Keywords
Concept of force
Formal metaphysics of nature
Construção na intuição pura
How to Cite
Abstract
The metaphysical basis for the remarkable achievements of the so-called “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century was provided by Cartesian mechanism. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) by Isaac Newton, while expanding these achievements, introduces a new concept whose difficulties of foundation reduced to the initial stage the task to which Descartes had dedicated himself. The concept of forces that seem to act at a distance and produce authentic attractions is irreconcilable with the conception of nature inherited from Cartesian metaphysics. From this insurmountable irreducibility arises what I will call “Newton's problem”, which consists of the incompatibility between the essential inactivity of matter and the evident activity in nature. Immanuel Kant's Metaphysical Principles of the Science of Nature (1787) testifies to how persistent the Newtonian puzzle became. In this treatise, Kant claims to articulate a formal metaphysics of nature structured on the distinction between mathematical (essential) and dynamic (relational) determinations of matter. Positioned in the interplay between these two orders of determinations, the analysis of the conditions of possibility (constructibility in pure intuition) of the essential forces of matter will occupy a central place in the program developed in the Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science. This fact, by itself, allows to attribute to this work the status of the most ambitious philosophical effort of the 18th century destined to offer a solution to “Newton’s problem”.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2023 Eduardo Salles de Oliveira Barra
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