Abstract

Konstantin Pollok - Kant's Critical Concepts of Motion - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 559-575 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Kant's Critical Concepts of Motion Konstantin Pollok There are two significant places in Kant's Critical corpus where he discusses the concept of motion. The first is in the Critique of Pure Reason, where in the "Deduction of the Categories" Kant writes: Motion, as an act of the subject , and therefore the synthesis of the manifold in space, first produces the concept of succession—if we abstract from this manifold and attend solely to the act through which we determine the inner sense according to its form. In this passage Kant simply refers to the concept of motion, and the immediate context in which this reference occurs reveals little about what he means by it. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, however, motion plays a more significant role, and, concomitantly, it is in his writings on natural science that Kant most fully expresses his thoughts on the subject. For present purposes, the most relevant passage is paragraph 15 of the Preface of the Metaphysical Foundations, where Kant says that the concept of matter had … to be carried through all four of the indicated functions of the concepts of the understanding , where in each a new determination of this concept was added. The..