Uno de los problemas que se le presentan a Kant en la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar es el de la aptitud de la naturaleza en su diversidad particular para ser conformada por las leyes del entendimiento. En este contexto, Kant defi ne los conceptos de naturaleza, materia y fi nalidad de una manera que antes no había tenido cabida en su sistema, y postula la idea de una técnica o arte de la naturaleza. En este artículo se analiza (...) y discute cómo Kant aborda esto, haciendo hincapié en el papel que juega el principio de la conformidad a fi n en el marco de una naciente ciencia de los seres vivos.One of the problems for Kant in the Critique of Judgment is the suitability of nature's particular diversity to the laws of the understanding. In this context, Kant characterizes the concepts of nature, matter and purposiveness in a novel fashion, putting forward the idea of an art or technique of nature. This article considers this new Kantian approach emphasizing the role played by the principle of purposiveness in a context in which a new science of living beings is emerging. (shrink)

Race and religion are integral parts of bioethics. Harm and oppression, with the aim of social and political control, have been wrought in the name of religion against Blacks and people of color as embodied in the Ten Commandments, the Inquisition, and in the history of the Holy Crusades. Missionaries came armed with Judeo/Christian beliefs went to nations of people of color who had their own belief systems and forced change and caused untold harms because the indigenous belief systems were (...) incompatible with their own. The indigenous people were denounced as ungodly, pagan, uncivilized, and savage. Hence, laws were enacted because of their perceived need to structure a sense of morality and to create and build a culture for these indigenous people of color. To date bioethics continues to be informed by a Western worldview that is Judeo/Christian in belief and orientation. However, missing from bioethical discourse in America is the historical influence of the Black Church as a cultural repository, which continues to influence the culture of Africans and Blacks. Cultural aspects of peoples of color are still largely ignored today. In attempting to deal with issues of race while steering clear of the religious and cultural impact of the Black Church, bioethics finds itself in the middle of a distressing situation: it simply cannot figure out what to do with race. (shrink)

In the final chapters of her 1824 Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect, Lady Mary Shepherd considers what it means for an organism to be alive. The physician William Lawrence had...

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)

The aim of this paper is to show that for Kant, a combination of epigenesis and monogenesis is the condition of possibility of anthropology as he conceives of it and that moreover, this has crucial implications for the biological dimension of his account of human nature. More precisely, I begin by arguing that Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species is based on two premises: firstly the biological unity of the human species (monogenesis of the human races); and secondly (...) the existence of ‘seeds’ which may or may not develop depending on the environment (epigenesis of human natural predispositions). I then turn to Kant’s account of man’s natural predispositions and show that far from being limited to the issue of races, it encompasses unexpected human features such as gender, temperaments and nations. These predispositions, I argue, are means to the realisation of Nature’s overall purpose for the human species. This allows me to conclude that man’s biological determinism leads to the species’ preservation, cultivation and civilisation. (shrink)

Scholars studying the history of heredity suggest that during the 19th-century biologists and anthropologists viewed characteristics as a collection of blended qualities passed on from the parents. Many argued that those characteristics could be very much affected by environmental circumstances, which scholars call the inheritance of acquired characteristics or "soft" heredity. According to these accounts, Gregor Mendel reconceived heredity - seeing distinct hereditary units that remain unchanged by the environment. This resulted in particular traits that breed true in succeeding generations, (...) or "hard" heredity. The author argues that polygenist anthropology (an argument that humanity consisted of many species) and anthropometry in general should be seen as a hardening of heredity. Using a debate between Philadelphia anthropologist and physician, Samuel G. Morton, and Charleston naturalist and reverend, John Bachman, as a springboard, the author contends that polygenist anthropologists hardened heredity by conceiving of durable traits that might reappear even after a race has been eliminated. Polygenists saw anthropometry (the measurement of humans) as one method of quantifying hereditary qualities. These statistical ranges were ostensibly characteristics that bred true and that defined racial groups. Further, Morton's interest in hybridity and racial mixing demonstrates that the polygenists focused as much on the transmission and recognition of "amalgamations" of characters as they did on racial categories themselves. The author suggests that seeing race science as the study of heritable, statistical characteristics rather than broad categories helps explain why "race" is such a persistent cultural phenomenon. (shrink)

