Naturalisation of Physics

Analytic and ontology. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the relationship between Analytic and Dialectic corresponds to that between general metaphysics and special metaphysics in Suarez's partition. This can be verified with the following table.

Therefore, in the Analytic, Kant is proposing his ontology. He doesn't draw it directly from Suarez, but rather from Baumgarten's Metaphysics, which he adopted in class as a textbook. Again, a table comes in handy here.

Again, the Analytic/Dialectic relationship in the Critique of Pure Reason reflects exactly the traditional partition, as shown by a third table.

From logic to physics. So far, we have been dealing with simple structural correspondences which, however, reveal a crucial point, namely that the Analytic is Kant's ontology. But there is one important difference. Suarez, and even more Baumgarten (going though Leibniz and Wolff), assume that the object of ontology consists of everything that is not logically contradictory: a mountain made of gold falls within ontology, but a square circle doesn’t. This situation – which depends on the primacy of the principle of reason – is not one Kant was happy with: in line with an idea that was relatively popular in his day, he excluded the possible from the sphere of ontology, thereby also expelling from it mountains made of gold, hippogriffs and telepathy (which are not motivated by the characteristics of this world). Essentially, he restricts the field of ontology to the real, which means ultimately to the sensible – 100 real talers are ready at hand – as opposed to the possible. For this very reason the principle of non-contradiction is only a norm for analytical judgments, which have nothing to do with reality, but only with formal properties of the intellect. The supreme principle of all synthetic judgments becomes the agreement between intuition and the internal sense, that is, a version of the intellect's adaequatio to the thing, which is also the distinction between formal and transcendental logic. But what does Kant mean by ‘real’? When circumscribing ontology, he is also forced to exhibit the criteria by which it is determined that something is real, and his answer is that the real is the object of physics.