KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Heuristic but Necessary Principles 151
philosophical reason for this part of the text, and thus the psychological
explanation offered by Adickes and others would at least be
plausible. However, this one sentence of Kant's is a rather flimsy
basis for drawing such far-going conclusions, especially since one
cannot even take Kant literally when drawing them. The passage
does not contain a solution but at best merely the assertion that there
is nothing to solve, that is, it (perhaps) expresses the mere opinion of
Kant's that the contradiction is gone. And if Kant really meant to
say this, why did he call the section "Preliminary to the solution to
the above antinomy"? Thus, if we want to take the text seriously in
philosophical terms and to continue to pursue the problems of
Kant's analysis of biological explanation, we have no choice but to
reject the previous approaches to its interpretation.
3.4 Heuristic but Necessary Principles
The task now is to develop an alternative to the interpretations
of the antinomy of judgment previously available that a least keeps
open the option of pursuing some of the philosophical questions
posed by the Analytic and of bringing them closer to a solution. In
the Analytic the organism was essentially determined not as something
that has certain properties but as something whose explanation
causes us certain difficulties. If the Dialectic is to accomplish
anything, it must explain why we have such difficulties. In this section
I shall take up three questions that must be clarified before the
resolution of the antinomy can be presented: 1) What does Kant
mean by mechanism or mechanistic explanation? 2) What does the
purported necessity of the two maxims (R1 and R2) consist in? and 3)
If, as I maintain, the two constitutive principles (C1 and C2) do not
make up an antinomy of judgment, why were they introduced in the
first place? I shall try to answer one of these three questions in each
of the following three subsections.