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By taking into account Kant’s scientific background in the pre-Critical writings, it is possible to show the impact of traditional paradoxes and dilemmas that grounded his cosmology and cosmogony. In the first part of my contribution, I shall expound the relevance of the Kepler and Halley’s riddle, better known as the starry-dark-sky paradox, which has been later discussed and formalized by Olbers in the 19th century. In the second part, I shall clarify which elements of Kant’s cosmology can be read as an answer to this riddle, involving a specific hierarchical structure of the universe, which is represented as an expanding sphere. In order to highlight this conception, I shall refer to the influence exerted by Sir William Herschel on Kant’s Critical writings on natural science and theory of matter, as well as to the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that provided useful tools in order to clarify and solve paradoxes and dilemmas of natural science.

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Silvia De Bianchi, University College London
Seminarraum Theoretische Physik
Contact: not specified