This volume is the first ever English translation of Kant's last major work, the so-called Opus Postumum, a work Kant himself described as his 'chef d'oeuvre' and as the keystone of his entire philosophical system. It occupied him for more than the last decade of his life. Begun with the intention of providing a 'transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics,' Kant's reflections take him far beyond the problem he initially set out to solve. In (...) fact, he reassesses a whole series of fundamental topics of transcendental philosophy: the thing in itself, the nature of space and time, the concept of the self and its agency, the idea of God, and the unity of theoretical and practical reason. Though never completed, the text reaches a logical albeit not fully developed, conclusion. (shrink)

This volume is the first ever English translation of Kant's last major work, the so-called Opus Postumum, a work Kant himself described as his 'chef d'oeuvre' and as the keystone of his entire philosophical system. It occupied him for more than the last decade of his life. Begun with the intention of providing a 'transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics,' Kant's reflections take him far beyond the problem he initially set out to solve. In (...) fact, he reassesses a whole series of fundamental topics of transcendental philosophy: the thing in itself, the nature of space and time, the concept of the self and its agency, the idea of God, and the unity of theoretical and practical reason. Though never completed, the text reaches a logical albeit not fully developed, conclusion. (shrink)

Biographical note: Pierfrancesco Basile, Zürich, Schweiz.

This book offers new perspectives on the theoretical elements of the Opus postumum, Kant's project of a final work which remained unknown until eighty years after his death. The contributors read the OP as a central work in establishing the relation between Kant's transcendental philosophy, his natural philosophy, practical philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and his broader epistemology. Interpreting the OP is an important task because it helps reveal how Kant himself tried to correct and develop his critical (...) philosophy. It also sheds light on the foundational role of the three Critiques for other philosophical inquiries, as well as the unified philosophical system that Kant sought to establish. The chapters in this volume address a range of topics relevant to the epistemological and theoretical problems raised in the OP, including the transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to physics as an answer to a deficiency in critical thought; the notion of ether and, more specifically, its transcendental deduction; self-affection and the self-positing of the subject; and the idea of God and the system of ideas in the highest standpoint of transcendental philosophy. Perspectives on Kant's Opus postumum will be of interest to upper-level students and scholars working on Kant. (shrink)

In his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (MAN), Kant claims that chemistry is an improper, though rational science. The chemistry to which Kant confers this status is the phlogistic chemistry of, for instance, Georg Stahl. In his Opus Postumum (OP), however, Kant espouses a broadly Lavoiserian conception of chemistry. In particular, Kant endorses Antoine Lavoisier's elements, oxygen theory of combustion, and role for the caloric. As Lavoisier's lasting contribution to chemistry, according to some histories of the science, was his (...) emphasis on quantitative methods, Kant's assimilation of the chemical revolution raises the question: did Kant continue to think of chemistry as an improper, though rational, science in OP? In this paper, I answer this question affirmatively. I explain that a proper science requires a priori laws for the mathematical construction of its objects: the mere use of quantitative measurements is insufficient for the satisfaction this requirement. Further, I argue, contra Burkhard Tuschling, that in OP Kant retains a central role for mathematical construction in the foundations of proper natural science. Finally, I contend that the prominent a priori components of chemistry discussed in OP—the aether and the enumeration of the elements—do not make chemistry into a proper science. (shrink)

In this article, I have a modest goal: to sketch how Kant can avoid the charge of “subjective idealism” advanced against him by John McDowell and to do so with reference to Kant's last work, the so-called Opus Postumum. I am interested in defending Kant on this point because doing so not only shows how we need not—at least not because of this point about idealism—jump ship from Kant to Hegel , but also suggests that the Opus (...) Postumum is a text that ought to be explored more by Kantians and those interested in Kant. A subsidiary, implicit point is that we need not shy away from McDowell's reading of Kant in order to oppose McDowell's criticism of Kant. In order to defend against McDowell's charge, I focus on the argument of the Refutation of Idealism, showing how this argument evolves in Kant's later works, especially the Opus Postumum. (shrink)

This paper analyzes, first, the reception of Schelling’s philosophy in the environment of Kant in Königsberg, and second in Kantian writings published by his students Jäsche and Rink. – The only two passages Kant mentions Schelling are to be found in the latest leaves of the Opus postumum. Here Schelling’s philosophy is characterized as transcendental idealism. In current research it became rather common to interpret these passages as a positive account of Schelling’s philosophy, moreover, that Kant recognized Schelling’s (...) transcendental idealism as an improvement of his own philosophy. However, in the latest leaves of the Opus postumum the term transcendental idealism is – remarkably – strongly linked with Spinozism. In this paper I argue, thirdly, that Kant in the Opus postumum employs transcendental idealism in a negative way in order to distinguish his own transcendental philosophy clearly from the wrong philosophical account transcendental idealism brings forward. (shrink)