Kant’s analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conflated in the biological sciences of the period: adaptation, functionality (...) and conservation of forms..Kant’s unitary concept of natural purpose was subsequently split in two directions: first by Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, that would draw on the idea of adaptative functions as a regulative principle for understanding in reconstituting and classifying organisms; and then by Goethe’s and Geoffroy’s morphology, a science of the general transformations of living forms. However, such general transformations in nature, objects of an alleged ‘archaeology of nature’, were thought impossible by Kant in the §80 of the Critique of judgment. Goethe made this ‘adventure of reason’ possible by changing the sense of ‘explanation’: scientific explanation was shifted from the investigation of the mechanical processes of generation of individual organisms to the unveiling of some ideal transformations of types instantiated by those organisms. (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)

Blumenbach’s epigenetic theory, particularly his concept of the formative drive, was appropriated by both Kant and Schelling. Kant’s third Critique endorsement of Blumenbach’s formative drive shows him to be close to Schelling’s conception of nature, since it is evidence of his distance from an artifactual conception of teleology. Schelling also draws on this concept of the formative drive, making the structures operative in the formative drive the explanatory ground of all natural forces and processes, thereby supplying the unity between the (...) organic and inorganic which, according to Kant’s Critical philosophy, is unattainable for our discursive understanding. In this paper, I will argue for two related conclusions. First, Kant is closer to Schelling in his outlook than he has been interpreted to be, particularly in his conception of reflecting teleological judgment, according to which we must judge organisms as if they internally directed at ends, while using design as a heuristic device. Second, Schelling’s philosophy of nature expands upon Kant’s view of the teleological principle, and in doing so develops a systematically unified view of nature. For Schelling, the organizing principle manifested in the formative drive also unifies all of nature into a single system. (shrink)

Franco Andrea Bonelli, a disciple of Lamarck, was one of the few naturalists who taught and disseminated transformism in Italy in the early nineteenth century. The explanation of the history of life on Earth offered by Lamarck’s theory was at odds with the Genesis narrative, while the issue of man’s place in nature raised heated debates. Bonelli sought to reconcile science and religion through his original interpretation of the variability of species, but he also focused on anthropological subjects. Following Blumenbach’s (...) studies, he investigated the differences within the human species and explored the topic of humans’ alleged superiority over animals. The origin of human beings, their history, and their relationship with the rest of life were thus read in light of transformism. According to Bonelli, such questions would not do irreparable damage to the new theory. On the contrary, he considered evolution not only acceptable but even necessary to protect the Holy Texts from certain dangerous trends in anthropological and zoological research. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss Kant’s views on the “American race.” Robert Bernasconi has pointed out that more research on the sources of Kant’s ideas on non-white races is needed in order to have a better understanding of his racism. This essay responds to that call in order to show how Kant contributed to on-going discussions on the causes and meaning of human differences. However, I will also focus on his influence on his contemporaries. The reason for doing so is (...) two-fold. Firstly, I will question Irene Tucker’s recent attempt to show that skin color was considered a racial sign because of its supposed self-evidence and immediate legibility. By way of a presentation of Kant’s views on the “American race,” I will show that race mixing formed the core of Kant’s racial theory and not the alleged immediacy of racial sight. Secondly, I will focus on his influence in order to question the popular idea that Kant had in his late work developed second thoughts on his racial hierarchy. His appraisal of the work of one of his contemporaries clearly shows that the matter is far more complicated than suggested in these interpretations of Kant’s racial work. (shrink)

