Abstract

The author of this impressively learned and innovative addition to Kantian scholarship is concerned primarily with Kant's lifelong attempt to furnish philosophical grounds for the exact sciences of his time. The reference to "exact sciences of his time" is of central importance. A part of Friedman's thesis is that Kant scholars, in their eagerness apparently to defend the contemporary relevance of Kant, tend to be embarrassed, in view of twentieth-century developments in science, by the quaintness of Kant's total immersion in eighteenth-century Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. This tendency, Friedman claims, is highly unfortunate: it obscures the magnificent service performed by Kant in showing the extent to which philosophical foundations can be furnished for whatever science is contemporary. Kant, Friedman adds, probably makes a contribution in this regard that has been unmatched to the present.