KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Interpretations of the Antinomy 137
causes "in terms of a concept of reason (the concept of purposes)"
(B289; CJ, 251). 4
3.3 Interpretations of the Antinomy
Kant's presentation of the antinomy of judgment and especially
some of his occasional remarks about the antinomy have
given rise to a number of insecurities in interpretation in as much
as Kant seems here to be groping forward at the outer limits of his
conceptual scheme. He seems to be trying to determine the bounds of
the mechanistic view of the world from the inside. In order to help
clarify the issues and problems involved in this antinomy, I shall
here introduce some of the most important approaches to interpreting
the text: all of them either interpret the antinomy as
merely an artificial sophistry or else attribute opinions to Kant that
are incompatible with central positions of the Critique of Pure
Reason. However, the point of surveying this literature is not to
show that there are passages in Kant's works which seem to contradict
(in the context I provide) the cited interpretations. On the
contrary, the point is to determine whether the basic approach on
which these interpretations are grounded is acceptable in terms of
method and plausible in terms of content.
Three Approaches
(1) Most commentators have interpreted the opposition
between the two constitutive principles (C1 and C2) as the apparent
contradiction in which the antinomy is said to consist. Instead of
locating the antinomy between the two regulative principles, they
see in these two principles the resolution of the antinomy. Such
influential Kant scholars as Adickes, Stadler, Körner, Ewing, and
Ernst Cassirer assert that the differentiation between regulative and
constitutive principles provides the solution to the antinomy of
4 Cf. above 1.4, pp. 47f.