Ryan L. Vilbig

The relationship between Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and the modern theory of biological evolution has been a topic of much scholarly debate with little consensus. It has been generally contended that the amassed confusions about Kant’s views are due to ambiguities in his own thinking, and, as such, perplexed interpretations subsequent to his writings were broadly articulated even in 19th-century Germany. More recent philosophers have sought to emphasize how Kant changed his mind from 1785 when he found evolutionary theories “so monstrous that reason recoils before them” to a reconsideration that “one species would have arisen from the other” as a mere “daring adventure of reason” in 1790. Alternatively, this paper will argue that Kant’s philosophical commitments to biological evolution can be traced to an earlier point, specifically, in his encounter with the deus ex machina concept of Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) in his True Intellectual System, translated at Jena in 1733. Kant had read Cudworth’s text sometime before writing his Universal Natural History in 1755, influencing his professed adherence to universal physical laws and metaphysical teleology, as well as his opposition to the deus ex machina fallacy of divine interference in the natural biological order. Similar arguments against the deus ex machina concept are also frequently found among evolutionary biologists throughout the 19th–20th centuries, thus placing the pre-critical Kant even among their philosophical ranks. This paper will evaluate these important sources and demonstrate Kant’s continuing relevance to the philosophy of evolutionary biology, including his perspective on teleological judgments.

Both Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) have been recognized for their scientific ideas that anticipated the later theory of biological evolution (Mayr 1959; Wells 1967). While Kant had referenced the evolutionary rebirth of the phoenix in 1755 and then quoted the inscription of the Egyptian goddess Isis’ Temple as early as 1763, he later questioned in 1796: “though unable to lift the veil of Isis, can [philosophers] yet make it so thin that one may divine the goddess beneath it”? (1796/2002: 439). Along similar lines of thought, Goethe had written of nature’s veil in his artistic and experimental portrayals of biological phenomena in 1808 as follows: “A weaving flowing, Life all-glowing, Thus at Time’s humming loom ’tis my hand prepares, The garment of Life which the Deity wears!” (Goethe 1808/2018: 17). For both, their diverse and subtle references to Egyptian philosophical imagery helped frame their proposals of evolutionary concepts, and these together are demonstrable of characteristics, simultaneously, of a hesitancy to speculate beyond the bounds of their reason, as well as a willingness to allow their thoughts to emerge in new and unexplored contexts.

The African-American philosopher William Fontaine (1909-1968) inaugurated a neo-Kantian philosophical analysis of the original biological theories of fellow African-American Ernest Everett Just (1883-1941), and his thesis regarding the “space-time” structure of biological systems deserves our renewed consideration today. First comparing Just’s methodology in his 1939 text Biology of the Cell Surface to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Fontaine then suggested a parallel reading of Just’s irreducible theory of cellular structure to Samuel Alexander’s (1859-1938) Gifford Lectures of 1920 on the metaphysical possibility of non-Euclidean or multidimensional space-time — Along these lines, Just had written of life’s constituents, because “assembled both in space and time, its investigation is limited”. Since Kant was well-known and also later criticized for his logical commitments to three-dimensional Euclidean space-time, it is clear that Fontaine’s reading of Just’s statements departed from traditional Kantian philosophy. However, since Just’s Biology of the Cell Surface emphasized the whole-part relation of living organisms as well the distinction between reductionistic mechanism and emergent theories — metaphysical views that Kant also expounded — Fontaine’s analysis charted a new route for bringing Kantian philosophy into the context of contemporary theories of non-Euclidean and higher-dimensional space-time. This paper first reviews the original contributions of Ernest Everett Just to biology as well as William Fontaine’s philosophical commentary upon them, and then considers the current scientific basis for non-Euclidean and higher-dimensional geometries in the biological sciences.

The chemist Jeremias Benjamin Richter (1762–1807) coined the term “stoichiometry” and proposed the “law of definite proportions.” He is also commonly acknowledged as having been a student of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). This paper demonstrates how Kant’s philosophy positively shaped Richter’s approach to chemistry in the _Anfangsgründe der Stöchiometrie_ (1792–1794) and outlines two ways in which Richter attempted to represent the chemical force in “pure intuition”: (1) “reductionistic forces,” in which qualitative features scale with the quantity of matter; and (2) generalized “abstracted forces,” in which a plurality of dissolution- and bonding-properties are latent within the chemical in the manifold of space-time.

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was deeply influenced by the British empiricist school of the eighteenth century, particularly by the philosophy of David Hume(1711–1776). Though frequently disputing Hume’s conclusions, Newman nevertheless worked to develop a theistic form of empiricism that integrated the developing scientific worldview with traditional Christian philosophy. In light of recently renewed interest in Hume, this essay first explores Newman’s empiricist leanings and then proposes that his distinctive philosophy can contribute to modern discussions about the relationship of science and religion.