The developers of ecological ethics claim that the rationale of anthropocentrism is false. Its main message is that natural complexes and resources exist to be useful to the human being who sees them only from the perspective of using them and does not take into account their intrinsic value. Kant’s anthropocentric teaching argues that the instrumental attitude to nature has its limits. These limits are hard to determine because the anthropocentrists claim that the human being is above nature. Indeed, the (...) “human exclusiveness thesis” (J.- M. Schaeffer) assumes that its advocates underestimate nature’s impact on humans and their connection to other living beings. Constructing a dialogue between Kant and Schaeffer helps to solve two problems. First, to determine whether Kant’s ethical and teleological concept is immune to Schaeffer’s critique. Second, to clarify the German philosopher’s contribution to environmental ethics. I come to the conclusion that it is premature to claim that consciousness and free will exist only in the framework of their being conditioned by nature. I also demonstrate that in his teleological teaching Kant sees the mechanism of nature as the dependence of living things on forces that act in an unpremeditated manner. Recognition of these forces sets limits to humans’ instrumental attitude to nature and paves the way for them to become moral subjects. Thus, Kant’s teaching combines “the human exclusiveness thesis” and the intuitions of the representatives of deep ecology and the opponents of anthropocentrism as such. (shrink)

This paper investigates conceptions of explanation, teleology, and analogy in the works of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Richards (2000, 2002) and Zammito (2006, 2012, 2018) have argued that Kant’s philosophy provided an obstacle for the project of establishing biology as a proper science around 1800. By contrast, Russell (1916), Outram (1986), and Huneman (2006, 2008) have argued, similar to suggestions from Lenoir (1989), that Kant’s philosophy influenced the influential naturalist Georges Cuvier. In this article, I wish to (...) expand on and further the work of Russell, Outram, and Huneman by adopting a novel perspective on Cuvier and considering (a) the similar conceptions of proper science and explanation of Kant and Cuvier, and (b) the similar conceptions of the role of teleology and analogy in the works of Kant and Cuvier. The similarities between Kant and Cuvier show, contrary to the interpretation of Richards and Zammito, that some of Kant’s philosophical ideas, whether they derived from him or not, were fruitfully applied by some life scientists who wished to transform life sciences into proper sciences around 1800. However, I also show that Cuvier, in contrast to Kant, had a workable strategy for transforming the life sciences into proper sciences, and that he departed from Kant’s philosophy of science in crucial respects. (shrink)

Kant entwickelt in der Kritik der Urteilskraft eine philosophische Ästhetik, eine Theorie der organischen Natur. Die beiden scheinbar heterogenen Gegenstandsbereiche sind durch das Prinzip der reflektierenden Urteilskraft, die Idee der Zweckmäßigkeit, verbunden, die der Mensch sowohl bei der Reflexion über die schönen Gegenstände der Natur und der Kunst als auch bei seiner Erforschung der organischen Natur zugrunde legt. Da sich alle Zwecke zuletzt auf den Endzweck des Menschen als moralisches Wesen beziehen, übersteigt die dritte „Kritik" schließlich die Bereiche von Kunst (...) und Natur und berührt Fragen der Moralphilosophie und der Moraltheologie. Zusätzlich entdeckt Kant im subjektiven Vermögen der Urteilskraft jenes Bindeglied unter den menschlichen Gemütskräften, das einen architektonischen Übergang zwischen den Naturbegriffen des Verstandes in der ersten und dem Freiheitsbegriff der Vernunft in der zweiten „Kritik" ermöglicht und die theoretische und die praktische Philosophie in einem einzigen philosophischen System vereinigt. Der vorliegende kooperative Kommentar bietet eine textnahe, fortlaufende Interpretation der „Kritik der Urteilskraft". Für die 3. Auflage anlässlich des 300. Jubiläums Immanuel Kants wurden alle Beiträge überarbeitet und auf den neuesten Forschungsstand gebracht. Mit Beiträgen von: K. Ameriks, J. Bojanowski, R. Brandt, G. Cunico, M. Foessel, E. Förster, C. Fricke, H. Ginsborg, P. Giordanetti, I. Goy, O. Höffe, A. Kablitz, G. Kohler, S. Mathisen, B. Recki, J. Rivera de Rosales, S. Roth und E. Watkins. (shrink)

