A recent article in this journal describes certain mathematical and philosophical controversies which occurred in Prussia during the middle decades of the 18th century. The article pays particular attention to the position of Christian Wolff and to the views of some of his followers. Both Wolff and the Wolffians are shown to have supported some of Leibniz's doctrines against those of the Newtonian camp. As a result, or perhaps in part as a premise, there is a strong tendency throughout the (...) article to identify Wolff himself with Leibniz. The reader will naturally conclude that Wolff (and, in turn, the Wolffians) must have been a faithful student and expositor of his master, Leibniz. My purpose in the present investigation is to contribute to an examination of the accuracy of this portrayal. (shrink)

I defend Kant’s definition of analyticity in terms of concept “containment”, which has engendered widespread scepticism. Kant deployed a clear, technical notion of containment based on ideas standard within traditional logic, notably genus/species hierarchies formed via logical division. Kant’s analytic/synthetic distinction thereby undermines the logico-metaphysical system of Christian Wolff, showing that the Wolffian paradigm lacks the expressive power even to represent essential knowledge, including elementary mathematics, and so cannot provide an adequate system of philosophy. The results clarify the extent to (...) which analyticity sensu Kant can illuminate the problem of a priori knowledge generally. (shrink)

Kant's Moral Religion argues that Kant's doctrine of religious belief if consistent with his best critical thinking and, in fact, that the "moral arguments"--along with the faith they justify--are an integral part of Kant's critical thinking.

This paper analyzes Immanuel Kant’s views on mechanical explanation on the basis of Christian Wolff’s idea of scientific demonstration. Kant takes mechanical explanations to explain properties of wholes in terms of their parts. I reconstruct the nature of such explanations by showing how part-whole conceptualizations in Wolff’s logic and metaphysics shape the ideal of a proper and explanatory scientific demonstration. This logico-philosophical background elucidates why Kant construes mechanical explanations as ideal explanations of nature.

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (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)

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)

I distinguish two senses in which organisms are mechanically inexplicable for Kant. Mechanical inexplicability in the first sense is shared with artefacts, and consists in their exhibiting regularities irreducible to the regularities of matter. Mechanical inexplicability in the second sense is peculiar to organisms, consisting in the reciprocal causal dependence of an organism's parts. This distinction corresponds to two strands of thought in Aristotle, one supporting a teleological conception of organisms, the other supporting a conception of organisms as natural. Recognizing (...) this distinction helps us to see how a teleological conception of organisms is compatible with recent advances in biology. (shrink)

The controversy over spontaneous generation and the theory of evolution was part of the broader issue of the nature of life. It was the vitalists, who had originally accepted the doctrine of heterogenesis, who now were forced to reject abiogenesis. Their commitment to the view that life was unique and autonomous was so strong that, once the link between evolution and the abiogenetic origin of life had been made, they were almost constrained to reject evolution. It is not surprising that (...) one finds this extreme position among German scientists, for it was only in Germany that the strong connection had been made. In Britain, with its strong empirical tradition, the theory of evolution was never completely tied to the doctrine of abiogenesis.Many nonvitalistic biologists were equally committed to the view that there was a gradation between the living and the nonliving, and saw in the doctrine of evolution a vindication of these views. To many of this school, abiogenesis was an a priori necessity requiring no empirical proof. If they sought for any empirical justification for their views on abiogenesis, one feels that such proof was never of great importance to them. Many—particularly the Germans—regarded those who denied abiogenesis because of the lack of proof to be guilty of following an outdated methodology: “that modern scientists still put so uncommon value on the inductive proof of spontaneous generation, is the clearest indication that few place confidence in the first principle of the theory of knowledge.” To them an acceptance of abiogenesis was necessary “in order to understand nature according to the laws of causality.” 105. (shrink)

In attempts to come to grips with Kant’s thought, the influence of the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) is often neglected. In this paper, I consider three topics in Kant’s philosophy of mind, broadly construed, where Wolff’s influence is particularly visible: consciousness, self-consciousness, and psychology. I argue that we can better understand Kant’s particular arguments and positions within this context, but also gain a more accurate sense of which aspects of Kant’s accounts derive from the antecedent traditions and which constitute (...) genuine philosophical innovations. (shrink)

Kants Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft von 1786 stehen ihrem Anspruch nach zwischen einer transzendentalen Kritik der Vernunft - Kant bereitete zur selben Zeit die in wesentlichen Stücken umgearbeitete zweite Auflage der KrV vor - und der Physik als empirischer Wissenschaft. Die Notwendigkeit einer Reflexion über die Naturwissenschaft verhilft dieser Schrift heute wieder zu systematischer Relevanz, nachdem sie lange Zeit nur aus dem Blickwinkel ihrer Bedeutsamkeit für die empirische Naturwissenschaft betrachtet und infolgedessen allenfalls aus wissenschaftshistorischem Interesse rezipiert wurde.

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Kein Geringerer als Arthur Schopenhauer beurteilte Kants Prolegomena als die "schönste und faßlichste aller Kantischen Hauptschriften, welche viel zu wenig gelesen wird, da sie doch das Studium seiner Philosophie außerordentlich erleichtert". Die Prolegomena von 1783 sind eine Kurzfassung der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", deren Plan und Ergebnisse sie übersichtlich darstellen sollen. In Umkehrung der Methode der Kritik - statt der synthetischen Lehrart wird nun die analytische befolgt - nimmt Kant unter der Leitfrage "Wie sind synthetische Urteile a priori möglich?" eine (...) Inhalts-, Umfangs- und Grenzbestimmung reiner Erkenntnis vor. Orientiert am Ideal der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaft soll der Metaphysik hinsichtlich der Gewißheit ihrer Prinzipien die Nobilitierung einer Wissenschaft zuteil werden, die ihr vor der Kritik versagt war. Damit sind die Prolegomena nicht nur eine Einführung in den Transzendentalen Idealismus Kants, sondern dokumentieren bereits die Weiterführung dieser Kritischen Philosophie, welche sich über die "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten" (1785) sowie die "Metaphysischen Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft" (1786) bis zur zweiten Auflage der Kritik (1787) und über diese hinaus fortsetzt. (shrink)