Het moeizame einde van een huwelijk (1687-1781): filosofen in de rol van echtscheidingsadvocaat

Abstract

The laborious end of a marriage (1687-1781): philosophers in the role of divorce lawyer Although during academic ceremonies professors of philosophy in the Dutch Republic often dealt with the status of their discipline, they refrained from discussing the relationship between philosophy and the sciences. This remarkable phenomenon is easy to account for: the conceptual means to distinguish branches of knowledge were lacking in the eighteenth century. A survey of philosophical dictionaries such as E. Chauvins Lexicon philosophicum (1713) and the Encyclopédie (1751-1780) shows the continuing currency of the traditional, originally Aristotelian, definitions of philosophy and scientific knowledge. It is only in W. T. Krugs Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1827), that the modern distinction can be found. However, at the end of the eighteenth century in the teaching natural philosophy and 'theoretical' philosophy that is the other parts of philosophy had become distinguished and no objections were made against the splitting up of the traditional faculty of philosophy in the faculties of the humanities and of natural science and mathematics by law in 1815. In this paper it is argued that Kant's transcendental philosophy contains two notions which helped to prepare the ready acceptance of the separation; (1) Kant (1724-1804) with Daniël Wyttenbach (1746-1820) and Franicois Hemsterhuis (1721-1790) attributed to metaphysics an object and method completely different from the sciences. (2) Philosophy has to be transformed into epistemological research. Such inquiry elucidates the logical presuppositions of the sciences, but is as such irrelevant to scientific research. Kant rejects the 'reductionism' of science to philosophy. The conceptual renewal of Kant is argued for by comparing his conception of transcendental philosophy with Christian Wolff's notion of philosophy consisting of an elaborate whole of 'scientific', a priori knowledge, required by experimental physics.