Table Of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................1 Chapter I: Organisms and Teleology in The Only Possible Argument................................ 23 1.1: Potentially Natural Responses to the Central Question ................................................ 30 1.2: A General Answer to the Central Question ....................................................................... 40 1.3: Epigenesis vs. Preformation as Accounts of Natural Generation ................................ 78 1.4: Natural Teleology and the Perfection of the World......................................................110 Chapter II: Organisms and Teleology in the 1770s ...............................................................124 2.1: Generation and Classification ..............................................................................................124 2.2: Natural History and Natural Teleology.............................................................................125 2.3: Generation and the Generative Force (Zeugungskraft)................................................130 2.4: Conclusions Concerning the Pre­Critical View ...............................................................153 Chapter III: Organisms and Teleology in the 1780’s.............................................................156 3.1: Reason and Nature in the Critique of Pure Reason ........................................................178 3.2: Kant, Leibniz, and the Order of Nature .............................................................................194 3.3: Ideas of Reason as Rules for Systematic Empirical Cognition...................................231 3.4: Systematic Unity and the Idea of a Fundamental Power.............................................264 3.5: The Two­Fold Justification of the Principle of Continuity ..........................................277 3.6: Kant and Herder in the 1780s..............................................................................................299 Chapter IV: Organisms and Teleology in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.........325 4.1: Natural History and the Critique of the Power of Judgment........................................339 4.2: Mechanical Inexplicability and the Causal Unity of Nature .......................................350 4.3: The Formative Power of Nature and Natural Organization........................................374 4.4: The Dialectic of Teleological Judgment and the Order of Nature .............................419 4.5: The Methodology of Natural Teleology (Conclusion)...................................................469 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................................488 Organisms and Teleology in Kant’s Natural Philosophy Introduction There is a trend in recent scholarship away from interpreting Kant as a philosopher interested exclusively in what can be known a priori and towards understanding him as a thinker concerned to reflect on, understand, and contribute to the development of the natural and the human sciences. A good deal of work has been done, for instance, on Kant’s understanding of Newtonian physics, the generally Leibnizean context into which Newton’s views are introduced in Germany, and the significance of the reception of these views for the development of Kant’s mature philosophy.1 Work has also been done on Kant’s understanding of anthropology, his role in the development of that discipline, and the differences between the model of cognition provided in the Critique of Pure Reason and the model Kant develops and applies to the task of understanding and interpreting human culture and life.2 Thus far, however, comparatively little attention has been paid to the details of Kant’s long time engagement with two disciplines that are central to the eighteenth-century context in which he is working, namely, natural history and physiology. This is somewhat surprising given several relevant facts, some of which are already generally recognized by Kant scholars and historians of the philosophy of science. It is fairly well known, for instance, that one of Kant’s first publications is an original work on the natural history of the cosmos. Kant also lectures on physical geography nearly every year during his 1 Notable work in this area has been done by Watkins [1995, 1998a, 1998b, 2001a, 2001b, 2005] Friedman [1992] Polonoff [1971], Schönfeld [2000] 2 Makkreel [1990] provides a discussion of Kant’s general framework for interpretation in the human sciences. Düsing [1968] provides a discussion of the central role of teleology in Kant’s conception of the human world. Zammito [2002] discusses Kant’s role in the development of anthropology in eighteenth- century Germany. 1 time as an active lecturer. In his other lecture courses (e.g., metaphysics, logic, ethics) Kant lectures from introductory textbooks that are already readily available, but his physical geography lectures are delivered from a compendium he puts together himself through consulting the latest work of practicing physiologists and natural historians.3 Although the focus on Kant’s relation to the cosmology and general physics of modern science is clearly justifiable, it can also tend to obscure the fact that many of the important metaphysical and methodological controversies that concern Kant and his eighteenth-century contemporaries are more directly related to the scientific investigation of aspects of nature that do not lend themselves straightforwardly to the mathematically precise models of mechanistic physics. This fact, I believe, becomes even more obscured by the tendency to conflate Kant’s claims about mechanistic physics with his claims about the mechanism of nature, and to assume that his various appeals to a supersensible substrate for the former are largely motivated by his practical interest in supernatural entities and powers that are free from the constraints of the latter. In the following, I aim to make a contribution to the growing body of historically informed and philosophically rigorous work on Kant’s engagement with the sciences of his time. My work provides a closer look at Kant’s theoretical views concerning the status and nature of the various substances and powers appealed to in plant and animal physiology, and the status of the methodological principles that guide classificatory and explanatory hypotheses in natural history than is currently available in the secondary literature on Kant and on the history of the philosophy of biology. It will, I hope, provide a more contextually accurate and a more philosophically interesting picture of central aspects of the development and expression of Kant’s Critical philosophy than one finds in largely ahistorical reconstructions of the arguments in Kant’s major works in theoretical and practical philosophy. By paying detailed attention to how one of the greatest philosophical minds of the modern period approaches a constellation of issues 3 Werner Stark and Reinhardt Brandt are editing a new Akademie edition of Kant’s physical geography lectures. For a discussion of the way in which Kant came to put together this compendium, see Stark [2001] 2 confronted by natural philosophers who are striving to equal the achievements of Leibniz and Newton, within the constraints provided both by the nature of the particular objects of their inquiry and the nature of the human understanding, I believe we can also gain a fuller appreciation of the obstacles that present themselves to the eventual establishment of biology as a unified and autonomous natural science in the nineteenth century. I hope to show that the view Kant carefully constructs and defends concerning organisms and teleology in natural philosophy is far more original and far more coherent, both with the accepted methods and practices of natural philosophers at the time and with his own mature project in metaphysics and transcendental philosophy, than is generally recognized to be the case. In the remainder of this introduction, I will provide an overview of some of the recent work that has been done on Kant’s views on organisms and their role in justifying a teleological approach to the natural world, before providing an overview of my own position and of the chapters that will follow. The common point of focus in the literature is on Kant’s Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment (1790, hereafter CTJ). This work has remained relatively obscure in comparison to the first two installments in Kant’s three-part critique of reason, namely, the Critique of Pure Reason (A edition 1781, revised B edition 1787, hereafter CPR) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and even in comparison to the first half of the third Critique, the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment (hereafter CAJ). If one accepts the judgment of contemporary scholars such as Paul Guyer, there is good reason for this.4 According to Guyer, the several arguments that Kant provides to establish that organisms defy all mechanical explanation and, thus, require the adoption of causal principles that are located outside of the mechanism of nature are bad arguments that rest on confusions that Kant himself diagnoses in the CPR. What is worse, in Guyer’s view, is that the position Kant argues for there, in an effort to provide empirical justification for the basic two-worlds presupposition of his practical