This is one of the first volumes to appear in the projected fourteen-volume series, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, under the general editorship of Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. It is also the first translation ever into English of Kant's notorious late reflections on metaphysics and epistemology, dubbed "Opus postumum" by Kant's later editor, Erich Adickes. This is an excellent volume, in format, in content, and in physical presentation. Förster has provided a very clear, (...) concise, and judicious introduction, which describes the history of Kant's manuscript, its composition, its place in Kant's philosophy, and the development of Kant's views and argument contained in it. The body of the text is a generous and representative selection of substantial excerpts from Kant's opus postumum, which fills volumes 21 and 22 of Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, totalling about twelve hundred pages of text. Förster has provided headings for seven sections of this material: "Early leaves and Oktaventwurf," "Toward the Elementary System of the Moving Forces of Matter," "The Ether Proofs," "How is Physics Possible? How is the Transition to Physics Possible?" "The Selbstsetzungslehre," "Practical Self-Positing and the Idea of God," and "What is Transcendental Philosophy?" The body of the text is preceded by a brief but useful bibliography and is followed by factual notes on the excerpted passages, a detailed glossary, a concordance to Ak vols. 21 and 22, and very good indexes of names and subjects. The editorial apparatus makes this volume especially useful, and the translators have certainly achieved their aim of making their translation read at least like Kant wherever it cannot quite read like English. (shrink)

Funktion und Bedeutung des Opus Postumum für die Philosophie Kants sind in der Forschungsliteratur umstritten. Dina Emundts zeigt, dass die Hauptaufgabe des Nachlasswerkes ist, ein System aller für die empirischen Erkenntnisse erforderlichen Begriffe auszuarbeiten, wie es Kant zur Fundierung der empirischen Physik als unerlässlich ansah. Darüber hinaus geht die Untersuchung der Frage nach, wie sich empirische Wissenschaften fundieren lassen.

El presente artículo estudia la visión zubiriana de la voluntad en el pensamiento publicado póstumamente de Zubiri, donde aparece un concepto original de libertad como capacidad de autodeterminación de la voluntad.

This paper is about Kant’s late unfinished manuscript, Opus postumum (1796–1803) and some of the resonances it has with Schelling’s early Naturphiloso­phie (1797–1800). Most of the secondary literature on Opus postumum investigates its relation to the rest of Kant’s corpus, often framing the drafts as an attempt to fill a so-called “gap” in the Critical philosophy whilst ignoring the relationship it has to the wider landscape of late eighteenth century German philosophy. Whether Opus postumum (...) may provide grounds for reviewing the relationship between Kant and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, for example, is rarely discussed. Some scholars have remarked upon the striking parallels between Opus postumum and Naturphilosophie, but there has yet to appear a single monograph-length text on the relation. Whilst certainly “Schelling’s Post-Kantian confrontation with nature itself begins with the overthrow of the Copernican revolution” (Grant 2008, 6), what if Kant was himself overthrowing the Copernican revolution? In this paper, I will outline some of the points of contact to start from in support of posing this question. (shrink)

Kant’s admission of a “gap” in the philosophical system of criticism, which his unpublished project of the “Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics” would have been meant to fill, has been the object of controversy among scholars. This article reconsiders the problem by connecting the manuscripts with the operation of “exhibition” of concepts, which already had a systematic role in the 1780s, concluding that the new project was intended to provide not a reform, but a necessary (...) complement of previous works. In the final section Kant’s new awareness of this problem in the 1790s is connected to the contemporary reception of criticism. This context provides more evidence supporting the main argument of the article about the inner development of Kant’s thought. (shrink)

This paper is about Kant’s late unfinished manuscript, Opus postumum (1796–1803) and some of the resonances it has with Schelling’s early Naturphiloso­phie (1797–1800). Most of the secondary literature on Opus postumum investigates its relation to the rest of Kant’s corpus, often framing the drafts as an attempt to fill a so-called “gap” in the Critical philosophy whilst ignoring the relationship it has to the wider landscape of late eighteenth century German philosophy. Whether Opus postumum (...) may provide grounds for reviewing the relationship between Kant and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, for example, is rarely discussed. Some scholars have remarked upon the striking parallels between Opus postumum and Naturphilosophie, but there has yet to appear a single monograph-length text on the relation. Whilst certainly “Schelling’s Post-Kantian confrontation with nature itself begins with the overthrow of the Copernican revolution” (Grant 2008, 6), what if Kant was himself overthrowing the Copernican revolution? In this paper, I will outline some of the points of contact to start from in support of posing this question. (shrink)

