Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Physics and Sufficient Reason

While for Newton, the Principle of Sufficient Reason inheres in objects, as is expressed by his first Law of Motion, for Kant, it is a mental synthesizing process that constructs objects of knowledge, as is articulated in his Second Analogy.  So, since the latter is applicable to only phenomena, Kant argues that Newton's positing of the existence of an incorporeal first mover, i. e. of his deity, is an illegitimate extension of the PSR.  More generally, according to Kant, qua Theoretical, the Principle can only motivate the search for an unconditioned cause, and never ground the cognition of it.  But, upon the Kantian revolution, in which motion is located in the subject, Reason locates free causality in itself, i. e. in its Pure Principle of Practical Reason.  In other words, that revolution transforms the PSR from a Theoretical to a Practical proposition, with the latter the ground of the former.  However, Kant seems to leave unexplored the status of an Experimental PSR, which, on the one hand, entails a search for knowledge, but, on the hand, entails the positing of the free causality of events in a controlled context, e. g. Galileo rolling balls down an incline in order to demonstrate that they accelerate.

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