Kant, von Baer, and causal‐historical thinking in biology. In his Kritik der Urteilskraft Kant set forth an analysis of bio‐causality which attempted to unite the best features of teleological and mechanical frameworks of explanation. Kant's analysis suggested that related organic forms must be materially interconnected in the unity of a fundamental plan or morphotype. In the hands of Karl Ernst von Baer these suggestions led to concrete researches and groundbreaking empirical discoveries, including the discovery of the mammalian ovum. Von Baer's (...) theories of developmental types, germ layers and fundamental organs offered a precise formulation of the research program initially outlined by Immanuel Kant. Above all through the embryological method von Baer introduced the analysis of causal‐historical relations as the basic tool for biological research, the power of which he revealed in the formulation of a limited theory of evolution. (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)

The paper argues for the importance to Kant's critique of judgment of epistemological reflections upon the problematics of experimentation on organic processes. It examines the investigations of generation by Wolff and Blumenbach, demonstrating how their experimental practices mediated reflectively between organic phenomena and their conceptualisation, acting as instruments of their judgments of these processes. It then reads Kant's ‘Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft’ in light of these experimental investigations, arguing that Kant highlights how the problematic relation between organic phenomena and their (...) conceptualisation manifested in such investigations is opened up as a space for reflection, thus making this act of judgment conscious. The relation between Kant's critiques of judgment in his first and third critiques are then discussed, and it is argued that the reflective character of judgment highlighted in the judgment of organic processes draws into focus the problematic aspects of all judgments of natural phenomena, by making conscious the synthetic process of judgment effected by unconscious acts of the imagination in the first critique. Finally, the paper examines Humboldt's galvanic experiments, showing how they were informed by Kant's critical philosophy, but also how they contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between the judgment of organic and inorganic processes. Thus it is claimed that the reflections upon judgment in the Kritik der Urteilskraft problematized rather than clarified Kant's treatment of judgment in the first critique. (shrink)

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach has been called ‘The Father of Physical Anthropology’ because of his pioneering publications describing human racial variation. He proposed a racial typology consisting of five ‘major varieties/races’ of humanity. Since the 1990s, Londa Schiebinger and other Anglophone scholars have argued that Blumenbach’s writings on race show evidence that he was significantly influenced by nineteenth-century race supremacist beliefs which held Europeans/caucasians to be the highest ranked and most beautiful race. However, these modern authors relied largely on Thomas Bendyshe’s (...) 1865 English translations of Blumenbach’s Latin and German texts. As documented herein, Bendyshe’s publication includes numerous translation errors which form a pattern indicating that he employed two translators. The first translator was consistent with five earlier English translations. The second translator was not consistent with the earlier translators. This second translator also used English terms that denigrated extra-Europeans while adulating Europeans. Furthermore, Bendyshe’s1865 translation regularly used the term ‘beauty’ to translate different Latin words that Blumenbach used to express his nuanced view of aesthetics and structural symmetry. Given the inconsistency and errors in Bendyshe’s 1865 translations, they should not be unquestionably accepted as an accurate reflection of Blumenbach’s views. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show firstly why Kant believes we should hang on to teleology, and, secondly, that his views on the matter are still relevant to contemporary epistemology despite the fact that theories of evolution now allow purely mechanical explanations of organic processes. By considering Kant’s account in light of that of Daniel Dennett, I elucidate what I believe to be the strength of Kant’s theory, namely, the pragmatic role it assigns to reflective teleological principles. (edited).

This article shows that Johann Gottlieb Steeb supported different aspects of Kant's theory of race. Despite the growing research on Kant's racial and biological theory, one finds no mention of Steeb in these interpretations. However, his work is relevant because of his attempt in 1785 to synthesize Kant's preformationist terminology with Blumenbach's epigenetic theory. This article aims at understanding this synthesis. Recent interpreters of Kant presuppose that preformationism excluded epigenesis. But already in 1785 Steeb saw the possibility of integrating Kant's (...) germs into a discourse that was to a large extent dominated by Blumenbach. Steeb's synthesis primarily implied that the concepts of germs and race could be amended to Blumenbach's understanding of human diversity. (shrink)