The three presumptions that Hegel’s idealism further develops or radicalises Kant’s transcendental idealism, that their respective versions of idealism are linked by Kant’s account of self-positing (Selbstsetzungslehre) in the late opus postumum and that the basic model of Hegel’s early idealism holds also for his mature system are wide-spread and largely unexamined. This paper examines several problems confronting these presumptions, including Hegel’s refutation of the basic premises of Kant’s transcendental idealism and Transzendentalphilosophie in the late opus (...) class='Hi'>postumum (§2), Hegel’s critical rejection of intellectual intuition because it cannot escape Pyrrhonian scepticism (§3), and his critical rejection of the deductivist ideal of scientia, which undergirds Kant’s transcendental idealism and his late Transzendentalphilosophie (§4), the highly un-Kantian principles of Hegel’s mature idealism (§5) and finally Hegel’s thorough and incisive critique in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit of common philosophical views, concepts and presuppositions, including those which undergird the three presumptions noted above (§6). To understand properly Hegel’s philosophy of nature and hence also his philosophical system requires abandoning those three presumptions. (shrink)

Kant's Transition Project and Late Philosophy is the first study to provide a close reading of the connection between texts written by Kant during 1796 and 1798. Connecting Kant's unfinished book project, the Opus postumum, with the Metaphysics of Morals, it identifies and clarifies issues at the forefront of Kant's focus towards the end of his life. Labelled by Kant as the “Transition Project”, the Opus postumum generates debate among commentators as to why Kant describes the (...) project as filling a “gap” within his system of critical philosophy. This study argues for a pervasive transition project that can be traced through Kant's entire critical philosophy and is the key to addressing current debates in the scholarship. By showing that there is not only a Transition Project in Kant's theoretical philosophy but also a Transition Project in his practical philosophy, it reveals why an accurate assessment of Kant's critical philosophy requires a new understanding of the Opus postumum and Kant's parallel late writings on practical philosophy. Rather than seeing Kant's late thoughts on a Transition as afterthoughts, they must be seen at the centre of his critical philosophy. (shrink)

Es heißt, der Philosoph Immanuel Kant habe die klassische Newtonsche Physik im Verstand auf den Begriff gebracht, der wie die klassische Natur auf Kausalität und Empirizität beruht. Die Vernunft, der er seine drei berühmten Kritiken gewidmet hat, hat Kant dagegen als a-kausal und nicht-empirisch gegen diesen klassischen Verstand abgesetzt. Erst in seinem Spätwerk, dem Opus postumum, hatte Kant versucht, die Natur dieser Vernunft dingfest zu machen. Mit seinen Worten: Von der Physik zur Metaphysik und von der Metaphysik wieder (...) zur Physik. Kant kannte jedoch noch keine nicht-Newtonsche Natur. Von dieser wissen wir erst seit 1900 mit der Entdeckung der Quanten durch Max Planck. Kant tappe deshalb hinsichtlich einer Natur der Vernunft im Dunkeln, erschloss aber ihre Grundprinzipien. Sie artikulieren sich in einer von mir leicht ergänzten These: Die Mathematik der Physik ist die reine Dichtung der reinen Vernunft. Er sprach auch von Natur ist Kunst. Die Frage ist nur, welche Mathematik welcher Natur als Kunst? Der Quantenphysiker und begnadete Experimentalphysiker Anton Zeilinger aus Wien forderte im Jahr 2013 in einem Vortrag in der Ludwig Maximilians-Universität in München einen neuen Kant der Quantenphysik, der auch diese endlich auf den Begriff bringt. Ich habe dies im Prolog vorgestellt. Im Epilog gibt Kant posthum seine Antwort auf diese Forderung von Zeilinger. Es ist meine These, das Kant die quantische Natur im Opus postumum schon auf den Begriff gebracht hat. Deshalb erweist sich Kant als Quantenphilosoph, was ich im vorliegenden Buch ausführlich erläutere. (shrink)

This is the first book in English devoted entirely to Kant's Opus postumum and its place in the Kantian oeuvre.

Biology in the Critical Philosophy and the Opus postumum Hein van den Berg. Parts of Chap. 2 have been previously published in Hein van den Berg (2011), “ Kant's Conception of Proper Science.” Synthese 183 (1): 7–26. Parts of Chap.

Over two hundred years after Immanuel Kant’s death, the first full, critical, and digital edition of his last manuscript is currently being completed by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. This edition stands in institutional continuity with Wilhelm Dilthey’s monumental Akademieausgabe of Kant’s writings that was grounded in Dilthey’s lastingly influential concept of the national, literary-philosophical archive. The new edition showcases Kant’s dynamic writing process as a matter of investigation in its own right. As I argue here, it brings into view (...) the constitutive role of the archive for both texts and interpretative practices. A historical perspective that links the legacy of the Akademieausgabe with the digital edition of the Opus postumum highlights the changing role of the archive in emphasising or de-emphasising the manuscript’s resistance to certain appropriations and stylisations of Kant as a thinker. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/7), Kant laid out a deep-running and largely original picture of the apperceptive mind, including a claim that in consciousness of self, one does not appear to oneself as an object and that consciousness of self is presupposed by consciousness of other things. As a result, consciousness of oneself does not provide knowledge of oneself and the referential apparatus of consciousness of self is radically different from other kinds of referential apparatus. The main purpose (...) of this paper is to summarize this picture and then explore how much of it is still to be found in his late, unfinished Opus Postumum (1800/04). (shrink)