Kant on Laws

Eric Watkins’s Kant on Laws collects together revised versions of his essays written over the last twenty-five years concerning Kant’s views on laws. In the book, not only does Watkins lay out insightful interpretations of the diversity of laws in Kant’s philosophy—both describing Kant’s accounts of laws of nature, teleology, regulativity, and morality and unraveling knotty issues surrounding them—but he furthermore espouses a concise, generic conception of laws that encompasses the various manifestations. Kant and Laws thus contributes both to the currently popular title topic of Kant’s views on laws as well as to sundry other domains of Kant studies. Yet, in spite of the book’s long genesis and impressive breadth, its various concerns are by and large held together by a core conceptual apparatus: the generic concept of law and the faculty of reason’s quest for the unconditioned. Kant on Laws is a worthy follow-up to Watkins’s previous sole-authored text, the award-winning and highly esteemed Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (2005). Watkins again exhibits a rare ability to shepherd the reader through complex conceptual terrain to precise, satisfying interpretations.In part 1, Watkins presents his generic concept of law. Chapter 1 explains that there are two essential properties of laws: all laws (i) are necessary and (ii) result from a spontaneous act of legislation by an appropriate authority (paradigmatically a spontaneous mental faculty). Furthermore, in a rousing piece of historical scholarship, Watkins describes the generic conception as emerging from and wedding together two developments in Kant’s purview: the natural law tradition in practical philosophy and the notion of laws of nature arising with the scientific revolution. This generic concept of law is valuable, even independently of the rest of the book, and the historical contextualization is rich. Chapter 2 goes on to argue that Kant’s understanding of transcendental laws—as a priori laws that are conditions of the possibility of experience—provides a genuine and attractive alternative to present-day accounts of the laws of nature (particularly regularity theory, necessitarianism, and skepticism).Part 2 is a study of Kant’s a priori laws of mechanics in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, which begins with a wide angle and proceeds by progressively narrowing focus on their justification. In chapter 3, Watkins carefully lays out the arguments for the transcendental laws of the Critique of Pure Reason, both detailing the way in which Kant argues that they satisfy the account of transcendental laws from chapter 2 and laying down the conceptual framework for the consideration of the laws of mechanics in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 4 explains how to understand the overarching argumentative strategy of the Foundations, in order to situate the laws of mechanics therein. According to Watkins’s ‘Transcendental Argument Interpretation’, the principles of the Foundations—including the laws of mechanics—are necessary conditions for objects of outer sense to be possible objects of experience. Along these lines, the argument of the Foundations proceeds via two steps. First, Kant argues that objects of outer sense are essentially movable in space. Secondly, Kant determines this concept of matter (qua the movable) via the categories, which grounds the substantive a priori laws of matter. Chapter 5 zooms in on the laws of mechanics. In particular, Watkins highlights oft-overlooked or neglected distinctions between Kant’s own laws of mechanics and Newton’s and explains that the discrepancies are not merely apparent, but rather reflect fundamental differences in goals and concerns. In particular, Kant (like various of his German forerunners) is especially interested to provide nonempirical justifications of the laws of motion within an intelligible ontological framework. Chapter 6 then restricts focus to Kant’s justification for the laws of mechanics, which both details how Watkins’s Transcendental Argument Interpretation applies to them and situates Kant’s mechanics within the aforementioned ontological framework.Watkins brings his keen insight to some of the thorniest passages in Kant’s corpus in part 3: namely, those concerning teleological judgment in the third Critique. Chapter 7 examines basic, but notoriously troublesome, issues surrounding the antinomy of teleological judgment: what the antinomy of judgment is—for Watkins: a conflict between regulative principles of reflective judgment—and the components of its solution—for Watkins: transcendental idealism and a supersensible unification of mechanism and teleology via subordination play an essential role. (The full details of Watkins’s understanding of the resolution, however, justifiably wait until chapter 12.) Chapter 8 concerns a pair of claims Kant makes in the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” about teleology in and of the whole of nature. Watkins explains that reason’s search for the unconditioned leads us to posit an unconditioned purpose for the whole of nature, which additionally allows us to order all the particulars in nature according to this overriding purpose. This is the first appearance of the faculty of reason in the book, which increasingly plays a crucial, even starring, role in Kant on Laws (one that ultimately culminates in the final passage of the book).Part 4 concerns Kant’s account of regulative laws. In particular, Watkins examines Kant’s account of the justification and basis for the cosmological principles of “no fate, no chance, no gap, and no leap” (chap. 9) as well as of the principles of “no next” and “no lowest” species and their grounding in the principles of systematicity (chap. 10). All of these regulative principles, for Watkins, are products of reason’s search for the unconditioned and are fundamentally limits on adequate explanation. Nevertheless, such principles are not merely methodological; rather, as Watkins shows, these regulative principles contain substantive ontological presuppositions.Part 5 centers on the moral law. In chapter 11, Watkins compares and contrasts Kant’s account of the legislation of the a priori laws of nature in the Prolegomena and that of the moral law in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, thereby adding some needed meat to the generic conception of law described in chapter 1. He concludes by suggesting Kant’s account of the autonomous legislation of the moral law in the Groundwork was inspired by the account of the legislation of laws of nature developed in the Prolegomena. (However, in the end, this remains but a suggestion.) Chapter 12 is brilliant: Watkins frames it as pushing back against the idea that Kant presents a secular, anthropocentric philosophy that does