Laws, Powers, and the Mind-Independent World in Kant

According to an increasingly dominant interpretation of Kant, empirical laws are grounded in causal powers exercised by things, in accordance with their (essential) natures. By emphasizing the natures of things, such an interpretation is in principle amenable to a comparatively realist–– within the constraints of a Kantian framework––approach, which views Kantian things in themselves, i.e., the mind-independent world, as the (ultimate) ground of empirical laws. In this paper ––to appear in the edited collection "Laws and Powers in the Metaphysics of Science: Historical and Scientific Themes", Routledge, eds.: Vanessa Seifert, Stathis Psillos, Stavros Ioannidis––, I formulate a number of positive considerations, and touch upon a (major) challenge, in the spirit of explicitly defending a comparatively realist, “noumenal” version of this type of reading of Kant.