Angela Breitenbach

TWO VIEWS ON NATURE : A SOLUTION TO KANT'S ANTINOMY OF MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY

In the Analytic of the Critique of Teleological Judgement, Kant introduces the principle of objective purposiveness of nature. Certain objects of nature, the organisms, must be thought of in teleological terms. They cannot but be considered as natural purposes. In the light of the conception of nature brought forward in the first parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, this comes as a bit of a surprise; for how can a teleological conception of nature be reconciled with the understanding of nature as completely causally determined? Kant deals with this question in the Dialectic of the third Critique. He presents, and claims to solve, an antinomy between a principle of mechanism on the one hand and a principle of teleology on the other. The antinomy has been the object of much debate and rather differing interpretations. In this paper, I shall consider it again. An interpretation of Kant’s antinomy of judgement is made difficult by the fact that, in his paragraph on the ‘[r]epresentation of this antinomy’ (KU, AA V: 386), Kant in fact presents two different antinomies – one between two regulative maxims concerning the way we consider the world, and one between two constitutive propositions about the world itself (Section 1). In order to understand Kant’s view concerning the status and the compatibility of mechanistic and teleological judgements of nature, we therefore need to ask why, according to Kant, we can make no constitutive but only regulative judgements about the apparent purposiveness in nature; and we need to understand in what sense the conflict between the regulative maxims, but not that between the constitutive principles, can be resolved. I shall try to develop answers to these questions (Sections 3 and 4) by taking a closer look at how the conflict between principles of mechanism and teleology arises for Kant at all (Section 2).

Laws in Biology and the Unity of Nature

Kant’s philosophy of science is famous for putting the lawful unity of nature centerstage. Kant argues that all natural phenomena are law-governed. Any appearance of lawlessness is only the result of our ignorance, and this is true whether we consider the animate or inanimate world. Kant puts this point unambiguously at the start of the Jäsche Logic: Everything in nature, both in the lifeless and in the living world, takes place according to rules, although we are not always acquainted with these rules. – Water falls according to laws of gravity, and in the case of animals locomotion also takes place according to rules. The fish in the water, the bird in the air, move according to rules. The whole of nature in general is really nothing but a connection of appearances according to rules; and there is no absence of rules anywhere. If we believe we have found such a thing, then in this case we can only say that we are not acquainted with the rules. (JL 9:11) Kant here uses “rules” in the place of “laws,” but his central claim is clear.1 There is no exception to the law-governed character of natural phenomena. Kant develops this

Pluralism and the Unity of Science

Angela Breitenbach gratefully acknowledges the support of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.

Umweltethik nach Kant

Kant is often characterised as the chief exponent of an anthropocentric ethics that can ascribe to nature only a purely instrumental value. By contrast, this paper argues that Kants teleological conception of nature provides the basis for a promising account of environmental ethics. According to this account we can attribute to nature a value that is independent of its usefulness to human beings without making this value independent from the judgment of the rational valuer.