During the nineteenth century an intellectual elite formed in Germany which owed its status primarily to educational qualifications rather than to hereditary rights or wealth. With the ascendency of this elite, which Fritz Ringer has called the German ‘mandarins’, came their acceptance as the spiritual bearers of culture in German life. Politically they controlled the life of the Reichstag and hence were the spokesmen of the nation. As an intellectual elite they fed a diet of German idealistic philosophy to the (...) educational class. The university professors, as the most influential members of this class, spoke for the mandarin elite as a whole; and most cultivated Germans looked to the academicians for their understanding of political and cultural issues. Hence, German academic opinion became a sort of ‘mandarin ideology’. (shrink)

We should now be able to come to some general conclusions about the main lines of Cuvier's development as a naturalist after his departure from Normandy. We have seen that Cuvier arrived in Paris aware of the importance of physiology in classification, yet without a fully worked out idea of how such an approach could organize a whole natural order. He was freshly receptive to the ideas of the new physiology developed by Xavier Bichat.Cuvier arrived in a Paris also torn (...) by many overlapping debates on the nature of classification, and in particular that between the natural and artificial systems. The very validity of the enterprise of classification was questioned in many quarters. Cuvier's achievement on his entry into the Parisian world of science was not simply to establish himself as a highly competent anatomist: far more important, he also began to use ideas from many different specialties to change completely the notion of what was involved in natural history.124 At the same time that he himself swung away from the guiding image of the field naturalist as the ideal of the specialty, he took ideas from the new physiology to answer questions about the order of the animal world, and from comparative anatomy to resurrect extinct creation — and to come to conclusions from that creation about the history of the forms of life and the manner of their succession. He showed himself able to alter the relationships between natural history and many other fields of study in a way that implied, rightly or wrongly, his own complete mastery over such a movement. Partly he was able to do this because the ideas he borrowed were not themselves logically articulated and thus could be easily adapted and refocused for many different specific purposes. The value of the heuristic possibilities inherent in the idea of life, for example, far outweighed its inability to generate full systems of classification. Cuvier also consistently refused to consider in science matters relating to the first causes of events. Freed from the consideration of first-order phenomena, he was able to use second-order explanations across a far wider field of applicability. Personal doubts about the validity of a theology that had used science in order to bolster its own claims were combined here with the strong influence of the Kantian critique of the limits of human reason.125Cuvier's characteristic mode of procedure was that of intellectual appropriation and a bold capacity for altering the relationships between different fields of knowledge, rather than, with the exception of taxonomy, the technique of expanding their subject matter. His claims to originality came, first, from this reappropriation and reorientation and, second, from the sheer scope of his work, which aimed at nothing less than the cataloging and classification of all animate objects.126 They rested also on his acute use of his assertion of a certain relationship with the past of his subject. Very often he would present this history in such a way as to obscure his own intellectual genealogy, and often too he would give differing accounts of the priority of use of an idea in order to distract attention from the questionable exactitude of his own claims to originality. Cuvier came to Paris at precisely the time when society and institutions were most profitably malleable for a newcomer; it was also a time when many scientific disciplines had reached a stage advanced in terms of their factual content, yet relatively inadequate in conceptual organization. They were ripe for takeover by large-scale organizing ideas such as the animal economy and the subordination of characteristics. Paleontology is a particularly good example of a specialty in this particular form of underdevelopment in 1795.Cuvier paid a high price for his initial success. His electic applications of large-scale organizing ideas tended to mean that little of his own work had complete coherence at all levels. Ideas, as we have seen, that proved capable of providing a complete reform of the larger groups of the animal kingdom were incapable of producing its detailed working-out in the taxonomy of smaller groups, which had to be supplied from observed analogical correlations. Further, his physiological approach to classification involved the breakdown of strict correspondence between organs and functions, which left the way open for workers such as Geoffroy St. Hilaire gradually to tilt the balance away from the study of the correlations of hierarchies of functions, and toward morphology as the basis of the order of nature. Cuvier's brilliant appropriations from physiology from the beginning, therefore, contained the seeds of conflict with Geoffroy.Cuvier's eclectic approach made it very nearly impossible for him to present a clear idea of the ways in which the life sciences could be said to be lawful. In spite of his efforts to assimilate them to the position of the physical sciences in this respect, he was forced in the end to accord only an ambiguous status as “laws” to observational correlations. From this area of failure came much of the attempt to give his own two laws — the correlation of parts and the subordination of characteristics — predictive qualities, particularly in relation to paleontological research.It is not surprising that Cuvier's title as the “legislator” of natural history should represent more a claim than a reality. How, then, was he able to emerge as the leading French naturalist of his day? First of all must be adduced the sheer scale of his undertakings. Then comes his expertise as a practical anatomist, and the range of different topics toward which he turned his interest. His collaborators cannot be given credit for his output nor, as we have seen, for slavish adherence to his ideas. Cuvier was able to successfully claim to have dominated the underdeveloped specialties, such as paleontology, and turned them into a major heuristic input into both geology and comparative anatomy; but in other fields, such as physiology, he appropriated concepts and encouraged research but made little impact on the field himself. His attempts in 1812 to head off, or neutralize and absorb the growth of morphological studies landed him in a dangerously rigid position, which despite his encouragement of the new physiological research under the Restoration made further elaboration of his own conceptual underpinnings almost impossible.Cuvier's authority in the scientific world would in any case have been great because of his substantive achievement in taxonomy, but the rest of his work had enough ambiguities and dislocations for it to need the support of his political and social power. Cuvier's detractors seized on a vital fragment of the truth when they accused him of finding the political dimension all-important: it obscured the disjunctions in his theories and at the same time gave him the authority to make new claims for the status of the observational sciences - and for their relations of power with their surrounding specialties. Cuvier's science both thrived on and was halted by the power games of intellectual appropriation, manipulation of the past to confirm the present, and continual claims for hegemony. (shrink)

