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  1. The Marriage of Metaphysics and Geometry in Kant's Prolegomena (Forthcoming in Cambridge Critical Guide to Kant’s Prolegomena).James Messina - 2021 - In Peter Thiekle (ed.), Cambridge Critical Guide to Kant’s Prolegomena. Cambridge.
    Kant was engaged in a lifelong struggle to achieve what he calls in the 1756 Physical Monadology (PM) a “marriage” of metaphysics and geometry (1:475). On one hand, this involved showing that metaphysics and geometry are complementary, despite the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between these disciplines and between their respective advocates, the Leibnizian-Wolffians and the Newtonians. On the other hand, this involved defining the terms of their union, which meant among other things, articulating their respective roles in grounding Newtonian natural science. (...)
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  • Looking for laws in all the wrong spaces: Kant on laws, the understanding, and space.James Anthony Messina - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):589-613.
    Prolegomena §38 is intended to elucidate the claim that the understanding legislates a priori laws to nature. Kant cites various laws of geometry as examples and discusses a derivation of the inverse-square law from such laws. I address 4 key interpretive questions about this cryptic text that have not yet received satisfying answers: How exactly are Kant's examples of laws supposed to elucidate the Legislation Thesis? What is Kant's view of the epistemic status of the inverse-square law and, relatedly, of (...)
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