ABSTRACT
Challenging De Vleeschauwer and Friedman’s assessments, Courtney D. Fugate puts forward a reading of Kant’s Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (1764) that stresses its indebtedness to Newtonian empiricism. Following up Kant’s references to Newton and examining his attempts to employ the method treated in the Prize Essay in other writings, Fugate argues that Kant’s position embodies the anti-rationalist spirit of Bacon and Newton. More specifically, he contends that Kant commits to a specific type of empiricism, inspired also by Euler, according to which metaphysics must borrow its data from empirical sciences rather than generate truths by employing the synthetic method. According to Fugate, Kant not only generalized this empiricist method but also provided a metaphysical basis for it by distinguishing between logical and real possibility.
