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Originally Posted by Arneb
While one can say that Kant was ultimately proven correct in his hypothesis of stellar formation, one can't say (I think) that the physicists of the 20th century actually had Kant in mind while developing their models.
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I suspect this was true, mainstream seemed to favor Shapley's view that our galaxy was it (all there is out there). Ironically, it was his calculations that suggested the Milky Way was 300,000 lyrs. in diameter; assumed to be much larger than any other potential galaxy. Curtis, on the other hand, believed the galaxy to be much smaller; therefore, other galaxies similar to ours might explain the "clouds". Shapley used Leavitt's Cepheid data of the SMC to help make this determination, but elected not to mention it in his big "debate" with Curtis in order to throw Curtis off, apparently. [Shapley believed Curtis had the upper hand in a debate due to his experience in debating, so Shapley had the debate reduced to presentations only, with no rebuttals, IIRC.]
LaGrange(?) came up with the idea of accretion disks, but that was science, not philosophy. I'm still thinking.