For Émilie Du Châtelet, I argue, a central role of the principle of sufficient reason is to discriminate between better and worse explanations. Her principle of sufficient reason does not play this role for just any conceivable intellect: it specifically enables understanding for minds like ours. She develops this idea in terms of two criteria for the success of our explanations: “understanding how” and “understanding why.” These criteria can respectively be connected to the determinateness and contrastivity of explanations. The crucial role Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason plays in identifying good explanations is often overlooked in the literature, or else run together with questions about the justification and likelihood of explanations. An auxiliary goal of the article is to situate Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason with respect to some of the general epistemological and metaphysical commitments of her Institutions de Physique, clarifying how it fits into the broader project of that work.
There is a tension in Emilie Du Châtelet's thought on mathematics. The objects of mathematics are ideal or fictional entities; nevertheless, mathematics is presented as indispensable for an account of the physical world. After outlining Du Châtelet's position, and showing how she departs from Christian Wolff's pessimism about Newtonian mathematical physics, I show that the tension in her position is only apparent. Du Châtelet has a worked-out defense of the explanatory and epistemic need for mathematical objects, consistent with their metaphysical non-fundamentality. I conclude by sketching how Du Châtelet's conception of mathematical indispensability differs interestingly from many contemporary approaches.
The consensus is that in his 1755 Nova Dilucidatio, Kant endorsed broadly Leibnizian compatibilism, then switched to a strongly incompatibilist position in the early 1760s. I argue for an alternative, incompatibilist reading of the Nova Dilucidatio. On this reading, actions are partly grounded in indeterministic acts of volition, and partly in prior conative or cognitive motivations. Actions resulting from volitions are determined by volitions, but volitions themselves are not fully determined. This move, which was standard in medieval treatments of free choice, explains why Kant is so critical of Crusius's version of libertarian freedom: Kant understands Crusius as making actions entirely random. In defense of this reading, I offer a new analysis of the version of the principle of sufficient reason that appears in the Nova Dilucidatio. This principle can be read as merely guaranteeing grounds for the existence of things or substances, rather than efficient causes for states and events. As such, the principle need not exclude libertarian freedom. Along the way, I seek to illuminate obscure aspects of Kant's 1755 views on moral psychology, action theory, and the threat of theological determinism.
Du Châtelet holds that mathematical representations play an explanatory role in natural science. Moreover, things proceed in nature as they do in geometry. How should we square these assertions with Du Châtelet's idealism about mathematical objects, on which they are 'fictions' dependent on acts of abstraction? The question is especially pressing because some of her important interlocutors (Wolff, Maupertuis, and Voltaire) denied that mathematics informs us about the properties of real things. After situating Du Châtelet in this debate, this chapter argues, first, that her account of the origins of mathematical objects is less subjectivist than it might seem. Mathematical objects are non-arbitrary, public entities. While mathematical objects are partly mind-dependent, so are material things. Mathematical objects can approximate the material. Second, it is argued that this moderate metaphysical position underlies Du Châtelet's persistent claims that mathematics is required for certain kinds of general knowledge, including in natural science. The chapter concludes with an illustrative example: an analysis of Du Châtelet's argument that matter is continuous. A key but overlooked premise in the argument is that mathematical representations and material nature correspond.
Fichte's mature conception of transcendental freedom is the subject of some controversy. 1 This paper hopes to shed light on Fichte's later conception by examining his earliest thoughts on the matter. The focus is on three pivotal years of Fichte's development, 1791-93. During these years, Fichte had a number of interlocutors. But Kant was of central importance. Thus I begin with a discussion of Fichte's reflections on how a broadly Kantian conception of transcendental freedom can be manifest in the empirical world. However, Fichte's moves at this point are broadly unsatisfactory, even dogmatic, from a Kantian perspective. However, in several short works from 1792, Fichte's views become significantly more sophisticated. Fichte confronts the worry that neither a metaphysical account of the natural world, nor a mere appeal to 'facts of consciousness,' can be sufficient to establish autonomy in the positive sense. Fichte responds to these worries in two ways. One, relatively well known, is his attempt to prove the existence of practical reason from features of self-consciousness. I focus instead on Fichte's account of moral motivation added to the 1793 second edition of the Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation. There, Fichte sketches an account of pure practical motivation that does not depend on direct appeal to features of self-consciousness, but is more in line with Kant's own appeal to the moral law.
It is widely held that, in his pre-Critical works, Kant endorsed a necessitation account of laws of nature, where laws are grounded in essences or causal powers. Against this, I argue that the early Kant endorsed the priority of laws in explaining and unifying the natural world, as well as their irreducible role in in grounding natural necessity. Laws are a key constituent of Kant's explanatory naturalism, rather than undermining it. By laying out neglected distinctions Kant draws among types of natural law, grounding relations, and ontological levels, I show that his early works present a coherent and sophisticated laws-first account of the natural order.One of the most influential innovations of Kant's Critical system is his emphasis on nonempirical laws, such as the moral law and transcendental principles of the understanding. Rather than advance a detailed theory of empirical laws, Kant generally tends to begin with their prima facie reliability and look for the conditions that make this possible. And even regarding the conditions for the necessity and objectivity of empirical laws, there is no consensus among commentators.But Kantian philosophy does not begin with the first Critique. Given the lack of agreement on his mature theory, it is natural to hope that Kant's earlier philosophical worksprior to his transcendental turn, and published while Kant was directly engaged in first-order scientific research-can shed light on the status of empirical laws.On a widely shared interpretation, however, such hopes are mostly misguided. This reading contends that, while Kant may frequently speak of laws in his early work, his underlying metaphysics in this period focuses not on laws but on the natures and causal powers of created things. 1 Natural necessities, as well as the general truths expressed by laws, are supposed to be grounded in powers and natures. Laws then bear little or no metaphysical weight, however convenient it may be to posit them. This is often called a necessitation account of laws, but the point is that laws are necessitated; they do not necessitate. Now, I do think this reading is on to something. Even early on, Kant insists on the active causal powers of material substances (unlike Cartesians), and sets strict limits on God's direct role in grounding causal patterns in nature (unlike Newtonians and Wolffians). Yet Kant's rejection of some laws-first ways of explaining the natural order need not involve rejecting all of
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