Abstract
This chapter aims to shed new light on the arguments and philosophical significance of Kant’s Universal Natural History by examining the work’s natural-philosophical methodology. The 1755 cosmological treatise, Kant asserts, follows “the leading thread of analogy”. After introducing the work’s main cosmological analogy, I examine the historical context of Kant’s analogical method. The most relevant context, I argue, is not the prior tradition of cosmology and natural history but rather works of scientific methodology and logic. Next, to better understand and assess the principal analogy of the Universal Natural History, I outline Kant’s later theories of analogy. Kant distinguishes between analogies of similarity and fourfold analogies of proportion; the latter are concerned not with things but with relations. Analogies of proportion are further subdivided into inferential and non-inferential analogies. Based on these distinctions, I propose an interpretation of the kind of analogical reasoning that is employed in the Universal Natural History.
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Notes
- 1.
The Academy edition of Kant’s writings (Kant 1902) is cited according to volume and page number. I follow the translations in the Cambridge edition.
- 2.
Lambert 1761. See Kant’s note in the Only Possible Argument about the alignment of his and Lambert’s theories and the impossibility of Lambert knowing his 1755 work (2:68–9). Lambert describes his independent discovery of his theory in a 1765 letter to Kant (10:53).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
I borrow the formulation “eclectic and syncretic” from Ferrini 2022, 261.
- 7.
Descartes’ Le Monde (1632–1633, published 1664) and the Principia philosophiae (1644); Leibniz’s Protogaea (1691–1693, published 1749). On Burnet and Whiston, see Jaki 1977, 87–96. Buffon is discussed below.
- 8.
- 9.
To mention some of the figures to whom Kant explicitly refers: the ancient atomists, Bradley, Brahe, Cassini, Derham, Flamsteed, Haller, Halley, Huygens, Kepler, Pope, Pound, and Mairan. Jaki’s edition (Kant [1755] 1981), despite its dismissive perspective and overly literal translation, provides a wealth of information on Kant’s sources, as does Waschkies 1987.
- 10.
Adickes’ balanced assessment of Kant’s project in the Universal Natural History remains a good example of such a reading (Adickes 1925, 206–315).
- 11.
At 1:261, Kant repeats “whatever it may be”, again regarding the cause of the arrangement of the solar system. He seems to be evoking Newton’s famous agnosticism regarding the cause of gravity, although he will shortly claim to identify this cause in the fundamental forces of matter. We shall return to the role played by these forces in the work’s principal analogy.
- 12.
At least by the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘nebular hypothesis’ had become a common designation for the theories of the formation of the universe propounded by Kant and, in the Exposition du systéme du monde (1796), by Laplace (Adickes 1925, 206, 297–8). Shea (1986, 96) notes that in the 1850s Schopenhauer and Helmholtz ascribe the nebular hypothesis to Kant and Laplace.
- 13.
This particular sense of ‘system’ that Kant utilizes in the 1755 work is easily overlooked: for example, Ferrini (2000, 300) takes systematicity to designate “the common origin of the essential properties of things in the design of God’s infinite Understanding”, which is not how Kant defines ‘systematic constitution’ at 1:246. Burt and Sturm (forthcoming) discuss in detail Kant’s conception of systematic constitution in the Universal Natural History.
- 14.
The cosmology chapter of Wolff’s physics textbook, “Von dem Welt-Gebäude” in Wolff [1723] 1981, 150–268, is a compendium of contemporary astronomical knowledge in a relatively popular style. Analogical reasoning plays no role in the chapter, as far as I can tell, nor in Wolff’s rational (or general) cosmology in the fourth chapter of the German Metaphysics (1720) and the Cosmologia generalis (1731). Maupertuis (1750, 109) once refers to the “single analogy” between the earth and the other planets that “leads one to believe” that the planets are opaque like the earth; but he immediately adds that there are “more sure proofs that do not permit doubt”, so he is clearly sceptical of the value of analogical reasoning.
- 15.
Shea (1986, 105) points to this, although he overlooks the translation issue I mention in the next note. Shea (1986, 105–15) provides a rare extended discussion of Kant’s analogical method. His account is however broadly dismissive. This conceivably stems from his limited engagement with the historical context: Shea (1986, 105–6) mentions only Descartes’s methodological advice and the views of Leibniz and Pope, which he takes to exemplify Lovejoy’s notion of the great chain of being.
- 16.
