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  1. Explanation, teleology, and analogy in natural history and comparative anatomy around 1800: Kant and Cuvier.Hein van den Berg - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 105 (C):109-119.
    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 (...)
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  • The Explanatory Role of Umwelt in Evolutionary Theory: Introducing von Baer's Reflections on Teleological Development.Tiago Rama - 2024 - Biosemiotics 1:1-26.
    Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved (...)
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  • Kant on Language and the (Self‐)Development of Reason.Huaping Lu-Adler - 2023 - Kant Yearbook 15 (1):109-134.
    The origin of languages was a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century. This paper reconstructs a distinctively Kantian account according to which the origination, progression, and diversification of languages is at bottom reason’s self-development under certain a priori constraints and external environments. The reconstruction builds on three sets of materials. The first is Herder’s famous prize essay on the origin of languages. The second includes Kant’s explicit remarks about language – especially his notion of “transcendental grammar,” his argument that (...)
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  • Teleology and the organism: Kant's controversial legacy for contemporary biology.Andrea Gambarotto & Auguste Nahas - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93 (C):47-56.
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  • The Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends in eighteenth and nineteenth century biology.Henk Jochemsen & Wim Beekman - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (1):1-24.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism.Bognon-Küss Cécilia, Chen Bohang & T. Wolfe Charles - 2018 - Kairos 20 (1):113–140.
    Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or “forces”, over and (...)
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  • Teleomechanism redux? The conceptual hybridity of living machines in early modern natural philosophy.Charles T. Wolfe - manuscript
    We have been accustomed at least since Kant and mainstream history of philosophy to distinguish between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘teleological’; between a fully mechanistic, quantitative science of Nature exemplified by Newton and a teleological, qualitative approach to living beings ultimately expressed in the concept of ‘organism’ – a purposive entity, or at least an entity possessed of functions. The beauty of this distinction is that it seems to make intuitive sense and to map onto historical and conceptual constellations in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Analogical Reflection as a Source for the Science of Life: Kant and the Possibility of the Biological Sciences.Nassar Dalia - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 58 (C):57-66.
    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 (...)
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  • Kant’s Ongoing Relevance for Philosophy of Science.Andrew Jones & Andrew Cooper - 2023 - Kantian Review 28 (3):337-354.
    In this introductory article we reconstruct several broad developments in the scholarship on Kant’s theory of natural science with a particular focus on the Anglophone context over the past half-century. Our goal is to illuminate the co-development of Kant scholarship and the philosophy of science during this period and to identify points of influence in both directions. In section 2 we present an overview of the scholarship on Kant’s account of natural laws. In section 3 we survey the diverse interpretations (...)
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  • Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature.Naomi Fisher - 2023 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 105 (1):163-188.
    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, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism.Charles T. Wolfe, Bohang Chen & Cécilia Bognon-Küss - 2018 - Kairos 20 (1):113-140.
    Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or “forces”, over and (...)
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  • Kant and Schelling on Blumenbach’s formative drive.Naomi Fisher - 2021 - Intellectual History Review 31 (3):391-409.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology.Amanda Jo Goldstein - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):13.
    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 (...)
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  • Laws of organization and chemical analysis: Blainville and Müller.François Duchesneau - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 38 (4).
    When “general physiology” emerged as a basic field of research within biology in the early nineteenth century, Henri Ducrotay de Blainville (1777–1850) on the one hand and Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858) on the other appealed to chemical analysis to account for the properties and operations of organisms that were observed to differ from what was found in inorganic compounds. Their aim was to establish laws of vital organization that would be based on organic chemical processes, but would also be of (...)
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  • Kant’s Concept of Organism Revisited: A Framework for a Possible Synthesis between Developmentalism and Adaptationism?Philippe Huneman - 2017 - The Monist 100 (3):373-390.
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  • Ateleological propagation in Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants.Gregory Rupik - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-28.
    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 (...)
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  • Schelling on understanding organisms.Anton Kabeshkin - 2017 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (6):1180-1201.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology.Amanda Jo Goldstein - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):1-27.
    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 (...)
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  • Diverging views of epigenesis: the Wolff–Blumenbach debate.Andrea Gambarotto - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (2):12.
    Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is widely known as the father of German vitalism and his notion of Bildungstrieb, or nisus formativus, has been recognized as playing a key role in the debates about generation in German-speaking countries around 1800. On the other hand, Caspar Friedrich Wolff was the first to employ a vitalist notion, namely that of vis essentialis, in the explanatory framework of epigenetic development. Is there a difference between Wolff’s vis essentialis and Blumenbach’s nisus formativus? How does this difference (...)
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  • The First Brazilian Thesis of Evolution: Haeckel's Recapitulation Theory and Its Relations with the Idea of Progress.Ricardo Francisco Waizbort, Maurício Roberto Motta Pinto da Luz, Flavio Coelho Edler & Helio Ricardo da Silva - 2021 - Journal of the History of Biology 54 (3):447-481.
    The aim of this work is to present the thesis “On the Ontogenetic Evolution of the Human Embryo in its Relations with Phylogenesis,” by Affonso Regulo de Oliveira Fausto, published in Brazil in 1890. To our knowledge, it was one of the first Brazilian academic works focused specifically on evolution. It was also the first doctoral thesis that addressed the topic of recapitulation in order to analyze what was then called the progressive evolution of the human species in tandem with (...)
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  • Teleología y epigénesis: una aproximación a los organismos en la Crítica de la Facultad de Juzgar de Kant.Juan Felipe Guevara-Aristizabal & Xóchitl Arteaga-Villamil - 2014 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 5:21--33.
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