Kant: A Biography

Notes to Pages 302-306 489

117. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, pp. 4f. (Ak 4, pp. 468f).


118. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 12 (Ak4, p. 476).


119. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 16 (Ak4, p. 478).


120. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 28 (Ak 4, p. 487).


121. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 18 (Ak 4, p. 480). The distinction between
     relative and absolute space is interesting, if only because it seems to be central
     to what Kant is trying to do in this book, namely trying to find a middle ground
     between Leibniz, who held a relationalist view of space, and Newton, who viewed
     space as absolute. See Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, pp. I36f.


122. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 40 (Ak 4, p. 496).


123. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 41 (Ak 4, p. 497).


124. See especially Observation 2 (Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 48; Ak 4,
     pp. soif.).


125. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 77 (Ak 4, p. 523).


126. This is tricky. The two opposed camps within seventeenth- and eighteenth-
     century mechanical philosophy were the corpuscularians (Descartes, etc.) and
     the atomists (Gassendi, Newton). The corpuscularians insisted that matter was
     infinitely divisible; the atomists denied this. Yet, both parties maintained that
     matter is impentrable. They disagreed about whether matter (atoms) is absolutely
     hard. So the concepts of "hardness" and "impenetrability" are not necessarily
     identical.


127. See Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, pp. I38£, but it may not be Leibniz
     whom Kant has in mind here.


128. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 95 (Ak 4, p. 536).


129. See Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, ed. Kon¬
     stantin Pollok (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997), pp. i4Sf. I am deeply indebted to Martin
     Curd and Konstantin Pollok for their help with this account of the Metaphysical
     Foundations.


130. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 118 (Ak 4, p. 554).


131. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 126 (Ak 4, p. 559).


132. In the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung of August 29, 1789. See Konstantin Pollok's
     very helpful "Introduction" to Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwis¬
     senschaft, ed. Pollok, p. xxiii.


133. Ak 12, p. 23.


134. He must have written at least parts of the Preface during the winter of 1785. For
     the dating, see Pollok, "Introduction," p. xxi. Kant eventually returned to work
     on the problems of natural philosophy in his so-called Opus postumum. See pp. 409-
     413 of this volume.


135. The ensuing dispute was the so-called Pantheism Controversy. For more exten¬
     sive English accounts, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy
     from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 92-126;
     Beck, Early German Philosophy, pp. 352-360; Altmann, Mendelssohn, pp. 553-712.


136. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Werke, ed. Friedrich Roth and Friedrich Koppen
     (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976; reprint of the edition
     Leipzig, 1812-1820), IV, pp. i2if.


137. See Ak 10, pp. 417t, 433, 453-458.