Kant and Teleology

This Element develops Kant's teleology systematically, justifying its principle and the flow of aesthetic and biological judgments.

Thomas Teufel (Author)

9781009662383, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 May 2025

82 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm, 0.259 kg

Kant's mature teleological philosophy in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is predicated on innovations that address a set of unprecedented challenges arising from within critical philosophy. The challenges are (1) a threat of “transcendental chaos” between sensibility and understanding, emerging from the structure of critical epistemology; (2) a threat of “critical chaos” between determination and reflection, generated by Kant's response to that first threat. The innovations include (a) a transcendental conception of purposiveness, (b) a principle of nature's purposiveness based on that conception, (c) a power of judgment governed by that principle, (d) and so governed in an unusual (self-given and self-governing) way, (e) a view on which nature does make leaps. This Element argues that Kant's mature teleological philosophy – and a fortiori Kant's aesthetics and philosophy of biology – cannot be understood without a fully systematic account of these challenges and innovations, and it presents such an account.

1. Kant's critical teleology
2. Philosophy of Biology or critique of judgment?
3. Purposiveness as transcendental principle
4. The transcendental deduction of the principle of nature's purposiveness
5. Nature's Saltūs
References.

Subject Areas: History of Western philosophy [HPC]