Originating in the work of Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Preyer, and advanced by a Prussian embryologist, Wilhelm Roux, the idea of struggle for existence between body parts helped to establish a framework, in which population cell dynamics rather than a predefined harmony guides adaptive changes in an organism. Intended to provide a causal-mechanical view of functional adjustments in body parts, this framework was also embraced later by early pioneers of immunology to address the question of vaccine effectiveness and pathogen resistance. (...) As an extension of these early efforts, Elie Metchnikoff established an evolutionary vision of immunity, development, pathology, and senescence, in which phagocyte-driven selection and struggle promote adaptive changes in an organism. Despite its promising start, the idea of somatic evolution lost its appeal at the turn of the twentieth century giving way to a vision, in which an organism operates as a genetically uniform, harmonious entity. (shrink)

The rise of the mechanistic worldview in the seventeenth century had a major impact on views of biological generation. Many seventeenth century naturalists rejected the old animist thesis. However, the alternative view of gradual mechanistic formation in embryology didn’t convince either. How to articulate the peculiarity of life? Researchers in the seventeenth century proposed both “animist” and mechanistic theories of life. In the eighteenth century again a controversy in biology arose regarding the explanation of generation. Some adhered to the view (...) that life is a physical property of matter (e.g. Buffon), others saw living entities as the result of the development of pre-existing germs (e.g. Bonnet). Naturalists, lacked a convincing account that could guide their research. In interaction with leading naturalists of his time Immanuel Kant articulated an approach to explaining generation. Kant’s account, delineated in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the power of judgment) (1790), is a combination of Newtonian non-reductionist mechanism in explanation, and a concept of natural end comparable to Stahl’s formal conception of organic bodies. It consists of two claims: a) in biology only mechanical explanation is explanatory, and b) living entities contain some original organisation, which is mechanically unexplainable. In the nineteenth century this approach influenced naturalists as Müller, Virchow, and Von Baer, in their physiological research. Dissatisfied with a sheer mechanistic or, on the other hand, a sheer teleological approach, they appreciated the Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends. In Germany, in the second halve of the nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel reopened the debate about abiogenesis, which still continuous. (shrink)

Al netto di alcune eccezioni, non si può certo affermare che la concezione kantiana dell’organismo abbia rappresentato un modello frequente per le spiegazioni del funzionamento dell’organismo nella filosofia della biologia del ventesimo e del ventunesimo secolo. Tuttavia, il filosofo francese della biologia Philippe Huneman fa riferimento a questo tipo di concezione in alcune opere dedicate alla filosofia dell'organismo. Prendendo in analisi alcuni passaggi degli scritti del filosofo Gérard Lebrun, che fu il supervisore della tesi dottorale di Huneman, questo articolo si (...) propone di indagare le possibili influenze che la lettura di Kant proposta da Lebrun potrebbe aver avuto sulla biologia francese contemporanea, in particolare su Huneman. Kant; Lebrun; filosofia; biologia; organismo. (shrink)

The definition of biological individuality is one of the most discussed topics in philosophy of biology, but current debate has focused almost exclusively on evolution-based accounts. Moreover, several participants in this debate consider the notions of a biological individual and an organism as equivalent. In this paper, I show that the debates would be considerably enriched and clarified if philosophers took into account two elements. First, physiological fields are crucial for the understanding of biological individuality. Second, the category of biological (...) individuals should be divided into two subcategories: physiological individuals and evolutionary individuals, which suggests that the notions of organism and biological individual should not be used interchangeably. I suggest that the combination of an evolutionary and a physiological perspective will enable biologists and philosophers to supply an account of biological individuality that will be both more comprehensive and more in accordance with scientific practices. (shrink)

Given the central place organisms occupy in Kant’s account of living nature, it might seem unlikely that his claims about biological wholes could be relevant to current debates over the problem of biological individuality. These debates acknowledge the multiple realizability of biological individuality in vastly different forms, including parts of organisms and complex groups of organisms at various levels of the biological hierarchy, sparking much controversy in attempts to characterize a biological individual. I argue that, far from being irrelevant to (...) this controversy, Kant’s account provides a key insight for addressing the multiple realizability problem. I show how the reciprocal causality between a self-organizing whole and its parts, which Kant thinks characterizes a natural end, is not limited to organisms but is exhibited by numerous types of beings in living nature. Self-organizing wholes of various kinds, and at various biological levels, may count as biological individuals, depending on the degree to which their functionally integrated parts are represented by reflective judgement as a natural end. (shrink)

Viruses have been virtually absent from philosophy of biology. In this editorial introduction, we explain why we think viruses are philosophically important. We focus on six issues, and we show how they relate to classic questions of philosophy of biology and even general philosophy.