My translation of the Hamburg Freye Urtheile text from Fritz Krafft’s edition (Kant [1755] 1971, 201). Hastie gives an English translation of the Freye Urtheile summary in Kant [1755] 1968, 166–79 and Kant [1755] 1969, 169–80, but this is not always accurate, in part because he gives Wright’s English verbatim when it is (or he takes it to be) quoted: he therefore translates Aehnlichkeit in this passage as ‘analogy’. Jaki (1981, 220-1n3) notes discrepancies between the manuscript version translated by Hastie and the printed text in the Freye Urtheile.
- 17.
See 1:277 and 1:345, and also 1:261–2, 1:272, and 1:273–4: Jaki (1981, 257n3, 261n15, n17) argues that, in the latter three passages, Kant borrows from Buffon’s Historie naturelle without citing it. The title of Kant’s work seems to allude to Buffon’s title and more closely to the title of Kästner’s German translation, Allgemeine Historie der Natur (see Jaki 1981, 13; Cooper 2020, 80). Ferrini (2022, 263–5) suggests that there is a relevant conceptual difference between Historie and Geschichte.
- 18.
- 19.
These passages from Bacon and Locke are discussed in relation to Kant’s theory of analogy by Callanan (2008, 749–50).
- 20.
Letter to Thévenot of 24 August 1691, quoted Sticker 1969, 177.
- 21.
- 22.
Callanan (2008, 752n18, 762-3n40) claims that the proportional conception of analogy, which is explained below, first appears in the notes of Kant’s metaphysics lectures from the mid-1770s and can be found neither in the logic notes nor in Kant’s annotations on Meier (we should add: in notes that Adickes dates prior to the 1790s, because the proportional conception seems to be alluded to in R3292 and R3294, which Adickes dates to the period after the third Critique). This may be true but it does not reveal anything about Kant’s views, because his references to analogies of similarity in the logic notes tend to be critical, in line with his textbook author Meier, and so they do not reveal him affirming the similarity conception of analogy before the 1770s. I am not aware of evidence that shows that Kant held or did not hold some version of his proportionality theory (or rather, as we shall see, theories) of analogy in 1755. In what follows, I will suggest that certain claims in the Universal Natural History can be clarified if we read its principal analogy as an analogy of proportion.
- 23.
See Callanan 2008, 750–1, and Matherne 2021, 217–18. This phrase appears in the metaphysics lecture notes (28:292), as Callanan points out.
- 24.
Here and in what follows, I use ‘known’, ‘unknown’, ‘unknowable’ etc. in a non-technical sense, following Kant’s reference to the “Unbekannte” at stake in analogies of proportion (4:357). The loose sense of knowledge here is a case of neither Erkenntnis nor Wissen in Kant’s technical senses, which are discussed in Willaschek and Watkins 2020.
- 25.
Kant uses A, B, C, and X with reference to a different analogy (between parental love and God’s love) at 4:358-9n. A discussion, in abstract terms, of the fourfold form of analogy appears in the Critique’s Analogies of Experience (A179-80/B222). There, Kant distinguishes between philosophical analogies, through which we can determine a relation to an unknown fourth thing, and mathematical analogies, in which the unknown X is constructed (see Shabel 1998, 611n37).
- 26.
‘Determination’ in the critical period still has the meaning Kant gives it in the early New Elucidation (1755): “To determine is to posit a predicate while excluding its opposite” (1:391).
- 27.
For more on the Humean context and the debate in natural theology, see Reichl (forthcoming). Reichl doubts the success of Kant’s response in the Prolegomena to Hume’s attack on analogical reasoning. He argues that only the more developed account in the Critique of Judgement adequately meets Hume’s challenge.
- 28.
Matherne’s generally helpful discussion of Kant’s theory of analogy does not in my view adequately distinguish between the similarity conception of analogy, which Kant discusses in the logic lecture notes, and the proportionality conception, which he opposes to it. See particularly Matherne 2021, 220. Callanan (2008, 751–2) insists on the distinction, but he then blurs it by claiming that Kant’s analogies of proportion, like analogies of similarity, aim at “the inference of unknown properties” (Callanan 2008, 753). As I argued in the previous paragraph, analogies of proportion do not permit inferences about properties but only about relations.
- 29.
We shall return to Kant’s point that the two things should be species of the same genus.
- 30.
As this point is put in one of the logic lecture transcripts: “no proposition of experience gives us universitas simpliciter, but only secundum quid, as far as we are acquainted” (24:777).
- 31.
