Michael Friedman's Kant's Construction of Nature is the first Anglophone book-length treatment of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Friedman has given us an extraordinary book—clearly the fruit of decades of thought and labor from a philosophical mind of the first order. It will be read and studied, I believe, for many years to come.
The goal of the book is to give what Friedman calls a “reading” of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations that situates it in Kant's intellectual context. At around six times the length of the Metaphysical Foundations itself, Kant's Construction provides a wealth of detailed and sustained discussion of both the large themes and small points in the Metaphysical Foundations. Though not offering a traditional line-by-line commentary, Friedman ends up discussing virtually every paragraph of Kant's book.
In this review, I'll focus on two of the largest themes of Friedman's book. First, according to Friedman, “Kant's...
