Kant on the Philosophical Significance of the Telescope

Stephen Howard

doi:10.24310/nyl.19.2025.20551

Authors

Stephen Howard FRIAS, Universität Freiburg Germany https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7194-3853

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24310/nyl.19.2025.20551

Keywords:

Kant, Astronomy, Telescope, Critique, Boundary determination, Highest good

Agencies: Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)

Abstract

A footnote in the Critique of Pure Reason asserts, surprisingly, that astronomy teaches us two fundamental lessons of the critical philosophy: about the limits of theoretical cognition, and about the need to shift to practical philosophy and concern ourselves with the highest good. This article aims to explain this footnote, with reference to passages in Kant’s published and unpublished writings. A first set of passages concern the Leibnizian distinction between clear and obscure representations. Making a very different point to the footnote in the Critique, Kant claims that the telescope can clarify our representations. A second set of passages, in the third Critique, Reflexionen and lecture transcripts, suggest that astronomers have a particular tendency towards metaphysical issues. By combining the two sets of passages, I argue, we can reconstruct what Kant could have had in mind in the footnote. Astronomy is significance for the critical philosophy because it so successfully extends our knowledge, and thus, paradoxical as it may sound, reveals the greater field of what we do not know.

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