John H. Zammito

‘This inscrutable principle of an original organization’: epigenesis and ‘looseness of fit’ in Kant’s philosophy of science

Abstract Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique (B167), posed crucial questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception.

What's ‘new’ in the sociology of knowledge?

Publisher Summary In the field of the sociology of knowledge, one does not lack for announcements of novelty. The general drift of such novelties appears to be “from knowledge to culture.” There has also been a recent impulse to pluralize the concept—hence, “knowledges.” Sociology of knowledge seems riddled to the core with problems of epistemology, methodology, and politics that open out onto the whole morass of “postmodern social theory” and its so-called “social construction of reality.” How can one claim knowledge of knowledge without raising all the age-old quandaries of epistemology? It helps not a whit to pretend that such issues do not matter and yet to profess to “know” determinately that the “subject” is constituted by language or culture or anything else. There is a sort of performative self-contradiction that should embarrass even a postmodernist.

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered

Reconstructions of Kant are prominent in the contemporary debate over naturalism. Given that this naturalism rejects a priori principles, Kants anti‐naturalism can best be discerned in the “critical turn” as a response to David Hume. Hume did not awaken Kant to criticize but to defend rational metaphysics. But when Kant went transcendental did he not, in fact, go transcendent? The controversy in the 1990s over John McDowells Mind and World explored just this suspicion: the questions of the normative force of reason and of the ontological “space of reasons” vis‐à‐vis the world. “Bald naturalism” appears to “extrude” rationality both ontologically and epistemologically from the natural world. Kant sought to discriminate a transcendental middle ground, safe from either extrusion. But was Kants notion of the autonomy and spontaneity of reason as metaphysically innocent as McDowells critics would have it? Situating Hume and naturalism in the eighteenth‐century German context can help us understand the “critical turn” more accurately. While Hume recognized procedural proprieties for reflection, he did not believe in their a priori necessity. Initially, Kant shared that view. What assimilating Leibniz and Locke in the late 1760s garnered for Kant—the simultaneous spontaneity and self‐transparency of reason—seemed to provide a means for overcoming Humes skepticism and establishing a new foundation for metaphysics. Accordingly, all of the efforts of modern Kantianism notwithstanding, there is more than a whiff of the transcendent in Kants transcendentalism.

Ankersmit's postmodernist historiography : The hyperbole of opacity

Ankersmits articulation of a postmodern theory of history takes seriously both the strengths of traditional historicism and the right of historians to decide what makes sense for disciplinary practice. That makes him an exemplary interlocutor. Ankersmit proposes a theory of historical “representation” which radicalizes the narrative approach to historiography along the lines of poststructuralist textualism. Against this postmodernism but invoking some of his own arguments, I defend the traditional historicist position. I formulate criticisms of the theory of reference entailed in his notion of “narrative substance,” of his master analogy of historiography with modern painting, and finally of his characterization of historical hermeneutics. In each case I find him guilty of the hyperbole which he himself cautions against. While it is true that historical narratives cannot be taken to be transparent, in taking them to be opaque Ankersmit puts himself in an untenable position. Finally, Ankersmit seeks to buttress his theoretical case by an interpretation of the new cultural historical texts of authors like Davis and Ginzburg. While this is a concreteness heartily to be welcomed in philosophers of history, I cannot find his construction of this new schools work plausible.

