The use of hypothesis on Kant's critical philosophy.

The use (and misuses) of hypotheses in natural science was more than a methodological question for the European philosophers of the XVIII century. It was strongly associated to the relations between metaphysics and the empirical study of nature. The Newtonian concepts of space, time, force, and mass raised questions about the limits of the universe, God’s possible intervention in the course of nature, and human freedom. In this context, hypotheses were often presented to overcome conceptual conflicts between some metaphysical concepts and the mechanical explanations for natural phenomena. In this article, I argue that the transcendental method developed by Kant put him on a privileged position to settle the controversies of his time about the legitimate and illegitimate uses of hypotheses in natural science.