The Priority of Natural Laws in Kant's Early Philosophy by Aaron Wells

Aaron Wells, who is a research fellow at our Center, works on Du Châtelet, D’Epinay, Kant, and other (early) modern thinkers, and has published or forthcoming articles on these figures in Philosophy of Science, Res Philosophica, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, among other venues. In his recently published paper he argues that the early Kant endorsed the priority of laws in explaining and unifying the natural world, as well as their irreducible role in grounding natural necessity.  He shows that Kant’s early works present a coherent and sophisticated laws-first account of the natural order. Laws are a key constituent of Kant’s explanatory naturalism with respect to the empirical domain, and do not undermine it.

At the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientist Aaron Wells works on the digital critical edition of the Paris manuscript of Du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique. His recent paper has various connections to Du chatelet because it deals with figures whose works Du Châtelet was also reading, as well as topics she was interested in.