History of the Heavens 
Or
An Essay on the Constitution of Immanuel
Kant's Silent Speech in
Philosophical Comedy
as it emerged out of
Bernard de Fontenelle’s Conversations
and into
J.L. Austin's Theory of Language

 Read the first chapter

The book is centred around the following observations, interpretations and conclusions relative to Kant’s Universal Natural Theory and History of the Heavens (1755).

1. Kant’s opening sentence “In my view it is a disgrace to the nature of philosophy when we use it to maintain with a kind of flippancy free-wheeling witty displays having some apparent truth, if we are immediately willing to explain that we are doing this only as an amusement“ was originally constructed by Kant as either:
   
   a) A sentence used to illustrate a form in logic (known as ‘sophismata’) to students in his lectures using G.F. Meier’s 1752 logic textbook the 'Vernunftlehre'.
   
   b) Or possibly also as a parody of Meier (who was also known as a satirist and comedian in books such as 'Thoughts on Jesting' (1744) by Kant.
   
   

2. As Kant was writing his Theory of the Heavens about the same time, without a degree and looking for a career opening -
   And as Voltaire had been in Berlin under the auspices of Friedrich II between 1750-52, that Kant therefore:
   
   a) Added an appendix to his book which is something of a parody of Voltaire’s ‘Micromégas’ (1752), with an additional play on one of Voltaire’s earlier jokes in his lampoon of the French author Bernard de Fontenelle, who Kant makes a flea joke about; and that -
   
   b) Kant did this for the purpose of scandalizing the court of Friedrich II in order to gain the attention of the King and subsequent promotion to court philosopher,
   

3. Unfortunately for Kant, apart from the few personal copies he collected on the day, his edition was burned in a warehouse fire shortly after printing (with the printer declaring bankruptcy and paying creditors with the insurance) and so the project was aborted with Kant later redacting the appendix from the 2^nd edition and only reappearing in German in 1902, and first English translation in 1981.
   

4. That Kant’s sentence was sufficiently eye-opening that some German philosophers (quite possibly at the Munich School of Phenomenology where Adolf Reinach and Alexander Pfänder had developed the first pragmatic language theory later to be completed by the English philosopher J.L. Austin and that Austin was also made aware of it at some stage.

5. That Austin made a play on words in his ‘How to do Things with Words’ (pp. 2-3; 1962) when he twice spells Kant as KANT (whilst making two very curious claims about Kant) which doesn’t make any sense in itself but which does make sense if we interpret Austin as:
   
   a) Performing an ironic parody of Kant.
   
   b) Developing an idea out of Hermann Diels ‘Elementun Thesaurus’ (pp.13-14; 1899) where Diels introduces the 'vivid picture' in Aristotle’s use of capitalizing the font as an illustration of Democritus.
   
   c) As a play on the Font in terms of the joke about Bernard de Fontenelle and his book ‘Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes’.
   
   

   d) In such a way that it connects it altogether with Kant’s ‘Heavens’ and can be interpreted as “Austin 

   claiming a stamp in provenance on the heavenly font in modern times