Kant and the Starry Heavens or the Splendor and Misery of Speculative Rationalism

Kant stresses that scientific cognition can only materialize in conjunction with experience. Leaving the sphere of experience takes one into the world of fantasy. From the point of view of Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy his description of the inhabitants of other planets in the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens should also be viewed as unfounded wanderings of the mind. Such wanderings of the mind never occur in Kant's philosophy of mature years. Kant's philosophical revolution strengthened the positions of scientific cognition by excluding metaphysical speculation. At the same time rejecting metaphysical claims for cognizing the supernatural and acknowledging man's inclination towards it, Kant imprints a sphere of freedom returning to the starry heavens above its mystique, its inscrutability that had actually been looted by speculative rationalism. Kant is preoccupied with the problem of the objectivity of world cognition all through his lifetime and returns to it in his later-day treatise Opus postumum. In this manuscript Kant offers a special program of the metaphysics of nature that should ensure the objectivity of cognition in natural sciences. The program never saw its completion, yet it serves to demonstrate Kant's attempts at ensuring maximum objectivity to the world cognition process.