KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Introduction 59
tion on the questions of the First Antinomy than to the position
described by the antithesis. But it is also clear that he believed 1) that
the world is as large as space and as old as time; 2) that matter is
actually divided into infinity, 3) that the material world is causally
closed and completely determined, and the aggregate amount of
"force" in the universe is conserved; and 4) that the deus supramundanus
never intervenes into the material world "for the purposes
of nature" but only (e.g. in miracles) "for the purposes of
grace." In general Leibniz took up the position with respect to
science that although one knows for metaphysical reasons that
materialism is false, in science one must act as if the "evil doctrine"
of the materialists were true. 8 Even though the fit of the antitheses of
the First and Fourth Antinomies to Leibniz's philosophy is not
without its problems, in the Second and Third Antinomies, which
are of greatest interest to us here, there is a very good match.
The form and the terminology in which the "Newtonian"
theses and "Leibnizian" antitheses appear are of course Kantian;
and they are not presented as historically contingent positions, but
rather their content is supposed to be derived imminently from
within the Kantian system. But Kant also says that it was the antinomies
more than any other problem that compelled him to subject
reason to a thorough-going critique in the first place. 9 We cannot
separate history and systematics here. Kant takes up foundational
problems of modern natural science and tries to explain the relative
justification of each of the sides of the debate as well as the fundamental
mistake common to both. He also claims to be able to derive
the conflict and its resolution from his system of faculties of knowledge,
categories, and forms of intuition. Kant's philosophy must be
evaluated according to its ability to grasp conceptually the problems
that really existed and to bring them closer to a solution. Had Kant
simply derived some "nice" problems and their solutions from some
quantities is empirically meaningless since it would be compatible with any
empirical (and thus finite) loss or gain of the entity allegedly conserved.
8 Leibniz, 5th letter to Clarke; cf. Al Azm, Origins, pp. 116-121; Freudenthal,
Atom, chap. 2 and 3. In his "Answer to Bayle," (GP IV,559; PPL, 557) Leibniz
writes, "In a word, so far as the details of the phenomena are concerned, everything
takes place as if the evil doctrine of those who believe, with Epicurus and
Hobbes, that the soul is material were true, or as if man himself were only a body
or an automaton."
9 Prolegomena, §50; Ak 4,338; W 3,209-10.