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  • Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality
  • Gary L. Cesarz
Eric Watkins . Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 451 Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $32.99.

Eric Watkins' book is a substantial contribution to Kant scholarship, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. It could change the debate on the nature of causality, for it illuminates the advantages of Kant's critical conception of causality over the Humean theories favored today and outlines how Kant's analysis clarifies certain contemporary issues clustered around the notion of causality. Watkins' interpretation of Kant on causality is rooted in a thorough re-examination of Kant's early views which, though influenced by his Leibnizian and anti-Leibnizian predecessors, differed in ways sufficient to provide a basis for Newtonian physics and thus were preserved in the first Critique. This reflects a welcome amendment to Kant scholarship in the expansion of focus beyond the critical period to the periods before 1781 and after 1790. The general thinking seems to be that, with all that has been done to understand Kant's three Critiques within the parameters of critique, our understanding of his philosophy remains incomplete. The standard view that Kant sought to reconcile rationalism with empiricism and refute Hume's accounts of causality left much unanswered, and the old "patchwork theory" did more to conceal than reveal the depth, unity, and significance of Kant's thought. Thus, recent scholars, including Watkins, have begun looking beyond those parameters to Kant's writings in their early eighteenth-century German context.

Watkins' book is both a work in the history of philosophy and a solid piece of philosophical thinking that demonstrates how the history of philosophy is an integral part of philosophy itself. Watkins' historical re-examination of Kant's early thought provides a clearer understanding of his relation to Hume on causality. This, together with his penetrating account of Kant's critical concept of causality reinvigorates the relevance of Kantian ideas to contemporary philosophical issues. Thus, Watkins' book elegantly advances three main goals.

He begins with a historiographical study that resituates Kant's pre-critical analyses of causality in their German philosophical context. This is fundamental, for it shows that Kant's critical account of causality arose primarily in response to those of his German [End Page 166] predecessors and only secondarily to Hume. Watkins' in-depth analyses of the doctrines of pre-established harmony, causal powers, and physical influx trace Kant's path between the insights and inadequacies of both Leibnizian and anti-Leibnizian theories of causality. For example, Kant realized that it was futile to derive causal necessity, following Wolff, from the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason, but at first sought only to amend such views with the temporal principles of succession and co-existence. He also saw that Knutzen's attempt to combine physical influx with Leibnizian monads led to skepticism. Prior to the influence of Hume, Kant realized that his predecessors could not establish an idea of causality compatible with Newtonian physics. However, Hume pushed Kant to abandon any residue of Wolffian grounds of causality even in their amended form, for Hume convinced Kant that causality could not involve logical necessity, and thus could not be grounded in relations derived from the principle of contradiction. This led Kant to establish causality on "real grounds" in the nature of substances acting on each other according to their empirical circumstances. Though Kant eventually abandoned the pre-critical project, he remained convinced that activity, ground, power, and temporality were essential to an adequate notion of causality, and wove them into the critical concept of causality as an activity grounded in the nature of one substance exercising causal powers necessary for the change of states of another substance. Watkins fully treats these developments in the third and fourth chapters of his book.

According to Watkins, Hume's reduction of causality to the constant conjunction of momentary events and its resulting skepticism did not create in Germany an urgent need to refute him. Still, Kant realized that Hume's analysis of causality would not do, and sought to replace rather than refute it. Watkins' case for this rests on...

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