away with God, but the chapter does much more. Specifically, Watkins weaves together the assorted conceptions of God described in the three Critiques and argues that they must be understood collectively. The gem of this chapter, Watkins’s account of the resolution of the teleological antinomy, makes use of this insight. Watkins explains that God is the supersensible ground that resolves the conflict between mechanism and teleology by using mechanical laws to make possible the combination of virtue and happiness (the end of God described in the Postulates of the Second Critique). Thus, whereas the understanding and reason prescribe the laws of nature, the moral law, and regulative principles, it is God who is the law-giver of the teleological laws.Finally, the book’s conclusion returns to the generic conception of law and describes both the unity and diversity of laws in Kant’s system. The book wraps up by again spotlighting the role of reason: Watkins contends that all laws are unified insofar as they are tied to the essential end of reason, namely, the “attain[ment of] complete systematic theoretical and practical cognition of the unconditioned” (282) and with it the totality of all conditions. Each sort of law plays its own role in this overarching project. Insofar as reason’s search for the unconditioned comes up repeatedly throughout the book, this conclusion—that reason brings another, deeper sort of unity to laws—is highly satisfying.In the remainder, I raise a few issues with Watkins’s approach in this book, which I hope also to be informative as to its content.First, as one might expect from a book whose chapters were written intermittently over the last twenty-five years, there is occasionally a lack of engagement with current research. Particularly absent is consideration of accounts in the recent explosion of scholarship on Kant’s conception of laws of nature; for instance, the reader may be surprised that there is no discussion of interpretations appearing in the recently published volume, Kant and the Laws of Nature (Massimi and Breitenbach 2017). For the most part, neglect of current literature is merely bothersome, although in the following I highlight a few points where it causes more palpable trouble for Watkins’s generic account of law.Second, the reader should also not expect to find a detailed interpretation of Kant’s views on empirical laws of nature. This is admittedly understandable, given both the breadth of Kant and Laws and Watkins’s thorough discussion of the topic in Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Nonetheless, a more detailed treatment of empirical laws seems necessary, especially given Watkins’s aspirations to provide a comprehensive, generic conception of laws.Moreover, the rough account intimated by Watkins’s occasional comments on empirical laws of nature wants for further elaboration. On the one hand, Watkins indicates that it is only the matter of empirical laws (their content) that derives from natures of empirical objects, whereas their form (particularly, their necessity) derives from legislative acts of the understanding (24, 35, 240). On the other hand, he also endorses the idea that their necessity derives from natures as well (34, 36, 243n), an echo of the necessitarian account of laws of nature from Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Watkins 2005: 335, 346). At the very least, filling out Watkins’s account would require clarifying how both natures and the legislative acts of the understanding share in grounding the necessity of empirical laws of nature.However, in my view, these commitments stand in tension, and the necessitarian account of empirical laws of nature poses a potential threat to the univocity of his generic account of laws. Since, according to the necessitarian view, the necessity of empirical laws of nature results from natures, there would arguably be no need for a spontaneous act of lawgiving to secure their modal force. Indeed, Mrongovius’s notes from Kant’s lectures on metaphysics attribute to him the view that empirical laws of nature require no especial act of prescription: “the understanding does not prescribe all laws of nature ... but rather only those that belong to the possibility of experience” (V-Met/Mrong, AA 29:993; see pp. 264–65).2 Since necessitarianism thereby sits uncomfortably with Watkins’s generic account of laws, one may be disappointed that Kant on Laws omits recent scholarship elaborating the interpretation (from James Kreines, Michela Massimi, James Messina, Lydia Patton, and Nicholas Stang).Third, and relatedly, there are broader worries about Watkins’s commitment to acts of prescription being essential to laws. To begin with, the textual evidence appears not to attest directly to this condition. Throughout his corpus, Kant defines laws only as “necessary” or “objective” rules (KrV, A126, A216/B263; GMS, AA 4:420n; KpV, AA 5:19; KU, AA 5:184). While certainly some sorts of laws apparently involve prescription—notably the moral law and transcendental laws of nature—Kant’s own definitions of laws fail to include this as an essential condition for laws as such.In addition, the details of Watkins’s account of the acts legislating the laws of nature are hazy. Such acts cannot be understood as literal actions done by particular agents at particular times, but beyond this minimal condition, Watkins does little to illuminate what his interpretation involves. He does suggest that legislative acts are “a matter not of empirical but rather of transcendental psychology,” “formal cause[s]” of laws, and “guided ... by the functions of the understanding” (277–78), but these proposals are enigmatic and pass by too quickly to effectively elucidate and buttress his account.Lastly, even where Kant uses the language of prescription, it need not be understood as involving an act of legislation, as Watkins interprets it. There are substantially more deflationary accounts of prescription, particularly, again, in the context of the laws of nature. Karl Ameriks similarly offers a deflationary account of prescription as a mere act of apprehension of modality: it is “appreciation of a special kind of normativity” (2017: 44; emphasis added). Engaging with such views and situating Watkins’s own account with respect them would have been productive and enlightening. One can only hope that Watkins continues to bring his authority, pellucidity, and precision to the remaining difficulties surrounding Kant’s notion of law as well as to other open questions in the history of German philosophy.I thank James Messina, Janum Sethi, and Eric Watkins for their feedback on this review

Causality (physics) · Epistemology · Metaphysics · Morality · Natural law · Physics · Political science · Scholarship · Teleology · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy