Kant’s debut was one of the many attempts at settling the dispute, but for all practical purposes, it was a failure. The Living Forces appeared too late to make any difference, and Kant was unaware of d’Alembert’s and Euler’s research. But what doomed the book in the public eye was that Kant seemed to have bet on the wrong team of horses. He argued for a synthesis of Cartesian kinematics and Leibnizian dynamics, and did so at the expense of Newtonian mechanics. At the time he grasped Newton’s ideas only partially. He did not yet understand that motion, like rest, is a state (something Galileo had discovered) and that force is needed only for changing, not for keeping a state (which is Newton’s first law of motion). He not only implicitly rejected Newton through such mistakes, but also explicitly questions his authority (preface, 1:7). Later in the book, he criticizes the first law of motion (#50–51, #97–8), suggests an alternative to Newtonian inertia (#124–5, #132–3), and dismisses as a “desperate excuse” Newton’s view that loss of motion reveals nature’s entropic tendency (#50; 1:59). He tried to determine force without even mentioning the second law of motion that defines it as the product of mass and acceleration. For Kant, Newtonian mechanics was irrelevant. While there are hundreds of references to Descartes and Leibniz in the book, the references to Newton can be counted on the fingers of one hand.