Plaass's treatise stood at the beginning of a renewed wave of scholarship regarding Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MF). Plaass argues that the MF represents an integral step in Kant's development between the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason. The MF repeats the Copernican turn', using the conditions of subjectivity to derive the metaphysical determinations of matter' as the object of natural science with the new method called `metaphysical construction', which simultaneously grounds the mathematizability of physics. The translators provide background and analysis of Plaass's work, extend it to include the body of the MF and offer a variation on the analysis of the relationship between mathematics and metaphysics in the MF. They discuss its relevance for contemporary paradigm-dependency approaches to the philosophy of science and for philosophical hermeneutics. The book will be of interest to Kant specialists as well as to students of the philosophy of science in general.

Inhalt

Translators' Preface. Translators' Introduction and Commentary. Table of Contents to Introduction and Commentary. 1. Aims and Structure of this Introduction. 2. Central Themes of Kant's Philosophy of Science: Metaphysics and Mathematics as the a priori Basis for Natural Science. 3. Kant's Assumptions and Questions as the Background for Interpreting his Philosophy. 4. Overall Goal, Structure and Content of the MF. 5. Metaphysical Construction: the Central Method of the MF. 6. Plaass's Interpretation of Metaphysical Construction' and the Issue of Objective Reality' in the MF. 7. The Relation of the Empirical Part of Physics to the Pure Part. 8. The Relevance of Kant's Philosophy of Natural Science Today. Kant's Theory of Natural Science according to P. Plaass: an Introductory Analytic Essay by C.F. von Weizsäcker (1965). Kant's Theory of Natural Science; P. Plaass. Preface; C.F. von Weizsäcker. Foreword; P. Plaass. Table of Contents. 0: Introduction. 1: The Object of Natural Science: Nature. 2: Doctrine and Science Proper. 3: The Pure Part of Natural Science. 4: The Empirical Concept of Matter. 5: Pure Natural Science as Pure Doctrine of Motion. 6: The Function of the Pure Part. Bibliography. Selected Bibliography since Plaass. Glossary. Index.