Friday, September 28, 2012

Repulsion, Attraction, Intensive Magnitude

As previously discussed, Kant vacillates between characterizing Repulsion as 'filling a space', and as 'extending infinitely'.  Now, his characterizations of Attraction are also inconsistent--on the one hand it 'empties space', while on the other, it 'reduces matter to a point', which is still an occupation of space.  The two discrepancies reflect a significant shortcoming in his effort to derive those dynamic forces from the concept of Intensive Magnitude.  At the source of that shortcoming is an attempted application of a pure Concept to a non-sensible manifold--e. g. to the interior constitution of matter--which violates his own principle governing the application of any such Concept to Experience.

No comments:

Post a Comment