Kant,1 Scientific Pietism, and Scientific Naturalism

Abstract

The doctrine of Kantian natural piety says that rational human animals are essentially at home in physical nature. In this essay, I apply the doctrine of Kantian natural piety directly to the natural sciences, and especially physics, by showing how they have a cognitive, epistemic, metaphysical, practical/moral, aesthetic/artistic, religious, and sociocultural/political grounding in Kantian sensibility, both pure and empirical. This is what I call Kantian scientific pietism, and it is to be directly and radically opposed to scientific naturalism