Break, Transition And Ether

The motif of this dissertation is about the later work of Kant:the Opus Postumum. There are two questions need to be clarified here:firstly, what is the "transition philosophy" and its core argument "the Ether deduction". Secondly, how to evaluate Kant’s thinkings about these themes. So the former is the question of what, and the latter involves the question of why.In contrast to the familiar theory of "critique philosophy", Kant’s Opus looks a little beyond the expectations. There are four reasons to make man feel strange:1、As a experimental book, its content and structure are too trivial and it is difficult to grasp the purpose of Kant.2、The nature philosophy is the main theme in this book, but comparing the MFNS, Kant here use another way to argue this problem.3^the title of this book was "the transition from the metaphysics foundation of natural philosophy to physics", hears more like some kind of metaphysics, not critique philosophy.4、the ether concept seems cross the boundary of understanding, but to the thing itself.Because of these problems, this book didn’t attract enough attention at the beginning. In the wake of the more search, today Opus get more attention than ever. If we look the Kant’s thinking as the whole jigsaw, then the Opus will be the key piece of whole. For in any case people will ask how Kant evaluate his own critique philosophy, and how he responds the metaphysical problems. In this sense, Opus give us a valued clue.With these questions, in this dissertation I will do the search of Opus, and try to find out the situations of how the transition philosophy be possible, and how its content, steps, the ether concept to be designed and constructed. In the "introduction", I will discuss four issues:the history background of the Opus; to analysis the thorny points, the important parts and the values of this book; to do the literature review of todays research; to explain my own methodology about the researching.In chapter1,1outline the important issue in the researching of Opus, that is the relation between the "transition philosophy" and "gap". With clearing several misunderstandings, I focus on two typical theories about this question, the Forster’s and the Beiser’s. On one side, this introduction will help readers to understand Opus better, and on the other it is a trial to surpass the paradigm. In chapter2, I focus more on the "transition philosophy" itself, discuss the necessity, the methodology, the steps of it. Try to understand the real meaning in Kant’s own context.In chapter3,1argue the ether deduction, the core part of "transition philosophy". It is the proof which Kant discussed to support the exist of ether. And I divide this chapter into four parts:1、from the science view to clarify the ether concept.2、 to analysis several thinkings about Kant’s ether deduction.3、to explain the steps which Kant tried to prove the deduction.4、To argue with Prof. Haar, then to evaluate this deduction.In chapter4, I will try to find Kant’s purpose of the "transition philosophy", and try to explain it in two ways, from the history of philosophy view and from the the metaphysics view.The last chapter is a summary of this dissertation, here I use the most pithily way to explain the whole story of Kant’s Opus.There still something need to remind the readers, though the Opus contains some other important issues, like the God and The self-setting arguments, I didn’t have enough time to solve all of them, so these problems have to be solved in the future, that’s my regret.