"[T]he program which Immanuel Kant proposed back in the 1760s... was this: our knowledge of the outside world depends on our modes of perception... Unfortunately, a great revolution took place in or about the year 1768, when he read a paper by Euler which intended to show that space was indeed absolute as Newton had suggested and not relative as Leibnitz suggested. (...in the eighteenth century the question of whether Newton's... or Leibnitz's view of the world was right profoundly affected all philosophy.) After reading Euler's argument... Kant... for the first time proposed that... we must be conscious of [absolute space] a priori. ...Kant died in 1804, long before new ideas about space... had been published... And since one of the things that happened in [our] lifetime has been the substitution of... a Leibnitz universe, the universe of relativity, for Newton's universe... we should think that out again."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978) Ref: Kant, "Concerning the Ultimate Foundations of the Differentiation of Regions in Space" (1768) in Kant: Selected Precritical Writings and Correspondence with Beck Tr. and Intro., G. B. Kerford and D. E. Walford (1968)
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