- Email: [email protected]
Introduction: Kantian teleology and the biological sciences
Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
Introduction: Kantian teleology and the biological sciences Joan Steigerwald Science and Technology Studies, Humanities, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3
This special issue was stimulated by a meeting in Guelph, Canada, in July 2005, of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB). As its rather cumbersome name suggests, the society’s intention is to bring together scholars in history, philosophy and the social sciences as well as scientists with an interest in the biological sciences, and to create opportunities for conversations between them. What was a surprise at the Guelph meeting was the number of places where Kant appeared in the program. Not only were there sessions in which historians of science and historians of philosophy addressed the significance of Kant for the development of the ‘biological sciences’ of his time,1 but also in several sessions philosophers of biology concerned with the problem of biological functions discussed reassessing the significance of Kant’s work on teleology for modern debates. In the spirit of the interactions that took place at the ISHPSSB meeting, this special issue brings together historians of science, historians of philosophy and philosophers of science with a particular interest in the biological sciences and Kant’s work on teleology, with six of the eight contributors participants at Guelph. An argument can readily be made for the importance of a collection devoted to Kantian teleology and the biological sciences. Given the extensive literature devoted to Kant’s philosophy, this topic has received relatively little attention. A few monographs have been dedicated to Kant’s ‘Critique of teleological judgment’—Zammito (1992) McLaughlin (1990), Zumbach (1984), and McFarland (1970)—but their arguments and conclusions E-mail address: [email protected] Although it is anachronistic to use the expression ‘biological sciences’ for studies of organisms in Kant’s time, biology being a nineteenth-century term and concept and Kant largely reserving the term ‘science’ for the mechanical sciences, it is used in this issue to avoid awkward formulations referring to the studies in natural history, anatomy, anthropology and medicine to which Kant actually referred. Several papers in this issue are concerned precisely with specifying the fields of study on which Kant drew and his views on how those studies of organisms were related to his conception of natural science. 1
1369-8486/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2006.09.002
622
J. Steigerwald / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
warrant reassessment in light of recent scholarship in the history of science, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science. Some leading Kant scholars have recently turned their attention to Kant’s 1790 ‘Critique of teleological judgment’, most notably Henry E. Allison and Paul Guyer, but their primary interest is in Kant’s reflections on teleology as a part of his larger concern with the system of nature, either in relation to his conception of the mechanical sciences or in relation to his moral philosophy.2 Indeed, the difficulty in interpreting the arguments of the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ is in part due to the fact that they draw on the whole of Kant’s philosophy. Its placement in the Critique of judgment not only pairs it with the ‘Critique of aesthetic judgment’, but also frames it with an ‘Introduction’ which gives to the power of judgment a mediating role between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom. Moreover, Kant’s lengthy ‘Appendix’ to the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ not only examines how the principles of mechanism and teleology can be related in a system of nature, but also includes an extended discussion of the relationships between our concepts of nature and our morality and faith in God. Guyer concludes that ‘recent work has begun to make it clear that this part of Kant’s book should not be ignored’.3 Kant’s reflections on teleology and our comprehension of organisms are not restricted to the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’, however. He was concerned with the difficulties posed by organisms for our understanding of the natural world from his earliest writings, such as the Universal natural history and theory of the heavens of 1755, the Only possible proof of the existence of God of 1763 and the Dreams of a spirit-seer of 1766, a preoccupation that continued until the end of his life, as can be seen from his Opus postumum. He intervened in contemporary debates in natural history and on the development of organisms and the races of human beings in his lectures and related publications on physical geography and anthropology, and in his responses to works by Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Forster in the 1770s and 1780s. The most extensive scholarship on ‘Kantian teleology and the biological sciences’ to date has been concerned with the relationship of Kant’s reflections on the unique characteristics of organisms to studies in natural history, anatomy, development and anthropology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 Furthermore, Kant introduced natural teleology into his writings on politics and history, such as Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent of 1784 and To perpetual peace of 1795. He also discussed the human predisposition to animality in works such as Religion within the boundaries of mere reason of 1793 and Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view of 1798. Thus, preoccupations with teleology and our comprehension of the unique characteristics of organisms permeate many of Kant’s writings, even as his larger philosophical system informs those preoccupations. A growing body of literature discussing diverse aspects of Kantian teleology and the biological sciences can now be found scattered in articles and as parts of larger studies. This collection of essays contributes to that scholarship by providing an extensive examination of Kant’s writings on teleology and our comprehension of organisms, and of how they have been variously interpreted and assessed, and offers reevaluations of their significance. It becomes clear on reading these essays that a considerable lack of consensus exists not only on how to interpret Kant’s writings, but also on how to interpret their relevance to 2 3 4
Allison (2003 [1991], 2000), and Guyer (2005, 2003b, 2001). Guyer (2003a), p. xix. For an overview of this scholarship, and contributions to it, see Huneman (2007, Forthcoming).
