As the CfP and the Panel Proposal highlight, there are several, and politically highly relevant, reasons why it could be important to show that Kant’s practical "philosophy" is totally in line with "science".
Yet, Kant scholars are often sceptical or even hostile against such ideas. Did not Kant himself place freedom and other important concepts explicitly "outside nature"? Isn’t it vital to keep those concepts abstract, not corrupted by any deterministic processes or other physical aspects?
Yes, but within Kant’s critical work, practical philosophy—while it may well be at the centre of his interests—is not isolated, but interconnected with his epistemology of mathematics and physics in several ways. And, Kant even contributed to the non-physical sciences, as for example Saunders or de Bianchi have recalled. Stuart Kauffman—an eminent innovator of 20th century’s biology—grants Kant even for having been the first to understand (in Critique of Judgement, §§ 64–66, 68, 74–81) that life has to be regarded as a physical process that (re)produces its own constraints, thus constituting itself as an autonomous meta-physical realm.
Building on this, my paper aims to show that such a concept of "self-constitution" can be developed in such a way as to generate what Kant talks about in his practical philosophy as "natural" results of natural history. In particular, it appears that freedom goes only together with (Kantian) ethics—as opposed to egocentrism praised by "rational choice" approaches.
A second aim of my paper is to connect the same concept of "self-constitution" with Kant’s epistemology of physics, or at least his Copernican Revolution. In other words—but this can also be regarded a third aim—it is to be shown that Kant’s Copernican Revolution resonates well with today’s physics, as the starting point of current scholars like Kauffman.
So, not only gets Kant’s practical philosophy reconstructed, without any corruption, within "science". Also the basic structure of Kant’s work as a whole—starting with epistemology of physics in order to pave the way for practical philosophy—is fully preserved.
Yet, the boundary between "science" and "philosophy" that Kant placed directly at the borders of physics, gets shifted far beyond: Outside of "science", in "philosophy", only ethical, normative decisions remain—they cannot be "proved".
What can be "proved", however, is that a) science cannot ever be mounted against Kantian ethics—precluding any "scientism" as exemplified by old, biological racism, social darwinism or neoliberalism; and that b) Kantian ethics is not just an arbitrary philosophy among others, but includes justified epistemic claims—a message equally important in our world increasingly sceptical against science, and slipping back into geopolitics and tribalism.
And climate change—so also this should not be disregarded: Reconstructing Kant’s practical philosophy in terms of "self-constitution" also helps to update political theory in terms of including the ecological and planetary dimension of the conditio humana without sacrificing human dignity.
