Kant's physica generalis (Immanuel Kant)

Throughout his career Kant was preoccupied with the natural sciences of his time. In particular, he was at pains to understand the nature of the relationship between natural science and metaphysics. Kant thought of metaphysics as constituting the foundation of physics. The metaphysical principles are concerned with the nature of corporeal substance. Kant refers to this a priori part of physics as physica generalis. In this work I examine the notion of physica generalis first from a historical perspective, and then in the context of Kant's thinking.; The notion that the most fundamental part of physics consists in insights into the essential nature of material bodies can be traced back to the Aristotelians. The first part of this work outlines the Aristotelian origins and the further development of this tradition of metaphysical physics up to Kant's time.; In the second part I show the importance of the tradition of physica generalis for Kant's thinking about natural science. My starting point is Kant's first publication, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces. Here one finds Kant's most extended discussion of mechanics. This is a part of Kant's work that has received little attention in the literature, but is important for a full understanding of Kant's thinking about rational mechanics. I argue that it was a permanent fixture of Kant's thinking that mathematical physics ought to be embedded in a philosophical study of corporeal substance. I further argue that Kant was more heavily influenced by Leibniz, Wolff, and his contemporaries at the Berlin Academy than it is ordinarily assumed to be the case.; By placing Kant's thinking about natural science in the historical context of the tradition of general physics I am able to address some important issues in recent Kant scholarship. A number of Kant scholars have claimed that Kant's intention was completely to divorce Newtonian physics from metaphysics. Against this line of interpretation I argue that Kant's aim was to reconcile a special metaphysics of corporeal nature with rational mechanics, and that this position put Kant at odds with many of Newton's official pronouncements on scientific method.