J. Steigerwald / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
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the biological sciences of his time and to modern debates about teleology in biology. It might be assumed that Kant’s analysis of our comprehension of organisms—that they appear to us as contingent with regard to the mechanism of nature and thus that we must appeal to purposiveness, if only as a regulative principle, in our investigation of them— reflected the limitations of both the biological sciences and physical sciences of his time. It might also be assumed that subsequent developments in science, particularly in evolutionary theory and genetics, resolved the problems to which Kant’s analysis drew attention and removed the need for an appeal to teleology in biological science. Indeed, Guyer concludes that ‘Kant’s analysis of our problem in comprehending organisms is now indefensible . . . undermined by developments in histology, embryology and genetics since the nineteenth century’.5 But recent work in both the history of science and the philosophy of science calls for a reassessment of such evaluations. Discussions at Guelph and contributions to this special issue suggest that Kant’s contributions to the development of biology and his continued relevance are still subject to debate. The papers in this collection form three groupings. The first three papers, by Phillip R. Sloan, Philippe Huneman and Alix A. Cohen, discuss the importance of Kant’s philosophy for the ‘biological sciences’ of his time, respectively, natural history and the history of nature, comparative anatomy and morphology, and anthropology and the study of mankind as a natural species. The papers by Angela Breitenbach, Joan Steigerwald and Marcel Quarfood, focus on the Critique of judgment and the concepts of mechanical explanation and natural purpose that Kant articulated within it. The final group of papers by John Zammito and D. M. Walsh raises the question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary debates over function in biology. The first group of papers draws on recent scholarship in the history of science reexamining the significance of German contributions and of Kant in particular to the ‘biological sciences’ of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Phillip R. Sloan’s paper, ‘Kant on the history of nature: The ambiguous heritage of the critical philosophy for natural history’, argues against the view, defended especially by James Larson, that Kant gave preference to the ‘history’ of nature, and that his opinions were thus found untenable by working naturalists.6 He rather argues that Kant’s arguments moved over time in the opposite direction, and served to restrict speculative natural history within limits that led notable successors, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Georges Cuvier, to find in the critical philosophy grounds for rejecting a historical science of nature in favour of a descriptive program in natural history. Sloan concludes that those who found warrant for drawing from Kant a program of developmental transcendental morphology, and even a form of evolutionism, misread him. Philippe Huneman’s paper is also interested in how Kant was read by subsequent anatomists and naturalists. In ‘Naturalising purpose: From comparative anatomy to the ‘‘adventures of reason’’’ he argues that Kant’s concept of natural purpose was elaborated in both functional and formal senses by later figures. Like Sloan, he interprets Cuvier’s comparative anatomy as drawing on Kant, seeing in his emphasis on adaptive functions as regulative principles a faithfulness to Kant’s position. But Huneman is primarily interested in how a reinterpretation of Kant’s critique of speculative natural history and conception of scientific explanation proved productive for the developmental transcendental morphology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and 5 6
Guyer (2003b), p. 46. Larson (1994).
