KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

176 Resolution of the Antinomy
method. A good illustration of this way of thinking is provided by
Robert Boyle: 29
And thus in this great automaton, the world (as in a watch or clock) the
materials it consists of being left to themselves, could never at first convene
into so curious an engine: and yet when the skilful artist has once made and
set it going, the phenomena it exhibits are to be accounted for by the number,
bigness, proportion, shape, motion (or endeavour) rest, coaptation, and
other mechanical affections of the spring, wheels, pillars, and other parts it is
made up of: and those effects of such a watch that cannot this way be
explicated must, for aught I know, be confessed not to be sufficiently understood.
It is the reductionism of this method that Kant wants to make binding
as a peculiarity of our understanding for all knowledge.
The method of science and its presuppositions are not considered
to be constitutive of nature but to be necessary regulative principles
for an understanding like ours. Kant does not say that science
as it in fact arose historically can only explain things in a mechanistic
manner and that we therefore ought to judge thing to be possible
according to mechanical laws; rather he maintains that our
understanding cannot do otherwise. It is not that our conceptual
instruments force us to reduce a whole to its parts (because we in
fact have no other such instruments), rather, he says, our understanding
is so constituted that we have no other way of explaining
things in principle. The method of classical modern physics is
equated with scientific explanation in general and the latter is
equated with knowledge as such. This is anchored in the "constitution"
of our understanding, so that this way of thinking seems not to
be one that arose in the course of history but to be one that is systematically
simply given. On the textual basis available I cannot of
course prove that Kant is indeed referring in §77 to the specific use
of the analytic-synthetic method in modern science, although there
is much to indicate this. It is however not necessary to prove this
since the point was merely to show that, even in the case of this
second peculiarity of our understanding, Kant's occasionally
psychologizing manner of expression can be given a consistent
epistemological sense. Thus, a psychological interpretation with all
its problems is by no means necessitated by the text.
29 Boyle, "Forms and Qualities," p. 48-49 (emphasis PM).