KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

60 Antinomies of Reason
categories or other, problems which had no relation to the real problems
posed by natural science, then he would rightly be gathering
dust on the shelves of intellectual history.
It cannot of course seriously be maintained that Kant has
really "derived" the conflict of Rationalism and Empiricism from
within his system. Where he does more of less succeed is in ordering
and interpreting some really given problems and assigning
them places in his system, although there are some difficulties
here. We shall, for instance, see that the second part of the First
Antinomy (the size of the world in space) cannot be derived at all
from Kant's systematics without contradicting another presupposition
of his; this presupposition in turn is needed in order to formulate
the Second Antinomy on the divisibility of matter. Furthermore,
in the Second Antinomy Kant's systematics should just as well
demand the question of the divisibility of an event in time as it does
the divisibility of a body in space — but on this question, as far as I
know, no major foundational conflict took place in 18th century
science. Thus the attempt to make the systematic or "conceptual"
origin of the antinomies in Kant's system solely responsible for the
content of the theses and antitheses already fails in the derivation of
the problems. It would seem to me also to be a rather peculiar way to
save Kant's philosophical honor if we were to try to show that the
philosophical problems which his system poses and, for better or
worse, solves are only accidentally in accord with those which were
highly controversial and for important reasons seriously debated in
his time, or that the presentation of the former were adapted to the
latter for purely external historical reasons. 10
However, I should emphasize that I have no intention of
trying to prove with philological means that Kant was "influenced"
by the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, or that he is thinking of
Newton and Leibniz only (and no one else — for instance the young
Kant himself). The point is that the debate between Newton and
Leibniz represents not merely a quarrel between two philosophers
but also presents a systematic discussion of the foundations and
philosophical presuppositions of natural science in principle form.
If it is true that both the conflict between Leibniz and Newton and
the antinomies chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason deal with the
same substantial problems, then a consideration of the Leibniz-
10 Cf. Wike, Kant's Antinomies, chap. 2 for the other side.