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J. Steigerwald / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Alix A. Cohen’s paper, ‘Kant on epigenesis, monogenesis and human nature: The biological premises of anthropology’, examines Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species. Positioning Kant within contemporary debates over organic generation and the human races, she demonstrates how Kant argued for the biological unity of the human species and for racial difference to be attributed to the possession of natural predispositions. Cohen argues that Kant’s account of man’s natural predispositions was not limited to the issue of races, but encompassed unexpected human features such as gender, temperaments and nations. Kant understood these predispositions, she concludes, to be the means for the realization of Nature’s overall purpose for the human species. While the first group of papers is concerned with several of Kant’s works up to and including the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’, the second group of papers focuses on the arguments of Kant’s third Critique. Angela Breitenbach contends in her paper, ‘Mechanical explanation of nature and its limits in Kant’s Critique of judgment’, that what, on first consideration, appears to be a thoroughly mechanistic conception of nature in Kant, turns out to be very limited. By considering Kant’s concept of mechanical laws as found in his early writings and his 1786 Metaphysical foundations of natural science in relation to both Hannah Ginsborg’s and Peter McLaughlin’s accounts of Kant’s concept of mechanism,7 she concludes that the mechanical laws in the third Critique should be understood as a particular species of empirical causal laws. She suggests that Kant’s conclusion in the third Critique, that our hope for an explanation of all of nature according to such mechanical laws is based on ‘regulative’ considerations about nature, may leave room for an alternative non-mechanistic conception of nature. Joan Steigerwald’s paper, ‘Kant’s concept of natural purpose and the reflecting power of judgment’, examines the concept of natural purpose as Kant articulated it in the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ in relation to and in distinction from the concepts of nature and the concept of purpose he had developed in his other critical writings. She argues that although Kant restricted his reflections on organisms to phenomena that can be demonstrated in experience, the concept of natural purpose is a product of the reflecting power of judgment, and concerns only the relation of things to our power of judgment. Yet it is necessary for the identification of organisms as organisms, as organized and self-organizing, and as subject to unique norms and circular or ‘reflective’ causal relations between parts and whole. Marcel Quarfood’s paper, ‘Kant on biological teleology: Towards a two-level interpretation’, offers a way to balance Kant’s claims in the Critique of judgment that teleology is indispensable for conceptualizing organized beings and yet that it is a regulative principle merely subjectively valid for our reflection on such beings. He proposes distinguishing between two roles that the concept of natural purpose serves. The concept has an identificatory function, enabling us to single out certain objects as natural purposes, and thus constituting the special science of biology; here Quarfood finds in Kant a partial endorsement of Aristotelian teleology and even a quasi-explanatory role for teleology. But on a meta level of philosophical reflection, the concept has a merely regulative role. Quarfood leaves his conclusions as only suggestive for the modern philosophy of biology, although in other places he takes up this question.8 The last group of papers is concerned directly with the relevance of Kantian teleology for the biological sciences today, 7 8
Ginsborg (2004, 2001), and McLaughlin (1990). Quarfood (2004).
J. Steigerwald / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
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and the authors offer quite different conclusions. One of the reasons Kant’s ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ has found new attention is a growing interest of both the biological sciences and the philosophy of biology in the phenomena of organic development, maintenance and reproduction. Kant’s analysis of organisms as natural purposes brought to attention precisely their unique capacities for self-organization. The question has thus arisen as to whether or not Kant’s analysis might be instructive for present debates regarding the goal-directedness of biological functions. In ‘Teleology then and now: The question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary controversies over function in biology’, John Zammito locates the motivation for a renewed interest in Kant in an impasse in current function talk, with little consensus over why teleological approaches are found only in biology, how they work and what risks they carry, and the extent to which they can be grounded in biological processes. But he warns that if naturalism is the aspiration of contemporary philosophy of biology and if