Neither Ghost Nor Machine

Abstract

Kant's longstanding interests in science have been well documented. There are numerous studies devoted to Kant's early work on cosmology in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), and of course also to his interests in physics and his work on forces (1747), axial rotation (1754), the ages of the earth (1754), fire (1755), earthquakes (1756), winds (1757), and even to his discussion of volcanoes on the moon (1785). It is well known, moreover, that part of Kant's work in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was to ground the certainty of scientific claims against Hume's skepticism, and that Kant's program for securing our experience of the natural world extended to his later account of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). Less well known, however, is the realization that Kant's apparent bias toward the hard sciences has lain rather more in the interests of Kant scholars, than in Kant himself. Kant taught a course on Physical Geography every year for 40 years, for example, and he taught Anthropology for 24 years; between Kant's own writings and student lecture notes from these courses, researchers have in fact close to 3000 pages worth of material to consider. The aim of Kant's Organicism, therefore, was to provide a broader portrait of Kant by focusing, in my own case, on the important role played by the life sciences in his intellectual development.I began this investigation by following the course of life-science debates regarding organic generation in England and France between 1650 and 1750 before turning to a description of their influence in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. With this background established, the remainder of Kant's Organicism moved to the influential role played by models of embryological development for Kant's approach to understanding the cognitive processes responsible for the generation of knowledge. I closed the book with a reinterpretation of Kant's transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason since Kant's organic approach to reason, I argued, could alone make sense of the work needing to be done by the deduction itself.Throughout Kant's Organicism I had a number of audiences in mind. The first was the community of Kant scholars whose interpretations have shaped my understanding of Kant's epistemology as much as they had my knowledge of Kant's scientific theories. It was to this audience that I spoke in terms that were familiar within the terrain of Kant's metaphysics and epistemology, even as I sought, at every instance, to position traditional arguments against the backdrop of the life sciences, and to provide textual resources provided by Kant himself in support of the new vantage point. The second audience I had in mind for the book was composed of historians of science, for it was these scholars, above all, who had done the most work to recover Kant's remarks regarding generation theory, and who had looked most closely at his essays on the variation of species, and his theories connecting teleology and mechanism in the case of organic life. While I had learned a great deal from these discussions, I also saw that I could add to them in light of my own specialization in Kant's epistemology. Finally, I was interested in introducing this 'new' Kant to those versed in post-Kantian Continental philosophy, since I believed that part of their greater attraction to German Idealism lay precisely in the manner in which they had taken Kant's conclusions one step further than the Critical philosophy seemed prepared to go. My hope here was that once Kant was seen from a broader vantage point, a set of fresh connections and new opportunities for investigation would be opened up.With these preliminary remarks made, I want to turn now to the heart of the challenge facing my account of Kant so far as my three interlocutors have positioned it. By way of background, I can just say that I understand the Kant of the mid-1760s, the young Kant, the one still in search of a guiding problematic to pursue, whose self-described 'eclecticism' so inspired the young Herder, to have been in fact already on the cusp of greatness. …