Martin Knutzen (14 December 1713 – 29 January 1751) was a German philosopher, a follower of Christian Wolff and teacher of Immanuel Kant, to whom he introduced the physics of Isaac Newton.
[4] A follower of Christian Wolff, in the rationalist school, Knutzen was also interested in natural sciences, and taught physics, astronomy and mathematics, besides philosophy.
The study of the doctrines of Newton induced him to question Leibniz' and Wolff's theory of pre-established harmony, defending the concept of mechanical causality in the movement of physical objects; his lessons on the matter would influence the later work of Kant, who sought to reconcile the autonomy of the spiritual with the reality of the mechanical in the Critique of Judgement.
Knutzen would be an important figure in the formation of his Königsberg University students Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann[2] (proponent of the Sturm und Drang literary movement).
Knutzen's ample private library on natural sciences constituted an invaluable resource for the writing of the first treatise of Kant, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Vital Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte), a mathematical text, and exerted a powerful influence on Kant's thought.
On 29 January 1751, Flottwell wrote that although Knutzen had inherited first 10,000 then a further 15,000 Thaler, "this philosopher was always in a bad mood, had no social contacts and lived in absolute isolation".
Knutzen's widow remarried a close friend of Kant's, a doctor of jurisprudence and young lawyer, Johann Daniel Funk (1721–1764).
My dear old Funk, who had married the widow of professor Knutzen, a very famous person at the time, did not deprive himself of other diversions apart from the conjugal act, but his lectures were as chaste as the bed of an elegy".
This is patent from one of his writings, published in 1740, the year in which Kant joined the university, titled "Philosophical Proof of the Truth of the Christian Religion" (Knutzen, 1740).
In writing this book, not only did Knutzen show how strongly rooted his thinking was in Königsberg's theological debate, but he also revealed his intimate knowledge of what had until then been an unknown aspect of British philosophy.
This way, Knutzen brought a breath of fresh, modern and advanced air into the Prussian cultural milieu dominated by Franz Albert Schultz's Pietist theology.
There were also differences and controversy between what Knutzen, Kant, Leibniz, Descartes and Newton thought about the concept of living force, dead pressure and momentum.
When a comet actually did appear in that year, Knutzen became an instant celebrity in the town and gained a reputation as a great astronomer well beyond the confines of Königsberg.
It was written in part as a response to a tract, penned by Johann Heyn and entitled "Attempt of a Consideration of the Comet, the Deluge and the Prelude of the Final Judgement; in Accordance with Astronomical Reasons and the Bible…", which appeared in Berlin and Leipzig in 1742.
Relying more on mechanical models than on rigorous calculations, he had some understanding of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica but was unable to make any original contribution to science.
In fact, Knutzen, in his exceptional essay entitled "Von dem Wahren Auctore der Arithmeticae Binariae, …", in English "On the True Author of Binary Arithmetic, also known as Leibniz' Dyadic" (Knutzen, 1742), rightly claims that the binary number system credited by many, including the man himself, to Leibniz, was actually attributable to the Spanish bishop Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (Caramuel, 1670), and outlined in the "Meditatio Proemialis" of his work, entitled, true to the Baroque style of the time, "Mathesis bíceps vetrus et nova.