I argue that recent advances in developmental biology demonstrate the inadequacy of suborganismal mechanism. The category of the organism, construed as a ’natural purpose’ should play an ineliminable role in explaining ontogenetic development and adaptive evolution. According to Kant the natural purposiveness of organisms cannot be demonstrated to be an objective principle in nature, nor can purposiveness figure in genuine explain. I attempt to argue, by appeal to recent work on self-organization, that the purposiveness of organisms is a natural phenomenon (...) and, by appeal to the apparatus of invariance explanation, that biological purposiveness provides genuine, ineliminable biological explanations. (edited). (shrink)

In the present paper I investigate the role that analogy plays in eighteenth-century biology and in Kant’s philosophy of biology. I will argue that according to Kant, biology, as it was practiced in the eighteenth century, is fundamentally based on analogical reflection. However, precisely because biology is based on analogical reflection, biology cannot be a proper science. I provide two arguments for this interpretation. First, I argue that although analogical reflection is, according to Kant, necessary to comprehend the nature of (...) organisms, it is also necessarily insufficient to fully comprehend the nature of organisms. The upshot of this argument is that for Kant our understanding of organisms is necessarily limited. Second, I argue that Kant did not take biology to be a proper science because biology was based on analogical arguments. I show that Kant stemmed from a philosophical tradition that did not assign analogical arguments an important justificatory role in natural science. Analogy, according to this conception, does not provide us with apodictically certain cognition. Hence, sciences based on analogical arguments cannot constitute proper sciences. (shrink)

The article surveys Kant’s treatment of biological teleology in the ’Critique of Judgment’, with special attention to the question of whether the notion of natural teleology is coherent. It argues that our entitlement to regard nature as teleological is not established by the argument of the ’Antinomy’, but rather results from our entitlement to regard the workings of our own cognitive faculties in normative terms. This implies a view of the relation between biological teleology and the representational character of mind (...) which is the reverse of that adopted by naturalistic theorists of mind like Fred Dretske and Ruth Millikan. (shrink)

A collection of essays investigating key historical and scientific questions relating to the concept of natural purpose in Kant's philosophy of biology.

Kant’s teleology as presented in the Critique of Judgment is commonly interpreted in relation to the late eighteenth-century biological research of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In the present paper, I show that this interpretative perspective is incomplete. Understanding Kant’s views on teleology and biology requires a consideration of the teleological and biological views of Christian Wolff and his rationalist successors. By reconstructing the Wolffian roots of Kant’s teleology, I identify several little known sources of Kant’s views on biology. I argue that (...) one of Kant’s main contributions to eighteenth-century debates on biology consisted in demarcating biology from metaphysics. Kant rejected Wolffian views on the hierarchy of sciences, according to which propositions specifying the functions of organisms are derived from theological truths. In addition, Kant argued that organic self-organization necessitates a teleological description in order to show that self-organization does not support materialism. By demarcating biology and metaphysics, Kant made a small yet important contribution to establishing biology as a science. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology claim that function talk is consistent with naturalism. Yet recent work in biology places new pressure on this claim. An increasing number of biologists propose that the existence of functions depends on the organisation of systems. While systems are part of the domain studied by physics, they are capable of interacting with this domain through organising principles. This is to say that a full account of biological function requires teleology. Does naturalism preclude reference to teleological causes? Or (...) are organised systems precisely a naturalised form of teleology? In this paper I suggest that the biology of organised systems reveals several contradictions in the main philosophical conceptions of naturalism. To integrate organised systems with naturalism’s basic assumptions—that there is no theory-independent view for metaphysics, and that nature is intelligible—I propose an idealist solution. (shrink)

In this book, Toby Svoboda develops and defends a Kantian environmental virtue ethic, challenging the widely-held view that Kant's moral philosophy takes an instrumental view toward nature and animals and has little to offer environmental ethics. On the contrary, Svoboda posits that there is good moral reason to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human interests, since doing so is constitutive of certain virtues. Svoboda argues that Kant’s account of indirect duties (...) regarding nature can ground a compelling environmental ethic: the Kantian duty to develop morally virtuous dispositions strictly proscribes unnecessarily harming organisms, and Svoboda argues that this duty compels us to act in ways that benefit non-human organisms, given that doing so can enhance one’s virtues. Svoboda’s argument engages the recent literature on environmental virtue and provides an original argument for an environmental virtue ethic firmly rooted in Kant’s moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss in what sense physics, chemistry, and the life sciences constitute a systematic unity according to Kant. I start by discussing Christian Wolff’s views on the hierarchy of sciences. I then argue that in one specific sense physics, chemistry and several life sciences constitute a unity: physics and chemistry provide statements that can be used to provide proofs in the life sciences. However, the unity of physics, chemistry, and the life sciences is limited in scope, since (...) Kant claims that the purposeful unity of organisms is mechanically inexplicable. I finally discuss whether there are laws within the life sciences according to Kant. I argue that the fact that Kant acknowledged that physics and chemistry ground the life sciences does not imply that there are laws of life. The reason is that life sciences of Kant’s time were concerned with explaining the purposeful unity of organisms, which is mechanically inexplicable according to Kant, and the regularities discussed by life scientists in Kant’s time lack a priori grounding. (shrink)