La crítica kantiana legó una doble herencia a la biología decimonónica: su noción de ciencia basada en el mecanicismo newtoniano configuró epistemológicamente la teoría de la evolución darwinista, mientras que su comprensión de los organismos se tradujo en una morfología teleológica. En este artículo planteamos dos cuestiones en torno la relación entre las ideas de Kant y Darwin: 1) si Kant habría considerado a Darwin el Newton de la biología, a lo que, con matices, respondemos afirmativamente; 2) si la física (...) newtoniana es hoy suficiente para naturalizar lo orgánico. Nuestra respuesta negativa se fundamenta en las ciencias de la autoorganización y la evo-devo, que permiten plantear la naturalización de la concepción kantiana de los organismos. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the variety and richness of the taxonomical practices between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During these decades, zoologists and paleontologists came up with different quantitative practices in order to classify their data in line with the new biological principles introduced by Charles Darwin. Specifically, I will investigate Florentino Ameghino’s mathematization of mammalian dentition and the quantitative practices and visualizations of several German-speaking paleontologists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In (...) so doing, this paper will call attention to the visual and quantitative language of early twentieth-century systematics. My analysis will therefore contribute to a prehistory of the statistical frame of mind in biology, a study which has yet to be written in full. Second, my work highlights the productive intertwinement between biological practices and philosophical frameworks at the turn of the nineteenth century. Deeply rooted in Kantian bio-philosophy, several biologists sought to find rules in order to apply ordering principles to chaotic taxonomic information. This implies the necessity to investigate the neglected role of Kantian and Romantic bio-philosophy in the unfolding of twentieth-century biology. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...) amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present. (shrink)

It was commonly accepted in Goethe’s time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God’s beneficent and providential design. Goethe’s identification of sexual propagation as the “summit of nature” in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff’s science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself (...) improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe’s plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity—not merely a passive product—freed Goethe of the need to tie plants’ forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...) amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present. (shrink)

This paper uses formal Darwinism as elaborated by Alan Grafen to articulate an explanatory pluralism that casts light upon two strands of controversies running across evolutionary biology, viz., the place of organisms versus genes, and the role of adaptation. Formal Darwinism shows that natural selection can be viewed either physics-style, as a dynamics of alleles, or in the style of economics as an optimizing process. After presenting such pluralism, I argue first that whereas population genetics does not support optimization, optimality (...) can still be taken as a default hypothesis when modeling evolutionary processes; and second, that organisms have an explanatory role in evolutionary theory, since they are involved in the economic perspective of optimization. Finally, in order to ask whether the Modern Synthesis can indeed provide a theory of organisms, I apply a Kantian-inspired theoretical view of organisms (underlying much developmental modeling), according to which they are both designed entities and subjects of intrinsic circular processes involving the whole organism and its parts. I first show that the design aspect is accountable for in terms of the Modern Synthesis understood in the formal Darwinism framework. I then question whether the latter aspect of organisms can also be ultimately captured in the same framework, and to this purpose devise an empirical test relying on an assessment of the relative weight of genetic elements in developmental and functional gene regulatory networks. (shrink)

Canguilhem’s contemporary relevance lies in how he critiques the relation between knowledge and life that underlies Kantian rationality. The latter’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment represent life in the form of an exception: life is simultaneously included and excluded from understanding. Canguilhem’s critique can be grouped into three main strands of argument. First, his reference to concepts as preserved problems breaks with Kant’s idea of concepts regarding the living as a ‘unification of the manifold’. Second, Canguilhem’s vital (...) normativity represents life as the potential to resist normative orders that judge the living, relegating Kant’s ‘lawfulness of the contingent’ to a ‘mediocre regularity’. Third, Canguilhem’s introduction of the environment as a ‘category of contemporary thought’ decentres the living/knowing subject and introduces contingency. His idea of the ‘knowledge of life’ leads to the conclusion that life is the condition of possibility of rationality, rather than rationality’s ‘blind spot’. (shrink)