Kant on Laws

This book focuses on the unity, diversity, and centrality of the notion of law as it is employed in Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Eric Watkins argues that, by thinking through a number of issues in various historical, scientific, and philosophical contexts over several decades, Kant is able to develop a univocal concept of law that can nonetheless be applied to a wide range of particular cases, despite the diverse demands that these contexts give rise to. In addition, Watkins shows how Kant comes to view both the generic conception of law which he develops and its different particular instances as crucial components of his systematic philosophy as a whole. This volume's new and unified account of a major current running through Kant's work will be important for scholars interested in numerous aspects of his philosophy, from the theoretical and abstract to the practical and empirical.

Introduction; Part I. Kant's Conception of Law: 1. What is, for Kant, a law of nature?; 2. Kant on transcendental laws; Part II. The Laws of Mechanics: 3. The system of principles; 4. The argumentative structure of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science; 5. The laws of motion from Newton to Kant; 6. Kant's justification of the laws of mechanics; Part III. Teleological Laws: 7. The antinomy of teleological judgment; 8. Nature in general as a system of ends; Part IV. Laws as Regulative Principles: 9. Kant on rational cosmology; 10. Kant on Infima Species; Part V. The Moral Law: 11. Autonomy and the legislation of laws in the Prolegomena; 12. Kant on the natural, moral, human, and divine orders.

Eric Watkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of the prizewinning Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge, 2005) and editor of Kant on Persons and Agency (Cambridge, 2017).