biology wants to conceptualize self-organization as actual in the world, Kant offers little help. Zammito argues that epistemological ‘deflation’ was the decisive feature of Kant’s treatment of the biological sciences of his day. The third Critique essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of pre-scientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. Denis Walsh takes a different stance in his paper, ‘Organisms as natural purposes: The contemporary evolutionary perspective’. Walsh begins by emphasizing recent studies in the biological sciences that have strong resonances with Kant’s conception of organisms as natural purposes—their capacity for selforganization, their emergent properties, their adaptability and their capacity to regulate their component parts and processes. Then, in a reformulation of Kant’s ‘Antinomy’ between teleological and mechanical principles for our judgment of organisms, he attempts to carve out an explanatory role for organismal purposes that is consistent with the modern commitment to mechanism. Appealing to the apparatus of invariance explanation, he sketches a model for how purpose and mechanism can be regarded as reciprocal causes of organisms, and concludes that purposiveness has a genuine, ineliminable role in biological explanations. This special issue does not attempt to resolve debates regarding the interpretation of Kantian teleology and its relevance to the biological sciences of Kant’s time or today. What it does present is the current state of the debate. References Allison, H. (2000). Is the Critique of judgment ‘post-critical’? In S. Sedgwick (Ed.), The reception of Kant’s critical philosophy (pp. 78–92). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allison, H. E. (2003). Kant’s antinomy of teleological judgment. In P. Guyer (Ed.), Kant’s Critique of the power of judgment: Critical essays (pp. 219–230). New York: Rowman and Littlefield (First published 1991). Ginsborg, H. (2001). Kant on the understanding of organisms as purposes. In E. Watkins (Ed.), Kant and the sciences (pp. 231–253). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginsborg, H. (2004). Two kinds of mechanical inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42, 33–65. Guyer, P. (2001). Organism and the unity of science. In E. Watkins (Ed.), Kant and the sciences (pp. 259–281). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guyer, P. (2003a). Introduction. In idem (Ed.), Kant’s Critique of the power of judgment: Critical essays (pp. vii– xxi). New York: Rowan & Littlefield. Guyer, P. (2003b). Kant’s principle of reflecting judgment. In idem (Ed.), Kant’s Critique of the power of judgment: Critical essays (pp. 1–61). New York: Rowan & Littlefield. Guyer, P. (2005). Kant’s system of nature and freedom: Selected essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Huneman, P. (Ed.). (2007, Forthcoming). Understanding purpose: Collected essays on Kant and the philosophy of biology. NAKS Publication Series. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Larson, J. L. (1994). Interpreting nature: The science of living form from Linnaeus to Kant. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McFarland, J. D. (1970). Kant’s concept of teleology. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. McLaughlin, P. (1990). Kant’s critique of teleology in biological explanation: Antinomy and teleology. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Quarfood, M. (2004). Transcendental idealism and the organism: Essays on Kant. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Zammito, J. H. (1992). The genesis of Kant’s Critique of judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zumbach, C. (1984). The transcendent science: Kant’s conception of biological methodology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
Introduction: Kantian teleology and the biological sciences Joan Steigerwald Science and Technology Studies, Humanities, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3
This special issue was stimulated by a meeting in Guelph, Canada, in July 2005, of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB). As its rather cumbersome name suggests, the society’s intention is to bring together scholars in history, philosophy and the social sciences as well as scientists with an interest in the biological sciences, and to create opportunities for conversations between them. What was a surprise at the Guelph meeting was the number of places where Kant appeared in the program. Not only were there sessions in which historians of science and historians of philosophy addressed the significance of Kant for the development of the ‘biological sciences’ of his time,1 but also in several sessions philosophers of biology concerned with the problem of biological functions discussed reassessing the significance of Kant’s work on teleology for modern debates. In the spirit of the interactions that took place at the ISHPSSB meeting, this special issue brings together historians of science, historians of philosophy and philosophers of science with a particular interest in the biological sciences and Kant’s work on teleology, with six of the eight contributors participants at Guelph. An argument can readily be made for the importance of a collection devoted to Kantian teleology and the biological sciences. Given the extensive literature devoted to Kant’s philosophy, this topic has received relatively little attention. A few monographs have been dedicated to Kant’s ‘Critique of teleological judgment’—Zammito (1992) McLaughlin (1990), Zumbach (1984), and McFarland (1970)—but their arguments and conclusions E-mail address: [email protected] Although it is anachronistic to use the expression ‘biological sciences’ for studies of organisms in Kant’s time, biology being a nineteenth-century term and concept and Kant largely reserving the term ‘science’ for the mechanical sciences, it is used in this issue to avoid awkward formulations referring to the studies in natural history, anatomy, anthropology and medicine to which Kant actually referred. Several papers in this issue are concerned precisely with specifying the fields of study on which Kant drew and his views on how those studies of organisms were related to his conception of natural science. 1
1369-8486/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2006.09.002
622
J. Steigerwald / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
warrant reassessment in light of recent scholarship in the history of science, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science. Some leading Kant scholars have recently turned their attention to Kant’s 1790 ‘Critique of teleological judgment’, most notably Henry E. Allison and Paul Guyer, but their primary interest is in Kant’s reflections on teleology as a part of his larger concern with the system of nature, either in relation to his conception of the mechanical sciences or in relation to his moral philosophy.2 Indeed, the difficulty in interpreting the arguments of the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ is in part due to the fact that they draw on the whole of Kant’s philosophy. Its placement in the Critique of judgment not only pairs it with the ‘Critique of aesthetic judgment’, but also frames it with an ‘Introduction’ which gives to the power of judgment a mediating role between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom. Moreover, Kant’s lengthy ‘Appendix’ to the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ not only examines how the principles of mechanism and teleology can be related in a system of nature, but also includes an extended discussion of the relationships between our concepts of nature and our morality and faith in God. Guyer concludes that ‘recent work has begun to make it clear that this part of Kant’s book should not be ignored’.3 Kant’s reflections on teleology and our comprehension of organisms are not restricted to the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’, however. He was concerned with the difficulties posed by organisms for our understanding of the natural world from his earliest writings, such as the Universal natural history and theory of the heavens of 1755, the Only possible proof of the existence of God of 1763 and the Dreams of a spirit-seer of 1766, a preoccupation that continued until the end of his life, as can be seen from his Opus postumum. He intervened in contemporary debates in natural history and on the development of organisms and the races of human beings in his lectures and related publications on physical geography and anthropology, and in his responses to works by Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Forster in the 1770s and 1780s. The most extensive scholarship on ‘Kantian teleology and the biological sciences’ to date has been concerned with the relationship of Kant’s reflections on the unique characteristics of organisms to studies in natural history, anatomy, development and anthropology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 Furthermore, Kant introduced natural teleology into his writings on politics and history, such as Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent of 1784 and To perpetual peace of 1795. He also discussed the human predisposition to animality in works such as Religion within the boundaries of mere reason of 1793 and Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view of 1798. Thus, preoccupations with teleology and our comprehension of the unique characteristics of organisms permeate many of Kant’s writings, even as his larger philosophical system informs those preoccupations. A growing body of literature discussing diverse aspects of Kantian teleology and the biological sciences can now be found scattered in articles and as parts of larger studies. This collection of essays contributes to that scholarship by providing an extensive examination of Kant’s writings on teleology and our comprehension of organisms, and of how they have been variously interpreted and assessed, and offers reevaluations of their significance. It becomes clear on reading these essays that a considerable lack of consensus exists not only on how to interpret Kant’s writings, but also on how to interpret their relevance to 2 3 4
Allison (2003 [1991], 2000), and Guyer (2005, 2003b, 2001). Guyer (2003a), p. xix. For an overview of this scholarship, and contributions to it, see Huneman (2007, Forthcoming).
