Space in Kantian Idealism
Kant’s conception of space can be understood only against the background of the famous debate between Leibniz and Newton in the early eighteenth century. Throughout his life, Kant sought a middle path between the philosophical extremes represented by Leibniz and Newton, but he eventually concluded that only transcendental idealism is able to explain the knowledge of nature expressed in Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, whose postulation of action at a distance among material bodies Kant embraced. Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism involves both his conception of geometry as providing synthetic a priori knowledge, but also his contention that the pure concepts of the understanding, such as substance and community, must be “schematized” or infused with spatiotemporal content if Newton’s science of nature is to be explained.