Science Versus Metaphysics/Philosophy

This excerpt from the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason should be plastered all over the walls of university departments that house cultural theorists and philosophers who consider science a collective illusion:

But though it is older than all other sciences, and would survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss of an all-destroying barbarism, it has not yet had the good fortune to enter upon the secure path of a science. For in it reason is perpetually being brought to a stand, even when the laws into which it is seeking to have, as it professes, an a priori insight are those that are confirmed by our most common experiences. Ever and again we have to retrace our steps, as not leading us in the direction in which we desire to go. So far, too, are the students of metaphysics from exhibiting any kind of unanimity in their contentions, that metaphysics has rather to be regarded as a battleground quite peculiarly suited for those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats, and in which no participant has ever yet succeeded in gaining even so much as an inch of territory, not at least in such manner as to secure him in its permanent possession. This shows, beyond all questioning, that the procedure of metaphysics has hitherto been a merely random groping, and, what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts.

Kant's Foreshadowing of the Quantum and the non-Euclidean

Kant, I think, is often misrepresented in philosophical circles as having supposed that Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry were the final words of their respective fields.

Certainly, Kant did think Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics were the most certain bodies of knowledge available, and his philosophy can be seen as providing a philosophical justification for why this is so, but I think a closer reading of his work will show that he never went on to suppose that nothing better than or different to these two bodies of thought were possible.

Now, having just read for the first time his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, I was pleased to find the following passage in the chapter titled On determining the boundary of pure reason that directly supports my view, even though I'm well aware that taking a tiny section from a much larger body of work as proof of any standpoint is a thoroughly misguided course of action to undertake:

The expansion of insight in mathematics, and the possibility of ever new inventions, goes to infinity; so too does the discovery of new properties in nature (new forces and laws) through continued experience and the unification of that experience by reason.

Plato and Kant's Flightless Dove

Yesterday we had Plato's metaphysical suppositions providing Copernicus with the idea of a heliocentric universe; today we have Kant lampooning those very same metaphysical suppositions that lie at the heart of Plato's philosophy by talking of a wishful-thinking dove.

From the introduction of Norman Kemp Smith's translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would still be easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance - meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion.