Andres’s Reviews > Kant and the Exact Sciences > Status Update

The dynamical principles of the understanding (modality & relation) ground the law-governedness of nature. So while the law of gravitational attraction is empirical, its properties of immediacy and necessity are not.

Kant as antiformalist: logical possibility ≠ real possibility (e.g., a shape between two parallel lines.

Problem: if I construct a triangle in my imagination, how do I know its angles add up to 180 degree and not 180 + 0.0001 degrees? That would axiomatically not be a triangle

Arithmetic is a technique for calculating magnitudes of given objects. It has no default objects.

Early Kant:
- metaphysics as something negative, studying everything that wasn’t phenomenal
- disagreed w/ the Wolffians who began science with metaphysics and syllogistically deduced empirical propositions
- Preferred the Newtonian method of trusting the results of empirical science and philosophizing in response to that

Later Kant:
- metaphysics provides foundations of sci by finding the concepts applied to it