KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

100 Antinomy of Division
justification of science lies in the fact that it nowhere arbitrarily
interrupts the process at allegedly ultimate elements. 49
Physical and Metaphysical Monads
Kant's remarks in the proofs and observations to the second
antinomy might possibly occasion some confusion. For instance, the
arguments for the antithesis repeatedly call the proponents of the
thesis (whom I have put in the camp of Newtonian atomism)
"monadists"; and the thesis, too, calls itself a "monadology." But
there are in fact important differences between the monadology of
Leibnizian metaphysics, the dynamical theory of matter proposed by
Leibniz in his physics, and the physical monadology once adhered
to, for instance, by the young Newtonian, Immanuel Kant. The
elder Kant wrote: 50
The reason for this confusion lies in a badly understood monadology,
which does not at all belong to the explanation of natural phenomena, but is
rather an, in itself, correct Platonic conception of the world worked out by
Leibniz, in so far as (considered not as the object of the senses but as a
thing in itself) it is merely an object of the understanding, which nonetheless
still underlies the phenomena of the senses.
Strictly speaking the Leibnizian monadology has nothing at
all to do with the Second Antinomy, which deals with cosmology and
the concept of matter. In the observation to the thesis, in the only
passage where Leibniz is explicitly mentioned, Kant stresses precisely
the difference between the simple parts of matter asserted by
the thesis and the simple substances of Leibnizian metaphysics:
The word monas, in the strict sense in which it is employed by Leibniz,
should refer only to the simple which is immediately given as simple substance
(e.g. in self-consciousness), and not to an element of the composite.
This latter is better entitled atomus. (B468-70)
Here reference is made to the specifically Leibnizian use of the term
"monas," and this use is distinguished from a different usage that
could just as well be called "transcendental atomistic" (B469). Kant
himself had once, in the 1750's and 1760's, supported this second
kind of theory, which he called "physical monadology."
49 Cf. Freudenthal, Atom, chap. 3.
50 Metaphysical Foundations, Ak 4,507; W 5,61-2.