Charlie Cooper-Simpson

ABSTRACT Kant’s account of natural teleology has recently garnered significant interest, though there is little consensus regarding either Kant’s aim or whether this account coheres with the rest of his critical project. I argue that Kant’s position on natural teleology is only intelligible against the backdrop of his account of conceptual synthesis in the B-Edition of the Transcendental Deduction, in the Critique of Pure Reason, and, more generally, his account of ‘transcendental logic’. Viewed in this light, I argue that we must see Kant as committed to the seemingly implausible claim that there can be no objective ground for the distinction between the living and the non-living, and that, consequently, there could be no possible occasion for the—even regulative—deployment of natural teleological judgment. I argue, further, that this suggests that Kant’s discussion of natural teleology plays a far more significant role in his larger critical project than is commonly understood.

Robert Pippin's recent study of Hegel's Logic, Hegel's Realm of Shadows, argues that we should read Hegel as rejecting the need for a Transcendental Deduction in logic because he takes Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to have ruled out the scepticism that motivates Kant's Deduction. By contrast, I argue, we cannot understand what Pippin calls the ‘identity’ of logic and metaphysics in the Science of Logic unless we see how Hegel does provide a kind of Deduction argument in the Logic, albeit one stripped of the psychologism present in the Kantian version. Accordingly, I provide a sketch of what such an ‘absolute’ Deduction must look like, and argue that Hegel's presentation of the ‘absolute idea’ functions as the conclusion of such an argument.