ABSTRACT

In this chapter and the next, the view of Kant that centers the business of recovering natural and human agency is this: Kant is a philosopher of science who was involved in the integral problems of knowledge and mind (transcendental idealism) and of matter and causal powers (metaphysics of realism). On the one hand, Kant is interested in understanding how knowledge of an objective world of nature is possible for the mind of the human subject, and, on the other, how the objective world of nature is possible as material matter grounded in immaterial powers. Kant is ultimately interested in uniting the idea of the subject knowing nature as a material world of powers and the idea of the subject being free by virtue of its being one of those powers of and thus in the material world of powers. But Kant’s having only been able to discover that that idea is a problem, the task which he left to the future is to discover how to solve it. In taking up that challenge, I am going to proceed in two stages: in this chapter I take up the recovery of agency in the natural world of matter, in the next, I pursue the recovery of human agency in the world of culture.