Kant’s Notion of Intrinsic Purposiveness in the Critique of Judgment

Zuckert’s Kant on Beauty and Biology (2007) marks an important moment in the re assessment of Kant’s conception of organismic purposiveness. This essay first offers a grasp of Zuckert’s accomplishment, then tries to draw from it—against the grain of her reading and, indeed, against Kant’s own view—support for a post Kantian recognition of (objec tive) intrinsic purposiveness in organisms as a feature of the natural world, not just our cognitive limitations. The whole language of purposiveness with reference to biology, Zuckert correctly observes, is an act of “domestication” to the critical system, at the ex pense of any objectivity in the discernment of organisms in nature. But it is Kant’s system of science that needs to be “domesticated” to the actuality of nature: this is a “constraint” that Zuckert insists the world must, even for Kant, exercise upon our logical construals. Kant continues to attract attention in current philosophy of biology, but from the vantage of contemporary naturalism he appears more an impediment than a facilitator in establishing biology as a special but le gitimate science of nature. Rejecting Kant’s “regulative” view of in trinsic or objective purposiveness seems essential if we are to articulate a meaningful naturalist philosophy of biology. Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (Zuckert, 2007) marks an important moment in the reassessment of his conception of organismic purposiveness. This essay first offers a grasp of Zuckert’s accomplish ment, then tries to draw from it support for a post Kantian recognition of intrinsic purposiveness in organisms. Zuckert’s sustained and persua sive account of the principle of purposiveness without a purpose raises against the grain of her reading and, indeed, against Kant’s own view 1 On Kant and current philosophy of biology, see Steigerwald (ed. 2006) and Huneman (ed. 2007). the case for (objective) intrinsic purposiveness as a feature of the natural world, not just our cognitive limitations. 1. Zuckert’s Charitable Reconstruction of Kant’s Critique of Judgment The Critique of Judgment (CJ), taken in itself, is a work of almost bewil dering diversity and complexity. If one then adds in the ambition Kant attached to this work to “complete” his critical system, finding unity in the endeavor is daunting. Divergent agendas clearly motivate the work. First, Kant offered a new, transcendental conception of the aesthetic. But he believed his “discovery” in aesthetics provided a decisive en hancement to his systemic conceptualization of the human mind and cognition. This “cognitive turn” finds its textual heart in the two intro ductions to the third Critique and in the new concept of “reflective judging.” The connection between these two interests in Kant forms the heart of Zuckert’s interpretation. But that leaves, still, at least three important domains of concern in the text. First, there is the question of fine art and genius, that is, the creation of things of beauty. Zuckert explicitly sets this aside as peripheral to her pursuit (18), though it could provide additional support for some of her key conclusions. Next, there is the question of the “transition from nature to morality,” which some of us consider to be the most im portant motivation in the work. It finds articulation in three textual components of the work: the treatment of the sublime, the discussion of “aesthetic ideas” and the “supersensible substrate,” and, finally, most importantly, the discussion of moral teleology. Zuckert acknowl edges this motivation (18; 370 ff), but she makes it quite clear that it is the transcendental problem of consciousness, not the problem of actu alizing the moral law in a determinate phenomenal world, that she takes as most essential. Finally, there is the specific problem of biology, or Kant’s “Critique of Teleological Judgment” (CTJ). Zuckert tells us that Kant himself termed this a mere “appendix” to his Critique (20). She proposes to as sign it prominence, but hardly for its own sake. It is rather central to her 2 Kant first announced this breakthrough in a letter to Karl Reinhold, Dec. 28– 31, 1787 (AA 10:513–15), then elaborated the idea in the Preface to the CJ. 3 Zammito (1992). John Zammito 224

Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and "Practicing Historians"

* The following works form the basis of this review article: H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989); Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann, and Paul Hamilton, Rethinking Historicism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literary Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Penelope Corfield, ed., Language, History, and Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Lionel Gossman, Towards a Rational Historiography, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 79, pt. 3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989); Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990); Leonard Krieger, Times Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). I wish to thank Stephen Crowell, Harvey Yunis, Alan Grob, Richard Wolin, Thomas Haskell, Anthony Sirignano, and Dwight Raulston for their helpful advice on this article, though of course all the errors that remain are my own.

