Abstract

This is the first chapter of Mark Julyan's 'History of the Heavens' which, as a whole, focuses on the many different interpretational problems that emerge within the controversial and previously unavailable appendix to Kant's 'Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens'. The first chapter makes the contention that we should interpret J.L. Austin's curious and otherwise eccentric capitalization of the font in the word KANT (twice on pp.2-3) of his 'How to do Things with Words' (1962), through pp.13-14 of the 'Elementum: eine Vorarbeit zum Griechischen und Lateinischen Thesaurus' of Hermann Diels (1899), where Diels describes the Thesaurus of the font based on Aristotle's description of ancient atomism (twice in the Metaphysics and Gen et Corr). This, alongside a play on the words of the name Bernard de Fontenelle and the provocative nature of Austin's obviously false statements regarding Kant, suggest he had seen Kant's astonishingly scandalous opening statement to the appendix; and that he was making a cryptic, but nonetheless fairly tangible reference to it, by means of showing us How To Do Things With Words by embodying a witticism ass encryption, an instance of his theory into his text.