In contrast to the previously widespread view that Kant's work was largely in dialogue with the physical sciences, recent scholarship has highlighted Kant's interest in and contributions to the life sciences. Scholars are now investigating the extent to which Kant appealed to and incorporated insights from the life sciences and considering the ways he may have contributed to a new conception of living beings. The scholarship remains, however, divided in its interest: historians of science are concerned with the content of (...) Kant's claims, and the ways in which they may or may not have contributed to the emerging science of life, while historians of philosophy focus on the systematic justifications for Kant's claims, e.g., the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of Kant's statement that living beings are mechanically inexplicable. My aim in this paper is to bring together these two strands of scholarship into dialogue by showing how Kant's methodological concerns (specifically, his notion of reflective judgment) contributed to his conception of living beings and to the ontological concern with life as a distinctive object of study. I argue that although Kant's explicit statement was that biology could not be a science, his implicit and more fundamental claim was that the study of living beings necessitates a distinctive mode of thought, a mode that is essentially analogical. I consider the implications of this view, and argue that it is by developing a new methodology for grasping organized beings that Kant makes his most important contribution to the new science of life. (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)

In the second half of the third Critique, Kant develops a new form of judgment peculiar to organisms: teleological judgment. In the Appendix to this text, Kant argues that we must regard the final, unconditioned end of creation as human freedom, due to reason's demand that we regard nature as a system of ends. In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation of this argument, according to which judgments of freedom within nature are possible as instances of teleological judgment. Just (...) as individual organisms are to be regarded as governed by supersensible teleological laws, so too is nature as a whole to be regarded as given laws from a supersensible ground. This supersensible ground in the case of nature as a whole is freedom. Freedom and teleological judgments are to be regarded as unifiable with mechanism in the supersensible, and we are to subordinate mechanical explanations to teleological judgments as well as to freedom. This interpretation makes sense both of Kant's claim that he overcomes the “incalculable gulf” between nature and freedom in the third Critique, and also of the location of this argument, as following after and relying on the results of the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment. (shrink)

A well-rehearsed move among teleological realists in the philosophy of biology is to base the idea of genuinely teleological forms of organic self-reproduction on a type of causality derived from Kant. Teleological realists have long argued for the causal possibility of this form of causality—in which a whole is considered the cause of its parts—as well as formulated a set of teleological criteria of adequacy for it. What is missing, to date, is an account of the mereological principles that govern (...) the envisioned whole-to-part causality. When the latter principles are taken into account, we find that there is no version of whole-to-part causality that is mereologically, causally and teleologically possible all at once, as teleological realism requires. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct Schelling’s theory of organism, primarily as it is elaborated in the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and the Introduction to the Outline. First, I discuss the challenge that the properties of organisms presented to the dominant scientific viewpoint by the end of the eighteenth century. I present different responses to this challenge, including reductive materialism, metaphysical and heuristic vitalism, and the Kantian response, and I situate Schelling’s account of (...) organism with respect to these responses. I argue that while Schelling agrees with vitalism in that he wants to preserve the specificity of organic phenomena, he rejects principles such as vital forces or the formative drive postulated by vitalism, even for purely heuristic purposes. I argue that Schelling understands organisms fundamentally in terms of the coordinated functioning of their organs. I further clarify Schelling’s account of problematic organic phenomena by focusing on his treatment of the relation between organic activity and organic receptivity. For Schelling, organic activity and organic receptivity mutually condition each other. I provide a detailed account of how this is supposed to work. (shrink)

A comprehensive and practical study tool, introducing Kant's thought and key works and exploring his continuing influence.

Despite relative neglect in the literature, Kant’s published and unpublished writings in theoretical philosophy reveal a sustained and at times ambivalent effort to come to terms with the problem of miracles. Because they entail a form of supernatural causation that undermines the law-governedness of the order of nature, miracles pose a significant problem for Kant’s metaphysics. I explore in detail Kant’s account of miracles in conjunction with the relevant aspects of his metaphysics of nature in order to establish in what (...) sense miracles are possible, and how they fit into Kant’s architectonic more generally. (shrink)