In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant calls purposiveness the “lawfulness of the contingent”. I argue that this should be interpreted not as lawfulness assumed in order to remove unacceptable mechanical indeterminacy, but rather as an additional kind of lawfulness which, in the case of organisms, inexplicably coincides with mechanical determination. Schelling adapts Kant’s notion of natural purposiveness in his own conception of the relation between mechanism and organism. He states in his 1798 work, On the World Soul, (...) that nature is “lawless in its lawfulness, and lawful in its lawlessness”. This should be interpreted similarly: there is a coincidence of two orders of lawfulness in nature. However, while Kant maintains that the coincidence or unity of these two orders is inexplicable for beings like us, Schelling explains the unity by assigning these laws to distinct levels of operation in nature. Organic organization is generated by a second-order operation of an organic principle on the first-order mechanical forces that are characteristic of matter. Schelling thereby builds on Kant’s third Critique framework in a creative way in order to offer a more fully unified account of nature. In this account, mechanism and organism maintain distinct roles but are both grounded in a further, higher principle. (shrink)

In the second Critique, Kant argues that for the highest good to be possible we need to postulate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul in a future world. In his other writings, however, he suggests that the highest good is attainable through mere human agency in this world. Based on the apparent incoherence between these texts, Andrews Reath, among others, argues that Kant’s texts reveal two competing conceptions of the highest good, namely a secular and a (...) theological conception. In this paper, I argue that Kant has a coherent conception of the highest good which applies to two different domains, namely the domain of the individual humans and the domain of the human species. (shrink)