Chemical Philosophy: Kant, Schelling, and DeLanda

Abstract

: The following essay examines the role of chemistry as an arbiter between sense and cognition in the work of Immanuel Kant and F. W. J. von Schelling. Kant’s well-known and decidedly lukewarm treatment of chemistry not only affects the relation between philosophy and science more broadly, but has important consequences for how to think of the relationship between the formal structures we can derive from sense as articulated by philosophy and how these conceptual forms give sense (scientifically coded as observation) a regulative function to discriminate particular scientific domains and/or fields from one another.