart figures as Locke,
Leibniz and Malebranche was at the same time scrutinized for the faintest

attempts to bolster a theistic view of the world with a priori rational arguments, and a scepticism that
would undercut the claims of modern natural science along with those of religious metaphysics’
20. But I find little evidence that Kant was concerned about epistemic threats to modern natural
­science as opposed to existential threats posed by modern natural science.
10 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 55. Lewis White Beck’s Early German Philosophy
devotes only one page to materialism.
11 Friedrich Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus. A preface by Cohen appeared in the edition
of 1882.
12 Nisbet, ‘Lucretius in 18th Century Germany’, 101. Thomas P. Saine offers an extensive discussion
of secularization in eighteenth-­century Germany in The Problem of Being Modern.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

8 Introduction

breath of unorthodoxy.13 As one can see from Descartes’s Meditations of 1640

and from the ‘Objections’ he strategically published with them, fear and
favour of materialism, fatalism, and atheism had established the framework
of early modern metaphysics. The objections voiced by Hobbes and Gassendi
against Descartes’s attempts to prove the existence of God and the in­cor­por­
eal­ity of the soul, raised counterproposals in the form of the corporeality of
the soul and the social construction of religion. The clerics and theologians
Marin Mersenne, Antoine Arnauld, Father Bourdin, and the unnamed Sixth
Set of Objectors charged Descartes with not having done enough to bolster
orthodoxy or indeed with undermining it.
According to what was taught in sermons and schoolrooms week after
week as the truths of the Christian religion, human beings were the children
of a caring but critical God, who had created the rest of the world for their
use. God had first condemned them to a miserable existence and permanent
death for Eve’s seductive wickedness and Adam’s crime of disobedience. God
had later relented and sent his only son—a morally perfect being with an
earthly but virginal mother- to save them from the worst of the hereditary
effects of sin, irreversible death, though his teaching. Christ’s miracles and his
resurrection from the dead proved his divinity and the assurance of immor-
tality. Human beings were powerless and wicked, and life on earth was a way
station and a value of tears. God—and his opponent the Devil—subjected them
constantly to moral tests, and on expiry God would send them to Heaven or
to Hell, according to their performance or else his inscrutable and arbitrary
will. In the meantime, priests and rulers, as earthly representatives of God,
were to be obeyed, and they and their expensive projects and retinues were to
be supported. History followed the path laid out for it by Providence, and
whatever happened reflected God’s will and His plan for humanity. On the
occasion of the Second Coming in the not-­too-­far-­off future, Christ would
raise the dead, restoring the souls of the righteous to their bodies, and presid-
ing over life on a new earth with himself as king. Preparations for the life to
come, not personal happiness or current social arrangements, should be eve-
ryone’s paramount concern.

13 See, representatively, Thomas Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants; Robert Darton, The
Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-­Revolutionary France; Alan C. Kors, Epicureans and Atheists in France;
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund; Catherine
Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity; Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought; Neven Leddy and
Avi Lifschitz, eds., Epicurus in the Enlightenment; Thomas Kavanaugh, Enlightened Pleasures:
Eighteenth Century France and the New Epicureanism.
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 15/04/22, SPi

Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century 9

Doubt and scorn where revealed religion and spiritualistic metaphysics

were concerned are woven into the early modern philosophical canon, and
they intensified. As Margaret Jacob characterizes the mid eighteenth century,
‘Never before in the Christian West had the beliefs of the literate and edu-
cated fractured so openly, so publicly, in matters not simply of doctrine—
Protestants and Catholics had been quarrelling for centuries—but around the
very status of Christian belief, its value and proofs.’14 The most extensive
demonstration of engagement and confrontation with heresy is Pierre Bayle’s
Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, first published in Amsterdam in 1697.
Bayle’s footnotes presented a panorama of ancient and medieval religious and
philosophical systems, including doctrines thoroughly at odds with orthodox
Christianity, whose intellectual merits Bayle assessed coolly and often appre-
ciatively. The inference to be drawn was that the human mind—contrary to
Descartes’s bold announcements—was inadequate for the discovery of truths
about metaphysics and theology. Such observations could lead to a passionate
fideism—or just as well to mockery. La Mettrie ridiculed the abundance of
books bearing titles such as ‘Proofs of the Existence of God from the Wonders
of Nature’, and ‘Proofs of the Immortality of the Soul from Geometry and
Algebra’, and ‘Religion Proven by Facts’.15
At the same time, the metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and
Christian Wolff posed threats to the Christian image in the name of reason
and logic. Although these writers treated extensively of God, the soul, and the
world in general, each came into confrontation with theologians and religious
authorities.16 Descartes’s God seemed only to have set the world in motion
and then abandoned it; Spinoza claimed that God and Nature were identical
and that everything happens out of necessity. Leibniz regarded the human
being as a physical-­spiritual automaton, as did his follower Wolff. The person-
ality and providence of God, miracles, and the truth of the Christian revela-
tion had no real place in these systems, but the canonical rationalists worked
with the traditional terms referring to spiritual substances. A more transpar-
ent threat to the Christian perspective came from later philosophers who
sympathized—though they dared not write at least for publication so boldly—
with the Baron Holbach, who described theology anonymously in print, as ‘a

