Kant and the stalemate of the social sciences: Prelude and transformation

The scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton provided the metaphysic of naturalism and its principle of determinism, within which the Science and Humanism debate concerning the modern problem of structure and agency is going to be framed, conducted, and, especially, is going to be understood. That debate is anticipated with the appearance of Hobbes’s materialist and mechanistic social theory and the challenge to it from the Cambridge Platonist’s spiritualist theory of human freedom in the seventeenth century (Mintz 1996: 80-133). The emerging debate seamlessly continues with the advent of Newtonian mechanistic physical theory and Rousseau’s reaction to it with his free-will theory in the eighteenth century. Let the proto-scientist Hobbes and the proto-Humanist Rousseau representatively speak to this point.