KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

2 Introduction
fact the rejection of mechanism and reductionism not any particular
positive doctrine. The question of the special status of the
organism was already taken up in the great mechanistic systems of
the 17th century and is still discussed under the heading of "reductionism"
or "emergence" in general textbooks of the philosophy of
science. Historically, it is mechanism that has always prevailed as
a scientific approach; or in other words, it is anti-mechanism that
has had to regroup and renew itself every generation: but it has
always done so.
Mechanism has always won out in biology because it is able to
generate a clear and definite research program. In fact mechanism
is nothing else but the metaphysical hypostasis of an analytical
method which is unquestionably part of the repertoire of every biologist
– including the anti-mechanists. This method, reduction or
analysis, prescribes that phenomena are to be traced back to the
properties and interactions of the parts of the system. If subsequently
the original phenomenon can be produced experimentally to
a sufficient degree of approximation, then it has successfully been
explained. The opponents of mechanism among natural scientists
seldom doubt that a successful reduction is a sufficient explanation
but rather only that such a reduction is possible in a particular case
or kind of case. From mechanism a concrete research program
emerges, namely precisely the program that mechanism projects
onto the structure of being. However, from the negation of this
projection there emerges no substantially different program of
research; thus the neo-vitalists and holists of this century are
scarcely to be distinguished from their opponents in their experimental
technique. The differences lie in the goals pursued and
inferences drawn, not in the means applied.
Philosophers of various schools have participated with or
without invitation in this conflict and have taken one side or the
other, supporting them with philosophical arguments. They have
attacked the inability of mechanism to understand the organism or
condemned the sterility of vitalism. Some few have analyzed the
quarrel itself; among these Kant stands out.
In one of the standard textbooks on philosophy of science
Ernst Nagel's The Structure of Science, which takes the side of
reductionism, two problem complexes are taken up, which are
thought to cause some difficulties for reductionism: the prima facie
purposiveness of life processes and the apparent impossibility of