In the mid-1760s, Johann Heinrich Lambert wrote a letter to Kant who offered cooperation with a view to reforming metaphysics. Based on the short correspondence between the two philosophers, it can be shown that this cooperation could never really come about. Nevertheless the thesis was sometimes put forward in research that Lambert had a defining influence on Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, also, and above all, with regard to the Newton-critical moments of this natur­al theory. However, this thesis can (...) only be confirmed in relation to individual theorems, such as the relationship between attraction and repulsion force, even though the reasons for Lambert and Kant’s deviation from Newton’s theory of gravity also differ. For in its main features the transcendental metaphysics of Kant’s nature is substantially different from the mathematical methodology of Lambert’s theory of nature. In addition, Lambert stuck throughout his life to a theonomous natural teleology in the succession of Wolff, which was fundamentally made impossible by the Critique of Pure Reason: because the wise “intention of the creator”, which Lambert’s empirical-rationalistic cosmology could not and did not want to do without, could no longer be referred to in a rational context according to the Critique of Pure Reason. Even if Lambert certainly had moments of the Kantian theory of matter or — as Kant himself admitted — elements of the spatial theory of the first Critique, there is no way from his mathematisation of metaphysics and his natural teleology to the fundamental innovation of the Metaphysical Foundations. (shrink)

This article examines Cohen’s “transcendental method”, Windelband’s “critical method”, the neo-Kantian distinctions between natural science and the humanities (i. e., human or cultural sciences), and Weber’s account of ideal-typical explanations. The Marburg and the Southwest Schools of neo-Kantianism have in common that their respective philosophies of science focused on method, but they substantially differ in their approaches. Cohen advanced the “transcendental method”, which was taken up and transformed by Natorp and Cassirer; later, it became influential in neo-Kantian approaches to 20th (...) century physics. Windelband distinguished between facts and values, linking the former to the “genetic” method of history and the latter to the “critical” method of philosophy; and between the “nomothetic” and “idiographic” methods of the empirical sciences, a distinction further elaborated by Rickert. The distinction does not give rise to a sharp discrimination but is rather what Weber would later call an ideal type. All these approaches contribute in different ways to understanding the structure of scientific knowledge, focusing on different aspects of the general path of the empirical sciences between rationalism and empiricism. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson is one of the most famous Kantian philosophers and interpretators of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. This study is dedicated to reconstruction of this interpretation. It is also dedicated to the analysis of the story and place of Strawson’s interpretation in the history of his own philosophical career. I show how Strawson reads Kant’s text, what strategies of interpretation he adopts and what problems he faces. In “Individuals” and “The Bounds of Sense” Strawson explicitly associates himself with Kant (...) and considers himself as Kantian philosopher. Kantian philosophy for Strawson is the descriptive, anti-sceptical metaphysics that seeks to explicate our basic conceptual sсheme. However, due to various criticism, Strawson had to abandon descriptive metaphysics and to change his intellectual figures. On of the main heroes of “Skepticism and Naturalism” - his late book - becomes Hume. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the explanation of the transition from Kant to Hume. In this work, Strawson argues for some kind of soft Hume-like naturalism instead of previously held descriptive metaphysics. This kind of naturalism is more modest than metaphysics. It does not pretend to be the main and the most fundamental of all the philosophical studies. It is simply an analysis of one of the possible philosophical perspective. The stand point of ordinary believes. (shrink)

This introduction consists of two parts. In the first part, the special issue editors introduce inductive metaphysics from a historical as well as from a systematic point of view and discuss what distinguishes it from other modern approaches to metaphysics. In the second part, they give a brief summary of the individual articles in this special issue.