KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

72 Kant's Logic
predicate under consideration) is a transcendental affirmation or
"reality." 29
Summing up, we may characterize the infinite judgment as
follows: A judgment which is affirmative in its logical form is to be
called infinite, if its predicate is negative in form (independently of
its transcendental content).
Although we may perhaps understand Kant's hesitancy simply
to classify such judgments as affirmative, the question still
arises as to why he did not simply treat them as negative judgments
as did Meier and Lambert. In order to see why Kant could believe
that the affirmation of a negative predicate was something else than
the negation of an affirmative predicate, it will perhaps be useful to
examine Lambert's argument for equating both kinds of judgment.
Lambert introduces infinite terms (termini infiniti) in order to
divide a genus neatly into two species: Genus A can be divided into
an arbitrary species B and its terminus infinitus non-B. Then he
maintains that "A is B" is an affirmative judgment and "A is
non-B" is a negative judgment, and that the two stand in the relation
of contradiction to one another. Lambert presupposes that the
genus A belongs to the concept of the subject to which the species are
ascribed as predicates, e.g., animate things (A) are either mortal (B)
or non-mortal (non-B). 30 However, if one, instead, adopts Kant's
procedure and begins with the two "contradictory" species B and
non-B, ascribing them in different judgments at the same time to
the same subject C: "C is B and C is non-B," the two judgments
stand in the relation of contradiction to one another only if one can
presuppose that "C is A" is analytically true; otherwise the two
29 Unfortunately, Kant always illustrates the infinite judgment on the example
of the immortality of the soul, and immortality is also an instance of what traditional
philosophy called a "reality" or positive predicate, which can or must be
attributed e.g. to the ens realissimum (God). Immortality, independent of its linguistic
form as "non-mortal" or "eternally living," is in Kant's terminology a
transcendental affirmation. The presence of the logical word "non" in the
predicate (making it a "negative predicate") does not make it a transcendental
negation. The (logical) form of the predicate is negative, its (transcendental)
content is positive. Kant uses the same example in different contexts to illustrate
both logical and transcendental negation. Cf. B602.
30 Lambert, Organon, §89, p. 55; cf. Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory:
"Suppose you draw a closed figure on a piece of paper and then someone indicates
a point on the ceiling and says: 'Does this point lie inside or outside the
boundaries of the figure?'... Things lying in a different plane were not excluded
from it, but neither were they included in it." (p. 6)