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623
the biological sciences of his time and to modern debates about teleology in biology. It might be assumed that Kant’s analysis of our comprehension of organisms—that they appear to us as contingent with regard to the mechanism of nature and thus that we must appeal to purposiveness, if only as a regulative principle, in our investigation of them— reflected the limitations of both the biological sciences and physical sciences of his time. It might also be assumed that subsequent developments in science, particularly in evolutionary theory and genetics, resolved the problems to which Kant’s analysis drew attention and removed the need for an appeal to teleology in biological science. Indeed, Guyer concludes that ‘Kant’s analysis of our problem in comprehending organisms is now indefensible . . . undermined by developments in histology, embryology and genetics since the nineteenth century’.5 But recent work in both the history of science and the philosophy of science calls for a reassessment of such evaluations. Discussions at Guelph and contributions to this special issue suggest that Kant’s contributions to the development of biology and his continued relevance are still subject to debate. The papers in this collection form three groupings. The first three papers, by Phillip R. Sloan, Philippe Huneman and Alix A. Cohen, discuss the importance of Kant’s philosophy for the ‘biological sciences’ of his time, respectively, natural history and the history of nature, comparative anatomy and morphology, and anthropology and the study of mankind as a natural species. The papers by Angela Breitenbach, Joan Steigerwald and Marcel Quarfood, focus on the Critique of judgment and the concepts of mechanical explanation and natural purpose that Kant articulated within it. The final group of papers by John Zammito and D. M. Walsh raises the question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary debates over function in biology. The first group of papers draws on recent scholarship in the history of science reexamining the significance of German contributions and of Kant in particular to the ‘biological sciences’ of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Phillip R. Sloan’s paper, ‘Kant on the history of nature: The ambiguous heritage of the critical philosophy for natural history’, argues against the view, defended especially by James Larson, that Kant gave preference to the ‘history’ of nature, and that his opinions were thus found untenable by working naturalists.6 He rather argues that Kant’s arguments moved over time in the opposite direction, and served to restrict speculative natural history within limits that led notable successors, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Georges Cuvier, to find in the critical philosophy grounds for rejecting a historical science of nature in favour of a descriptive program in natural history. Sloan concludes that those who found warrant for drawing from Kant a program of developmental transcendental morphology, and even a form of evolutionism, misread him. Philippe Huneman’s paper is also interested in how Kant was read by subsequent anatomists and naturalists. In ‘Naturalising purpose: From comparative anatomy to the ‘‘adventures of reason’’’ he argues that Kant’s concept of natural purpose was elaborated in both functional and formal senses by later figures. Like Sloan, he interprets Cuvier’s comparative anatomy as drawing on Kant, seeing in his emphasis on adaptive functions as regulative principles a faithfulness to Kant’s position. But Huneman is primarily interested in how a reinterpretation of Kant’s critique of speculative natural history and conception of scientific explanation proved productive for the developmental transcendental morphology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and 5 6
Guyer (2003b), p. 46. Larson (1994).
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J. Steigerwald / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Alix A. Cohen’s paper, ‘Kant on epigenesis, monogenesis and human nature: The biological premises of anthropology’, examines Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species. Positioning Kant within contemporary debates over organic generation and the human races, she demonstrates how Kant argued for the biological unity of the human species and for racial difference to be attributed to the possession of natural predispositions. Cohen argues that Kant’s account of man’s natural predispositions was not limited to the issue of races, but encompassed unexpected human features such as gender, temperaments and nations. Kant understood these predispositions, she concludes, to be the means for the realization of Nature’s overall purpose for the human species. While the first group of papers is concerned with several of Kant’s works up to and including the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’, the second group of papers focuses on the arguments of Kant’s third Critique. Angela Breitenbach contends in her paper, ‘Mechanical explanation of nature and its limits in Kant’s Critique of judgment’, that what, on first consideration, appears to be a thoroughly mechanistic conception of nature in Kant, turns out to be very limited. By considering Kant’s concept of mechanical laws as found in his early writings and his 1786 Metaphysical foundations of natural science in relation to both Hannah Ginsborg’s and Peter McLaughlin’s accounts of Kant’s concept of mechanism,7 she concludes that the mechanical laws in the third Critique should be understood as a particular species of empirical causal laws. She suggests that Kant’s conclusion in the third Critique, that our hope for an explanation of all of nature according to such mechanical laws is based on ‘regulative’ considerations about nature, may leave room for an alternative non-mechanistic conception of nature. Joan Steigerwald’s paper, ‘Kant’s concept of natural purpose and the reflecting power of judgment’, examines the concept of natural purpose as Kant articulated it in the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ in relation to and in distinction from the concepts of nature and the concept of purpose he had developed in his other critical writings. She argues that although Kant restricted his reflections on organisms to phenomena that can be demonstrated in experience, the concept of natural purpose is a product of the reflecting power of judgment, and concerns only the relation of things to our power of judgment. Yet it is necessary for the identification of organisms as organisms, as organized and self-organizing, and as subject to unique norms and circular or ‘reflective’ causal relations between parts and whole. Marcel Quarfood’s paper, ‘Kant on biological teleology: Towards a two-level interpretation’, offers a way to balance Kant’s claims in the Critique of judgment that teleology is indispensable for conceptualizing organized beings and yet that it is a regulative principle merely subjectively valid for our reflection on such beings. He proposes distinguishing between two roles that the concept of natural purpose serves. The concept has an identificatory function, enabling us to single out certain objects as natural purposes, and thus constituting the special science of biology; here Quarfood finds in Kant a partial endorsement of Aristotelian teleology and even a quasi-explanatory role for teleology. But on a meta level of philosophical reflection, the concept has a merely regulative role. Quarfood leaves his conclusions as only suggestive for the modern philosophy of biology, although in other places he takes up this question.8 The last group of papers is concerned directly with the relevance of Kantian teleology for the biological sciences today, 7 8
Ginsborg (2004, 2001), and McLaughlin (1990). Quarfood (2004).
