Jennifer Mensch

This essay discusses Kant’s account of truth, arguing that he offers us a weak coherence theory: weak for his insistence on an independent, sensuous content for intuition, coherentist for the transcendental apparatus supporting experience. While Kant is free to use the language of correspondence within experience, “empirical truth” will always be limited by the formative requirements set by “transcendental truth.” The difficulty, for Kant, is the role played by sensuous content since the sameness of this content in intersubjective experience seems to point outside the conditions of synthesis to a transcendentally real object. While the consequence of this would seem to leave Kant in a contradiction—denying transcendental realism at the same time that he must affirm it—we must read Kant’s insistence on a merely negative use of noumena as evidence that he adopts the role of the skeptic as a means for maintaining his epistemic goals.

John Locke’s theory of classification is a subject that has long received scholarly attention. Little notice has been taken, however, of the problems that were posed for taxonomy by its inability to account for organic processes. Classification, designed originally as an exercise in logic, becomes complicated once it turns to organic life and the aims of taxonomy become entangled with processes of generation, variation, and inheritance. Locke’s experience with organisms—experience garnered through his work in botany and medicine—suggested to him both the dynamism of nature and the artificiality of any a priori system of classification. This reinforced Locke’s critique of classification in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and by tracing its influence it is possible to approach Locke’s nominalism from a fresh perspective.

This edited collection began as an international symposium on Kant and biology held at the University of Tübingen in 2010 and the now-published volume offers us new ways of thinking about Kant’s theory of biology with respect to not only his own work but to contemporary discussions regarding biological function and form. With a consistently high level of scholarship and a set of internationally renowned contributors, Kant’s Theory of Biology thus offers us an important contribution to the field’s rapidly growing interest in the history of the life sciences, and the book’s discussions devoted to the Critique of Judgement, in particular, will no doubt shape the course of subsequent investigations in the years to come. The anthology contains fifteen essays divided into three parts, with a focus on the development of the philosophy of biology in Kant’s early writings, the theory of organisms in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and current perspectives on the teleology of nature. The quality of the editing on this book is excellent, far superior to that of a typical anthology, and what is to be especially appreciated is the helpful cross-referencing being done by the majority of the papers in so far as this lends the collection an organic, as opposed to a merely aggregative, feel.

Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy, traces the decisive role played by eighteenth century embryological research for Immanuel Kant’s theories of mind and cognition. I begin this book 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. Once this background has been established, the remainder of Kant’s Organicism moves 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, with special attention paid to Kant’s Precritical writings in the 1760s and 1770s. The book closes with a reinterpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Abstract: This essay addresses three specific moments in the history of the role played by intuition in Kant's system. Part one develops Kant's attitude toward intuition in order to understand how ‘sensible intuition’ becomes the first step in his development of transcendental idealism and how this in turn requires him to reject the possibility of an ‘intellectual intuition’ for human cognition. Part two considers the role of Jacobi when it came to interpreting both Kant's epistemic achievement and what were taken to be the outstanding problems of freedom's relation to nature; problems interpreted to be resolvable only via an appeal to ‘intellectual intuition’. Part three begins with Kant's subsequent return to the question of freedom and nature in his Critique of Judgment. With Goethe's contemporaneous Metamorphoses of Plants as a contrast case, it becomes clear that whereas Goethe can embrace the role of an intuitive understanding in his account of nature and within the logic of polarity in particular, Kant could never allow an intuition of nature that in his system would spell the very impossibility of freedom itself