I address a longstanding problem in Kant scholarship: how is Kant’s use of the term ‘mechanism’ to be understood? It seems that Kant uses that term in a variety of ways, from a narrow sense (“motion communicated between matter”) to a very wide sense (“any causation that is not noumenal”). I argue that Kant has a unified conception of mechanism, where the wider senses are to be understood in light of a conception of nature according to which all of nature (...) is purely mechanistic in the narrow sense. In contrast to his mechanistic predecessors, Kant holds that this conception of nature is an idea, an imaginary end-point of science that we need for orientation but can only approach asymptotically. (shrink)

We outline an alternative to both scientific and liberal naturalism which attempts to reconcile Sellars’ apparently conflicting commitments to the scientific accountability of human nature and the autonomy of the space of reasons. Scientific naturalism holds that agency and associated concepts are a mechanical product of the realm of laws, while liberal naturalism contends that the autonomy of the space of reason requires that we leave nature behind. The third way we present follows in the footsteps of German Idealism, which (...) attempted to overcome the Kantian chasm between nature and agency, and is thus dubbed ‘post-Kantian.’ We point to an overlooked group of scholars in the naturalism debate who, along with recent work in biology and cognitive science, offer a path to overcome the reductive tendencies of empiricism while avoiding the dichotomy of logical spaces. We then bring together these different streams of research, by foregrounding and expanding on what they share: the idea of organisms as living agents and that of a continuity without identity between life and mind. We qualify this as a bottom-up transformative approach to rational agency, which grounds cognition in the intrinsically purposive nature of organisms, while emphasizing the distinction between biological agency and full-fledged mindedness. (shrink)

This paper examines how in the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ Kant characterized the concept of natural purpose in relation to and in distinction from the concepts of nature and the concept of purpose he had developed in his other critical writings. Kant maintained that neither the principles of mechanical science nor the pure concepts of the understanding through which we determine experience in general provide adequate conceptualizations of the unique capacities of organisms. He also held that although the concept of (...) natural purpose was derived through reflection upon an analogy to human purposive activity in artistic production and moral action, it articulates a unique notion of intrinsic purposiveness. Kant restricted his critical reflections on organisms to phenomena that can be given to us in experience, criticizing speculations on their first origins or final purpose. But I argue that he held that the concept of natural purpose is a product of the reflecting power of judgment, rather than an empirical concept, and represents only the relation of things to our power of judgment. Yet it is necessary for the identification of organisms as organized and self-organizing, and as subject to unique norms and causal relations between parts and whole. (shrink)

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)

What is it to judge something to be a natural end? And what objects may properly be judged natural ends? These questions pose a challenge, because the predicates “natural” and “end” seemingly can not be instantiated at the same time – at least given some Kantian assumptions. My paper defends the thesis that Kant’s “Critique of Teleological Judgment”, nevertheless, provides a sensible account of judging something a natural end. On the account, a person judges an object O a natural end, (...) if she thinks that the parts of O cause O and if she is committed to approach O in a top-down manner, as if the parts were produced in view of the whole. The account is non-realist, because it involves a commitment. With the account comes a characterization that provides necessary and sufficient conditions on objects that may properly be judged natural ends. My paper reconstructs the argument in CTJ, §§64-65 where the account and the characterization are derived. (shrink)

El presente trabajo analiza algunas de las estrategias por medio de las cuales la reflexión estética de finales del siglo XVIII intentó dar respuesta al problema de la legitimación de la representación artística. Entre ellas es considerada con particular atención la redefinición del concepto de belleza que propone Immanuel Kant en la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar. A partir de la revisión de la postura kantiana, se pone en evidencia la conexión existente entre la crisis de fundamentación de la (...) belleza artística y la debacle de la historia natural clásica, por una parte. Por la otra, se procura dar cuenta de la modificación del estatuto y de las funciones de la esfera estética que introduce el vuelco kantiano hacia el ámbito de la subjetividad. (shrink)