We're used to hearing about Kant's more theoretical and
critical works like his three Critiques, and even some of his more
popular essays like "On Perpetual Peace" and "What is Enlightenment?"
But his students and contemporaries had other favorites. For example,
some of Kant's published writings that one rarely hears about these days
include such barn-burners as Dreams of a Spirit-Seer elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1790), Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1746), A New Theory of Motion and Rest (1758), Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), and the Physical Monadology (1756). In fact, his first (unpublished) dissertation was entitled Concise Outline of some Reflections on Fire (1755), and his course on A Discussion of the Theory of Winds was a popular one.
Even
more striking when you consider how we view Kant today are his
contributions to natural science early in his career. According to
Michael Friedman:
It is worth noting, at this point, that two of Kant's most prescient and original contributions to natural science concerned effects arising from a combination of the earth's rotation and gravitational forces. Whether the Earth has Undergone an Alteration of its Axial Rotation, appearing in 1754, was the first work (by more than one hundred years) to take seriously the possibility that tidal friction arising from the attraction of the sun and the moon on the sea could produce nonuniformities in the earth's rate of rotation. Similarly, the Theory of the Winds (1756), was the first work (by almost eighty years) to suggest an explanation of the directional tendency of the trade winds by the rotation of the earth - in terms of Coriolis forces due to this rotation, which upset the hydrostatic equilibrium in the atmosphere maintaining equal pressures at equal distances from the earth by a balancing of gravitational force and the air's expansive elasticity.
Kant returns late in his career to questions of natural science both in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) and even more interestingly in his unfinished Opus Postumum.
So
what? Well one of my recurrent interests is the dynamic relationship
between philosophy and (natural) science. If you recall that Newton's Principia was published in 1687 (the full title translated as The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)
- which was the seminal moment in the burgeoning scientific revolution
- it's curious to me that the distinction between natural science and
philosophy was still at points quite blurred as late as the end of the
18th century (Kant, before his death, was trying to construct a
transition from the foundations of natural science to physics itself -
from physics to metaphysics, if you will).
Geneeral Q: What processes were most influential in the disciplinary transition from natural philosophy to natural science?