The Laws of Knowledge and the Laws of Nature

On the Unity of the Sciences in Kant and Rosmini

Abstract

What in Kant attracts all attention is his interest in the epistemological foundations of his critical thinking. In Rosmini it is the overall metaphysical context of his reflections. In both cases we lose the importance that they – since their youth – attribute to the natural sciences in the total epistemological structure of their ‘systems’. Both mature the awareness that according to the modern vision of the world founded by Newton and Galileo, metaphysics must proceed synthetically, no longer analytically: epistemology is not completed without the scientific foundation of natural principles, and vice versa only through the gnoseological investigation (‘transcendental’ or ‘regressive’) of metaphysical principles science is epistemologically justified. At this point Kant and Rosmini can maintain the unity of science conceived physically (Kant) or ontologically (Rosmini) only at the cost of a metaphysical weakening of ‘nature’ or ‘reality’. On this basis, however, both do not sacrifice the need for a metaphysical integration of science that includes the theorization of the possibility in which each in his own way goes beyond Leibniz. The central difference lies in how they theoretically conceive this possibility as a scientific-theoretical assumption: with respect to natural physical things (Kant) or with respect to a real concept of being (Rosmini). In this perspective, the epistemological concept of the unity of science in Rosmini is less ‘scientific’ than Kant, but more ‘open’ for a multidisciplinary spectrum in today’s perspective.