Abstract

The philosophy of biology found in Kant's "Critique of Teleological Judgement" rests upon a fundamental ambiguity in Kant's use of the term "final cause". Kant conflates two different modes of causality under the term "final cause": formal cause and final cause. Kant's failure to distinguish the two different uses of final cause has important consequences for his philosophy of biology and for that branch of biology concerned with ecology. I argue that Kant's reintroduction of formal causality into modern scientific discourse paves the way for an ethically grounded biology. ;I find the ambiguity in Kant's account of teleology in a comparison of inner purposiveness with relative purposiveness. Kant's discussion of relative purposiveness relies on final causes as traditionally understood. But his account of inner purposiveness depends upon his reinvention of formal cause. Kant argues that a coherent account of nature as an interconnected whole is not possible from the vantage point of science since we cannot know what for the sake of which the world exists. There is no such obstacle to our understanding of organisms however. In fact, Kant argues that asking what-for-the sake-of-which any given part of an organism is for is necessary to the study of plants and animals. ;If we take the reintroduction of formal cause seriously while rejecting the Kant's anthropocentrism we can begin to construct an ethically grounded biology. In Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgement Rudolf Makkreel argues that the sensus communis "$\langle$i$\rangle$s transcendental, not in the sense of providing building blocks for truth, but in the sense of opening up the reflective horizon of communal meaning in terms of which the truth can be determined." Since both halves of the third critique discuss objects that are apprehended as wholes and are underdetermined by ordinary analysis I argue that the reflective power of judgement allows for and even demands the reevaluation of the ordinary tenets of modern biology to meet the growing global crisis