Médecin‐philosoph: Persona for Radical Enlightenment

International Society for Intellectual History RIHR_A_332100.sgm 10.1080/17496970802319334 llectual History Review 749-6977 (print)/1749-6985 (online) Original Article 2 08 8 30 0002008 JohnZ mmito zammito@rice.edu In 1772 a book appeared in Germany which officially inaugurated an intellectual pursuit that had been emerging over the course of the century and which would become the ‘royal science’ of the rest of the century in Germany, Ernst Platner’s Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise.1 I want to consider how that combination of Ärzte (physicians) and Weltweise (philosophers) came to be in Platner’s title by exploring a peculiar mode of philosophical self-presentation that became crucial in Europe around the middle of the eighteenth century, the philosophical physician or ‘médecin-philosoph’. I begin my narrative with a curious mistake in ascription by the eminent German theologian from Halle, Sigmund Baumgarten, in 1745, when the latter identified the author of the anonymously published Natural History of the Soul as ‘the physician [Denis] Diderot’.2 Baumgarten was wrong, of course, on two counts: the book was not by Diderot (but by Julien Offray de La Mettrie), and Diderot was no physician. Yet the mistake was thoroughly comprehensible, because the book sounded like Diderot, and Diderot sounded like a physician. He was shortly to have translated into French one of the most imposing tomes of English medicine with the aplomb that only a medical doctor should have possessed.3 More decisively, for my purposes, Diderot believed that medicine offered a distinctly privileged entrée into the key philosophical issues of his day;4 that is, philosophy could best conduct its affairs under the rubric, or in the (dis)guise of medicine. Masks and meanings prove equally apropos. Diderot and La Mettrie will be at the centre of my tale, which will take me from Paris to the Netherlands to return, at last, to Germany and the context behind Platner’s text. Panagiotis Kondylis has made the important argument that the Enlightenment undertook a ‘rehabilitation of sensibility’ not simply in the sense of taking sensual experience seriously in cognition but in recognizing and attaching positive value to human embodiment, or the ‘animal nature’ of man.5 Rejecting what it envisioned as ‘Cartesian’ dualism, the eighteenth-century science of man sought to ‘rehabilitate corporeality’ from negative associations which actually had their sources long before Descartes in Platonism and Christianity.6 The new physiological psychologists believed that even ‘the most impalpable and spiritual functions of man were to reveal themselves empirically, to exhibit

The “Last Dogma” of Positivism: Historicist Naturalism and the Fact/Value Dichotomy*

Abstract Has the emergence of post-positivism in philosophy of science changed the terms of the “is/ought” dichotomy? If it has demonstrated convincingly that there are no “facts” apart from the theoretical frames and evaluative standards constructing them, can such a cordon sanitaire really be upheld between “facts” and values? The point I wish to stress is that philosophy of science has had a central role in constituting and imposing the fact/value dichotomy and a revolution in the philosophy of science should not leave the dichotomy unaffected. The connection between post-positivism and naturalism will be my guiding thread in considering this “last dogma of positivism.” First this essay will specify the sense of naturalism that it will take to be essential to the post-positivist philosophy of science: the deflation of the notion of the “purity” of scientific knowledge. Then it will turn to the question of the implications that follow for the “autonomy” of ethics, including the danger posed by a new form of scientistic reductionism.

A Problem of our own Making: Roth on Historical Explanation

Roth claims that in constituting the sorts of events they want to connect, historians conceive matters that may not correlate with any inventory of elements eligible for admission by natural science. Given “the liabilities incurred by the very questions historians choose to ask,” the question of historical explanation is a problem of our own making. “Previous challenges to the epistemic legitimacy of historical explanations lose their point,” for no one can ask what kind of science or what kind of explanation history is, since it is none! This is, unsurprisingly, an unacceptable outcome for me. A case can be made for intersubjective assertability of a historical interpretation and the contestation of it – however tentatively, fallibly, partially – without a complete collapse into the aesthetics of form or the politics of the formulator. The task of the philosophy of history is to work out the reconciliation of the performative with the constative in historical writing and in historical appraisal.

A Philosophical Reconstruction of the Sublime

Robert Doran claims that the sublime is all about transcendence transferred from the religious to the aesthetic domain of experience. Taken in this philosophical rather than stylistic sense, it proved crucial for the development of modern subjectivity. Doran traces the issue from Longinus through the decisive reception of Nicolas Boileau, who first distinguished le sublime from le style sublime, on to an extended engagement with Immanuel Kant. In all this he seeks its place in the rise of the modern bourgeois subject. The social-historical connections tend to be a bit overstated, first, with regard to Boileau and the idea of the honnete homme, and especially with the claim that “Burke treats aesthetic concepts as proxies for sociopolitical categories.” It is not fruitful for an understanding of Kant, either. This weakens his powerful argument for the philosophical significance of the sublime in modern thought.