Teleology Then and Now: The Question of Kant's Relevance for Contemporary Controversies over Function in Biology (2006)
Zammito, John H. (Author)
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 37
Pages: 748--770
Publication date: 2006
Language: English
Edition Details: Part of special issue: “Kantian Teleology and the Biological Sciences”
`Naturalism' is the aspiration of contemporary philosophy of biology, and Kant simply cannot be refashioned into a naturalist. Instead, epistemological `deflation' was the decisive feature of Kant's treatment of the `biomedical' science in his day, so it is not surprising that this might attract some philosophers of science to him today. A certain sense of impasse in the contemporary `function talk' seems to motivate renewed interest in Kant. Kant---drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors---provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that it was impossible to explain it. Its `inscrutability' was intrinsic. The third Critique essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of pre-scientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity, to have its `Newton of the blade of grass'. By contrast, for Locke, and a fortiori for Buffon and his followers, `intrinsic purposiveness' was a fact of the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant's distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. If biology must conceptualize self-organization as actual in the world, Kant's regulative/constitutive distinction is pointless in practice and the (naturalist) philosophy of biology has urgent work to undertake for which Kant turns out not to be very helpful.
...MoreArticle Steigerwald, Joan (2006) Introduction. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (p. 621).
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