KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Analytic of Teleological Judgment 35
able to assert the systematic unity of nature, "as if all such connection
had its source in one single all-embracing being, as the
supreme and all-sufficient cause" (B714). We assume a unity of the
world system that is purposive to our cognitive activities in order to
have guidelines for the search for causal explanations. The deistic
God becomes a "transcendental presupposition" of the "logical" use
of the idea of the unity of nature. However, it should once again be
emphasized, that in the Critique of Pure Reason itself these problems
are dealt with in an appendix; the primary point of view is not
the needs of empirical research but the possible employment of the
deistic concept of God. God has for Kant no objective reality, and the
concept has no empirical meaning; but it can at least still function
as the transcendental presupposition of a sensible methodological
principle for empirical science.
The regulative principles as presented in the Critique of Pure
Reason are ideas of reason used heuristically by the understanding.
The possible use of regulative principles by the faculty of judgment,
on the other hand, remains unexplicated. Judgment, as it is introduced
in the Critique of Pure Reason, is the ability to subsume the
particular under the general:
If understanding in general is to be viewed as the faculty of rules, judgment
will be the faculty of subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing
whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datae
legis). (B171; emphasis PM)
It is implicitly presupposed that the rule is given by the understanding
and that judgment has only to subsume the given particulars or
to seek the appropriate and subsumable particulars. In the Critique
of Judgment the concept of judgment is further specified: judgment
is still the "ability to think the particular as contained under the
universal" (Bxxv; CJ, 18); but two kinds of judgment are now distiguished.
1) Determinate judgment corresponds to the faculty of
judgment introduced in the Critique of Pure Reason, where the general
rule was given, the only difference being that it is now
conceived as merely one species of the genus judgment and not as
the genus itself. 2) Reflective judgment, on the other hand, is the
ability to subsume a given particular under a rule that has yet to be
found. This species of judgment possesses a certain amount of
autonomy in as much as it can give itself its own maxims for the
best procedure in seeking the general rule. Such a maxim or rule
for seeking the rule is called a regulative principle for reflective