On Hume’s critique and whether the standard interpretation – that Hume criticizes the similarity conception of analogy in the Dialogues – actually holds, see again Reichl (forthcoming).
- 32.
Wood (1978, 86–8, 86-7n97) notes that the Thomistic tradition makes a distinction between the “analogy of attribution” and the “analogy of proportion”.
- 33.
As mentioned in note 25, above, Kant refers to this mathematical use of proportional analogy in the Critique (A179-80/B222). It appears in Wolff’s mathematical writings: see Shabel 1998, 611. I thank Fabian Burt for pressing me on this point.
- 34.
- 35.
In Kant’s terminology, in the case of the legitimate inference there is par ratio (equal reason) for ascribing the property to the two species, whereas in the case of the illegitimate inference there is not par ratio (5:464n).
- 36.
A cosmological rough equivalent of the beaver example appears in Kant’s annotations on Meier’s Auszug (see note 39) and the logic lecture notes: Kant suggests that we can infer through analogy, in line with the par ratio constraint, that the inhabitants of the moon are rational beings, but not that they are humans (R3292, 16:760; 9:133; see also R3285, 16:758).
- 37.
Matherne (2021, 220, 230) calls such sensible representation the ‘aesthetic’ function of analogy. I take my account here (drawn from Reichl) to be broadly in agreement with Matherne’s. However, I would not follow her claim that the sensible representation in this kind of analogy “makes the idea of God more concrete to us” (Matherne 2021, 230). Rather, I think that Kant takes it to make the relation between God and the world more concrete to us: see again 4:359.
- 38.
On my use of ‘knowledge’ in these definitions, see note 24 above. Matherne (2021, 218–19) also makes the distinction that I draw here between two types of analogy of proportion, calling them “qualitatively sensible” and “qualitatively mixed” analogies.
- 39.
Kant heavily annotated his interleaved copy of Meier’s Auszug over the four decades that he taught logic. His notes on the topics of induction and analogy, jotted around §401 and on the facing page, are reproduced in the Academy edition, 16:753–61.
- 40.
Adickes dates the note to phase ‘β1’, between 1752 and the winter semester 1755/56. According to Adickes’ dating, this is the earliest of Kant’s annotations on Meier’s §401.
- 41.
These statements concern his cosmogony: see Adickes 1925, 243. We can note in passing that the statements entail that ‘nebular hypothesis’ is, strictly speaking, a misnomer: Kant claims that his theory of the formation of the universe possesses “an excellent kind of approval that elevates it above the appearance of a hypothesis” (1:263).
- 42.
In the extracts from the Universal Natural History published in 1791 by Gensichen as an appendix to a translation of essays by William Herschel, which Kant authorized, nothing from chapter 7 is included. Gensichen explains his omissions at the end of his extracts: “This is now the essential part of the Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, which Herr Professor Kant allowed himself to be induced to now present once more to the public. The rest, he says, contains too much mere hypothesis for him to now still be able to completely endorse it” (Herschel 1791, 201). Arguably, this does not indicate any change in Kant’s view since he wrote the 1755 Preface, because in the latter he begged the reader’s indulgence for the more speculative character of chapter 7. The 1791 selection may not indicate that Kant had come to definitively reject the parts that were not included, but only that he selected what he had long thought were the more credible parts.
- 43.
The analogical claim is particularly clear in this passage: “Millions and whole mountain ranges of millions of centuries will pass within which ever new worlds and world-orders will form and attain completion one after another in the remote distances from the centre point of nature; regardless of the systematic constitution among its parts, they will attain a universal relationship to the centre point that has become the first point of formation and the centre of creation by the attractive capacity of its pre-eminent mass” (1:314). Two pages earlier, Kant acknowledges and tries to address the difficulty of the very notion of the central point of an infinite space: this central point could not be determined geometrically, as it were by measuring from the outer edges of the space (because the space extends infinitely); rather, it is the point of highest density in the initial formation of the universe, which continues to hold the strongest attractive force across the universe (1:312).
- 44.
I thank Fabian Burt, Andrew Cooper, and Pavel Reichl for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Wolfgang Lefèvre provided helpful advice at an early stage. The research was conducted while I was a visiting scholar in the Early Modern Cosmology group at Ca′ Foscari University of Venice: my thanks to Pietro Omodeo and his group for their feedback. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).
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Howard, S. (2023). Kant’s Universal Natural History and Analogical Reasoning in Cosmology. In: Lefèvre, W. (eds) Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 341. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34340-7_11
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