Kantian Accounts of Thought Experiments

The contribution outlines a critical history of the concept of TE from a broadly Kantian viewpoint. The thread of the discussion is Kant's position on the nature of the a priori and how each neo-Kantian theory of TEs can be understood in terms of its own position on this issue. Section 1 examined some aspects of Kant's philosophy that are related to today's debate on TEs. Section 3 was devoted to Ørsted's first important Kantian theory of TE, which had no effective influence on the historical development of the concept because his commitment to romantic Naturphilosophie led him to see TE as a special method for an a priori physics. Given the rejection of a material a priori by the most important schools of philosophy of science, it was no accident that a broadly Kantian approach to TEs was recently taken up by moving to quite different interpretations of the a priori, namely as universal and necessary, but devoid of content (Marco Buzzoni and Mike Stuart), and as a set of principles which are taken as constitutive of experience, but only in a contingent and relativized way (Yiftach Fehige).