KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

54 Antinomies of Reason
tent is particularly important for an understanding of the Critique
of Judgment will be examined in some detail: the Second Antinomy,
which deals with the relation of part and whole, and the Third
Antinomy dealing with causality and freedom. The latter must be
examined primarily because the traditional interpretation, dominant
since Hegel, has considered the antinomy of judgment presented
in the Dialectic of teleological judgment to be merely a repetition
of the Third Antinomy.
Kant himself almost always explicates the structure of the
antinomies on the example of the First Antinomy and compares or
contrasts the others with this. Thus, in order to be able to cite Kant's
own words, I shall have to concentrate on the First Antinomy — I
shall also at least as a sort of digression deal with its content. This
circumstance will on occasion inevitably lead to some somewhat
baroque arguments, for which I would like to apologize in advance.
Finally, a discussion of the highly controversial antinomies does not
occur in a vacuum; there are external constraints that result from
traditions of interpretation and from contemporary discussions of
Kant; there are also distortions that result from the fact that no one
can quite survey the entire literature. I can only take up those problems
which either appear to be substantially interesting from my
own necessarily subjective point of view or else can quantitatively
simply not be overlooked and thus for pragmatic reasons cannot be
ignored, whether or not they are particularly fruitful. For instance,
in the next chapter I shall reject the widespread view that the antinomy
of judgment has anything in common with the Third
Antinomy other than its logical form, as has been asserted by the
dominant interpretations. However, to make an argument against
any special connection, I must of course analyze the Third Antinomy
in some detail.
The "Antinomy of Pure Reason" constitutes the second of the
three formally equal chapters of the second book of the Transcendental
Dialectic. Dialectic is the "specious art" of using — or rather
misusing — logic as an instrument for the acquisition of knowledge
with empirical content. In this sense it is merely a "logic of illusion,"
"a sophistical art of giving to ignorance, and indeed to intentional
sophistries, the appearance of truth" (B86). Within Kant's system
dialectic means the "critique of dialectical illusion" (B86) and is
considered to belong to logic. Kant uses the term "dialectic" in both
senses: as illusion or sophistry and as critique of logical illusion.