KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Introduction 3
comprehending an organic whole as an additive system of independent
parts (pp. 409f). In the "Critique of Teleological Judgment"
Kant offers a solution that traces both problems back to the same
structural peculiarity of mechanistic explanation. Kant is concerned
not with the question of whether mechanism or vitalism
(which arose in his lifetime) is right in biology but rather with the
question of whether reductionism (which he considers to be the only
scientific method) when applied to the organism displays a structural
flaw that again and again necessitates teleological additions.
He sees in the conflict between mechanism and anti-mechanism the
same kind of antithetical opposition that he had analyzed in the
'Antinomies' chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, in which each
side looks strong only as long as it is attacking the other.
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Any new interpretation of Kant's philosophy inevitably takes
up a position vis à vis the manifold approaches and traditions of
interpretation. The discussion of these various approaches and the
justification of my own approach do not belong in the introduction,
but I would like at the start at least to indicate which traditions I
have found helpful. As for my own approach, it can only be justified
in practice: by providing an interpretation of the text that is historically
and philologically sound and philosophically convincing. My
claim at least is to have provided such an interpretation of the
"Critique of Teleological Judgment" for the first time.
In view of the announced intention to read Kant's critique of
teleology as philosophy of biology, it will come as no surprise that the
tradition of Kant interpretation to which I am closest is one that sees
Kant primarily as the philosopher of modern science. This kind of
interpretation is most closely associated with the German Neo-
Kantians, in particular, Erich Adickes and Ernst Cassirer; and this
is the interpretation that I consider to be right enough to be worth
criticizing in detail.
This book represents an attempt to learn something from
Kant about the structure of biological explanation. The "Critique of
Teleological Judgment," which is the second part of the Critique of
Judgment and could perhaps best be seen as a fourth 'Critique', is