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Articles

Kant’s Opus postumum

Terrence Thomson wrestles with Kant’s unfinished work to ask what we should expect from philosophy books.

I have recently been immersed in trying to understand Immanuel Kant’s last text, his so-called Opus postumum. It is composed of sheets (or ‘fascicles’ or ‘convolutes’) that Kant began writing in the mid 1790s, continuing to a year before his death in 1804. It is not easy to summarize, but I can start by observing that it contains a vast array of thoughts, notes, drafts, and marginalia at varying levels of completion. Attempting to make sense of Opus postumum presents an especially challenging task since it throws up all manner of perplexing material, which sometimes morphs the philosophy in the three Critiques [of Pure Reason, of Practical Reason, and of Judgement, Ed] that form the pillars of Kant’s thought; sometimes does not relate to it at all; and sometimes contradicts it entirely.

At its root (if we can talk in such a way about Opus postumum) is a work Kant provisionally titled Transition from the Foundations of Natural Science to Physics, which attempts to construct a bridge to empirical physics from the ‘special’ metaphysics of nature partially explored in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786.

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