Over the last few decades there have been several calls for a “big picture” of the history of science. There is a general need for a concise overview of the rise of modern science, with a clear structure allowing for a rough division into periods. This essay proposes such a scheme, one that is both elementary and comprehensive. It focuses on four machines, which can be seen to have mediated between science and society during successive periods of time: the clock, (...) the balance, the steam engine, and the computer. Following an extended developmental phase, each of these machines came to play a highly visible role in Western societies, both socially and economically. Each of these machines, moreover, was used as a powerful resource for the understanding of both inorganic and organic nature. More specifically, their metaphorical use helped to construe and refine some key concepts that would play a prominent role in such understanding. In each case the key concept would at some point be considered to represent the ultimate building block of reality. Finally, in a refined form, each of these machines would eventually make its entry in scientific research, thereby strengthening the ties between these machines and nature. (shrink)

Contrary to common perceptions of Simmel’s work as dividing into three stages of Darwinism, Kantianism, and Goethean/Bergsonian Life-Philosophy, consideration of the full scope of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe demonstrates Simmel’s concern with both Kant and Goethe as life-long, just as was his engagement with core principles respectively associated with them: Form and Life. What changed in his mind over time was how those two principles were construed and related. In this view, Simmel’s Soziologie can be read as a treatise on (...) the properties of social forms that emerge out of vital processes – following a dynamic akin to Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, whereas the Lebensanschauung puts more emphasis on the ways in which forms channel, constrain, and inspire the streams of life. This opens the door for creative work pursuing lines of connection between the two disciplines – a sociology of authentic individuality and a kind of existentialized sociology – and, beyond that, to a unified theory of action and evolution. (shrink)

Based on materials collected during a fieldwork in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia) in 2001–2004, the article explores two provincial academic discourses that are focused on issues of Russian national identity. Ethnohistories of trauma address Russia’s current problems through the constant re-writing of the country’s past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its national and state institutions. In the second discourse, ethno-vitalism, the struggle over constructing and interpreting the nation’s memory of the past is replaced with a similar struggle over (...) constructing and interpreting perceptions of the nation’s current experience. Produced by professional intelligentsia, these frameworks and discourses provide a useful link to understanding imaginary constructions of the national belonging in a situation where more positive ways of inventing traditions and imagining communities are unavailable or discredited. (shrink)