KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

62 Antinomies of Reason
"only conditionally false." 12 What Kant states explicitly for the Third
Antinomy clearly holds implicitly for the others. I shall explain this
briefly.
The apagogical form of proof used in the antinomies chapter
has, along with important technical functions that will be discussed
below, the function of giving the thesis position some initial plausibility
without compelling Kant to provide any direct justification —
which he would certainly have found very difficult. As long as the
thesis can be presented as the only alternative to the antithesis, it
can be made as strong as the antithesis is made weak. The refutation
of the antitheses in the four antinomies demands an intricate
and difficult argumentation that sometimes seems to presuppose at
least some of the results of the critique of reason that the refutations
themselves were supposed to support. The refutation of the theses,
on the other hand, is comparatively easy. For example, Kant's refutation
of the thesis of the First Antinomy (discussed in detail below),
which postulated an empty time before the world, consists in declaring
the notion to be unintelligible. The thesis of the Second
Antinomy, physical atomism, is said to be self-contradictory; in
other writings Kant even uses the proposition, "All bodies are divisible,"
as the paradigm of an analytic statement and the assertion
that an extended body is indivisible as an example of a logical
contradiction. 13 The thesis of the Third Antinomy, which as we
shall see in Section 2.5 denies that the material world is causally
closed, is incompatible with natural science as we know it, since it
denies the principle of conservation in a material system, allowing
non-material "active principles" to act in the world and thus
implying that some physical events have non-physical causes.
According to Kant, however, not even God himself could contravene
the conservation laws, for this would be absurd. 14
12 Critique of Practical Reason, A206
13 Cf. Prolegomena, §2; "Über eine Entdeckung," (Ak 8,229; W 3,347). In the
"Progress of Metaphysics" Kant asserts: "For instance, the statement: 'every
body is divisible' does in fact have a ground, and a ground in itself, i.e. it can be
understood as inferring the predicate out of the concept of the subject according to
the law of non-contradiction and thus according to the principle of analytic
judgments." (Ak 20,278; W 3,611)
14 If the vector sum of all 'forces' (mv) is not conserved and does not remain
equal to zero, then the position of the center of mass of the material world changes;
given the dynamic equivalence of a system and its center of mass, this implies a
motion of the universe in absolute space. In one of the so-called "Kiesewetter