Abstract

Kant uses two metaphors in his early works on cosmogony: “Fire Treasures” and his famous figure of a “Phoenix of Nature”. This study suggests two sources Kant may have known. The first metaphor, goes back to the German translation of Leibniz’s Protogaea (1749) or a review of the Protogaea by Gottsched. Both appeared in the same year as the Latin text. Kant receipts the second metaphor most likely from the English poet Abraham Cowley (his poem: “The Extasie”). Both metaphors are significant because they explain and illustrate Kant’s recourse to the Stoic doctrine of ekpyrosis, i. e. the passing away through a world-fire and the renewal of the cosmos from the elementary particles created in this holocaustic process.