J. Steigerwald / Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006) 621–626
625
and the authors offer quite different conclusions. One of the reasons Kant’s ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ has found new attention is a growing interest of both the biological sciences and the philosophy of biology in the phenomena of organic development, maintenance and reproduction. Kant’s analysis of organisms as natural purposes brought to attention precisely their unique capacities for self-organization. The question has thus arisen as to whether or not Kant’s analysis might be instructive for present debates regarding the goal-directedness of biological functions. In ‘Teleology then and now: The question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary controversies over function in biology’, John Zammito locates the motivation for a renewed interest in Kant in an impasse in current function talk, with little consensus over why teleological approaches are found only in biology, how they work and what risks they carry, and the extent to which they can be grounded in biological processes. But he warns that if naturalism is the aspiration of contemporary philosophy of biology and if biology wants to conceptualize self-organization as actual in the world, Kant offers little help. Zammito argues that epistemological ‘deflation’ was the decisive feature of Kant’s treatment of the biological sciences of his day. The third Critique essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of pre-scientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. Denis Walsh takes a different stance in his paper, ‘Organisms as natural purposes: The contemporary evolutionary perspective’. Walsh begins by emphasizing recent studies in the biological sciences that have strong resonances with Kant’s conception of organisms as natural purposes—their capacity for selforganization, their emergent properties, their adaptability and their capacity to regulate their component parts and processes. Then, in a reformulation of Kant’s ‘Antinomy’ between teleological and mechanical principles for our judgment of organisms, he attempts to carve out an explanatory role for organismal purposes that is consistent with the modern commitment to mechanism. Appealing to the apparatus of invariance explanation, he sketches a model for how purpose and mechanism can be regarded as reciprocal causes of organisms, and concludes that purposiveness has a genuine, ineliminable role in biological explanations. This special issue does not attempt to resolve debates regarding the interpretation of Kantian teleology and its relevance to the biological sciences of Kant’s time or today. What it does present is the current state of the debate. References Allison, H. (2000). Is the Critique of judgment ‘post-critical’? In S. Sedgwick (Ed.), The reception of Kant’s critical philosophy (pp. 78–92). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allison, H. E. (2003). Kant’s antinomy of teleological judgment. In P. Guyer (Ed.), Kant’s Critique of the power of judgment: Critical essays (pp. 219–230). New York: Rowman and Littlefield (First published 1991). Ginsborg, H. (2001). Kant on the understanding of organisms as purposes. In E. Watkins (Ed.), Kant and the sciences (pp. 231–253). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginsborg, H. (2004). Two kinds of mechanical inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42, 33–65. Guyer, P. (2001). Organism and the unity of science. In E. Watkins (Ed.), Kant and the sciences (pp. 259–281). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guyer, P. (2003a). Introduction. In idem (Ed.), Kant’s Critique of the power of judgment: Critical essays (pp. vii– xxi). New York: Rowan & Littlefield. Guyer, P. (2003b). Kant’s principle of reflecting judgment. In idem (Ed.), Kant’s Critique of the power of judgment: Critical essays (pp. 1–61). New York: Rowan & Littlefield. Guyer, P. (2005). Kant’s system of nature and freedom: Selected essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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