A shift away from exclusionary moral reductionism can be discerned in modern interpretations of Kant’s philosophy of religion. Consequently, at least since the 1970s, historical faith has been appreciated as a necessary and desirable element of Kant’s philosophy of religion. One of the reasons prompting Kant to include historical faith in his system of the philosophy of religion is what commentators on Kant’s philosophy call the ‘moral gap’ as there is a disproportion between the limited competence of man as a natural being and moral goals that seem unattainable. For the believer, the content of historical faith offers a real solution to the disproportion between his limitations as a natural being and the goals set for him by practical reason. For the believer, the ‘moral gap’ is not just a theoretical problem, but an existential challenge whose solution lies beyond his own limited competence. In this article, I consider whether historical faith can also provide a theoretical supplement to the picture of one’s own life. If so, then the content of historical faith may also prove important for the non-believer.
The relationships between Kant’s philosophy and Protestantism are still the subject of studies and new findings. Contemporarily, the univocal and enthusiastic identification of Kantian philosophy with Lutheran anthro¬pology and eschatology, typical for nineteenth-century historians, has been evaluated much more critically. Paulsen’s claim that Kant was a “philosopher of Protestantism” is not received without reservation. Some analogies with the foundations of Luther’s reform can be recognised in Kant’s polemic with religious metaphysics. However, Kant’s philosophy of religion seems to be a kind of continuation of the reformation spirit in the field of philosophy, but not only a legitimisation of the religious reform which in the 18th century were already fossilised and out of date.
Kant’s attitude towards Newton is ambiguous though he owes much to him. Although Newton’s physics is a paradigm of science for Kant, he is fully aware that few appearances occur accurately according to the way described by mechanics. When he ties the principles of his philosophy with Newton’s mechanics, Kant makes a mistake, for due to the development of knowledge it began losing its absolute position in science in his day. In Opus postumum Kant recognizes the mistake and no longer refers to the rules of Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft as the ultimate ones. Till the beginning of his work on Opus postumum Newtonian mechanics was a paradigm of science for Kant. It ceases to be so in Opus postumum, where Newton is present mainly as the object of Kant’s polemics. The progress of science, new phenomena, new methods, the development of chemistry. In Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft chemistry was not referred to as science (since it was Newton’s mechanics that was the paradigm of science), whereas in Metaphysik der Sitten (1797) Kant defines Lavoisier’s chemistry as the only chemistry [AA VI 207]; in Anthropologie [AA VII 326] (1798) he ranks Lavoisier as high as Archimedes and Newton. New main problems appeared science which had to deal with: combustibility, origin of acids, the change of the state of matter, electricity, magnetism and – first of all – theory of heat. The main notion of the new theory of chemistry developed by Lavoisier (ether, the caloric) takes the central position also in Kant’s theory of transition (Übergang).
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