Kant on the Laws of Nature: Laws, Necessitation, and the Limitation of Our Knowledge

European Journal of Philosophy 17 (4):527-558 (2008)
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Abstract

Consider the laws of nature—the laws of physics, for example. One familiar philosophical question about laws is this: what is it to be a law of nature? More specifically, is a law of nature a regularity, or a generalization stating a regularity? Or is it something else? Another philosophical question is: how, and to what extent, can we have knowledge of the laws of nature? I am interested here in Kant's answers to these questions, and their place within his broader theoretical philosophy during the period spanning from the first to the third Critique.

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Author's Profile

James Kreines
Claremont McKenna College

Citations of this work

On the Transcendental Freedom of the Intellect.Colin McLear - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7:35-104.
Rehabilitating the Regulative Use of Reason: Kant on Empirical and Chemical Laws.Michael Bennett McNulty - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 54:1-10.
Hypotheses in Kant's philosophy of science.Andrew Cooper - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 99 (C):97-105.

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References found in this work

Laws and symmetry.Bas C. van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
What is a Law of Nature?D. M. Armstrong - 1983 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Sydney Shoemaker.
Kant and the exact sciences.Michael Friedman - 1992 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Laws of nature.Fred I. Dretske - 1977 - Philosophy of Science 44 (2):248-268.

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