14 Margaret Jacob, ‘The Clandestine Universe of the Early Eighteenth Century’.

15 La Mettrie, ‘Preliminary Discourse’. In Machine Man, ed. Thomson, 147.
16 See Cornelio Fabro’s long disregarded alarmist study of 1968, God in Exile/Introduzione
all’Ateismo moderno. On Descartes, see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes, p. 3 et passim; on Spinoza,
Steven Nadler, A book forged in hell; on Leibniz, Catherine Wilson, Leibniz’s Metaphysics, 296–303; on
the Wolff affair, G.V. Hartmann et al., Anleitung zur Historie der Leibnitzisch-­Wolffischen Philosophie.
Another Random Scribd Document
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 Astronomy - Answer Key
Spring 2021 - Program

Prepared by: Teaching Assistant Miller

Date: August 12, 2025

Appendix 1: Theoretical framework and methodology

Learning Objective 1: Ethical considerations and implications
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 1: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Learning Objective 2: Research findings and conclusions
• Key terms and definitions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Learning Objective 3: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Learning Objective 4: Historical development and evolution
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Learning Objective 5: Current trends and future directions
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Practical applications and examples
• Ethical considerations and implications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Key Concept: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Best practices and recommendations
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Key Concept: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Key terms and definitions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 9: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Note: Experimental procedures and results
• Problem-solving strategies and techniques
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Unit 2: Assessment criteria and rubrics
Remember: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 11: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Note: Study tips and learning strategies
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 12: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Example 12: Best practices and recommendations
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Example 13: Practical applications and examples
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Remember: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Remember: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Case studies and real-world applications
• Ethical considerations and implications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Interdisciplinary approaches
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 18: Key terms and definitions
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Note: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Key terms and definitions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Practice 3: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
Remember: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Study tips and learning strategies
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 21: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Example 21: Research findings and conclusions
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 22: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Definition: Literature review and discussion
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
[Figure 23: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Note: Fundamental concepts and principles
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Important: Learning outcomes and objectives
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Practice Problem 25: Fundamental concepts and principles
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Example 26: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Current trends and future directions
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Interdisciplinary approaches
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 29: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Definition: Study tips and learning strategies
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Discussion 4: Key terms and definitions
Important: Best practices and recommendations
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Example 31: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Problem-solving strategies and techniques
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 32: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Problem-solving strategies and techniques
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Historical development and evolution
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Learning outcomes and objectives
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Research findings and conclusions
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Important: Ethical considerations and implications
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Note: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Important: Study tips and learning strategies
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
[Figure 40: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Discussion 5: Practical applications and examples
Practice Problem 40: Experimental procedures and results
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice Problem 41: Historical development and evolution
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Important: Ethical considerations and implications
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Note: Practical applications and examples
• Literature review and discussion
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Case studies and real-world applications
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 46: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Key Concept: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 47: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Definition: Experimental procedures and results
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Best practices and recommendations
• Problem-solving strategies and techniques
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Remember: Key terms and definitions
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Discussion 6: Comparative analysis and synthesis
Key Concept: Research findings and conclusions
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Experimental procedures and results
• Critical analysis and evaluation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 52: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 53: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Practice Problem 53: Historical development and evolution
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 54: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Example 54: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Critical analysis and evaluation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Historical development and evolution
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Critical analysis and evaluation
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Remember: Historical development and evolution
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Learning outcomes and objectives
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice 7: Fundamental concepts and principles
Key Concept: Interdisciplinary approaches
• Critical analysis and evaluation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Practice Problem 61: Research findings and conclusions
• Ethical considerations and implications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 63: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Note: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Practical applications and examples
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Practical applications and examples
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 66: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Key Concept: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Interdisciplinary approaches
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 68: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Definition: Case studies and real-world applications
• Literature review and discussion
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
[Figure 69: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Important: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Practice 8: Case studies and real-world applications
Key Concept: Practical applications and examples
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 71: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Practice Problem 71: Learning outcomes and objectives
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
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