Abstract
In 1790, Immanuel Kant completed and published the final installment of his three Critiques. With these, he addressed and changed our world perspective on some of the most fundamental problems with which human knowledge had been wrestling. The nature of these Critiques is, amazingly, from a twenty-first-century biologist perspective, still important and relevant in our rapidly evolving discipline to this day, a consequence of the depth and clarity of thought that appeared on the pages Kant presented to the reader. It also provides us with a wealth of bases to reassess problems that we had perhaps in our hubris thought solved in the relentless wave of scientific discovery, or at least had withered away from old age to inconsequential dust. But, as we so often find, dust may merely cover something from view, but in no way affect the structure of the object itself. And with this understanding, it is perhaps time to dust off Kant’s third Critique and use it to investigate the “sleeping giant” problem of teleology and design-like nature of organisms and assess how this work may inform our understandings of organisms and the process of life in the current day environment.
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Notes
- 1.
As a background, Kant, like earlier philosophers, distinguished between two types of propositions, synthetic and analytic. These can be further divided into two other types, a priori and empirical (a posteriori).
A priori propositions: have fundamental validity, they are not based on perception, for example, “7 + 5 = 12” or “all bachelors are unmarried men.” They are available without appeal to experience.
Empirical (a posteriori) propositions: depend upon sense perception, for example, “the cat is black” or “the earth moves around the sun.” Humans, Kant contends, can only judge by what they see and experience, that is, by what is empirical.
Analytic propositions: the predicate is implicate in the subject, for example, “the black cat is black” or “bachelors are unmarried men.” For analytic propositions, the truth is discovered by analysis of the concept itself.
Synthetic propositions: those propositions that cannot be arrived at by pure analysis, for example, “the cat is on the mat.” In these propositions, the predicate is not included in the subject; you need to go and investigate its truth.
Synthetic a priori propositions: have an a priori base but are also synthetic (whereas other a priori propositions are analytic). For example, between any two points is one straight line. You cannot get insight into this truth by merely investigating your concept of straight lines or points. The nature of space also has to be considered, which has to be investigated empirically. Synthetic a priori propositions show us the limits of our view on reality when we investigate them.
- 2.
Discursive understanding is knowledge yielded through the understanding through concepts, and thus is ultimately filtered through and limited in scope by the categories. It picks out features that things have in common with other things and applies concepts to them. It is interchangeable with “judgment” and “thought.”
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9. Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bob Wicks and Wayne Waxman and Dave Lambert for discussions, wisdom, and clarifications.
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Chetland, C. (2012). Does Biology Need a New Theory of Explanation? A Biological Perspective on Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment. In: Swan, L., Gordon, R., Seckbach, J. (eds) Origin(s) of Design in Nature. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4156-0_7
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