The title of Ina Goy’s Kants Theorie der Biologie is to some extent a misnomer: although most of the book is indeed devoted to Kant’s account of organized beings, its novelty and significance lies primarily in the way it unifies this account with the moral and theological topics that Kant discusses at the end of his Critique of the Power of Judgement (hereafter CPJ), as the author herself recognizes (e.g. p. 138, n. 69). Before I discuss her reading in more detail, I will say a few words about the way it advances beyond the previously available scholarship.

Kant’s CPJ deals with a number of topics. Its two main parts deal with aesthetic and teleological judgement, respectively, but the diversity of the topics treated in the book is not fully revealed by this division. In the Introductions Kant considers, among other things, the problem of the systematic unity of empirical laws of nature and the problem of the realizability of our moral purposes in the natural world. In the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement he discusses judgements about beauty and sublimity. Most of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgement focuses on the status of our judgements about living organisms, but in its appendix, entitled the Methodology of the Teleological Power of Judgement, Kant returns to some themes familiar from the previous two Critiques, such as the proofs of God’s existence and the significance of our belief in God for morality. It is thus no surprise that readers often feel bewildered by this variety of topics under one cover, and it is no small challenge to explain how exactly they belong together in one project. And although Kant attempts to account for the unity of his project by reference to the principle of purposiveness of the power of judgement, this is often found unsatisfactory.

In fact, a lot of scholarship on the CPJ focuses on specific topics without trying to show how they are related to the rest. Among recent works which do attempt to show the unity of these multiple topics the most detailed and significant is Zuckert’s (Reference Zuckert2007), which argues that the principle of the unity of the diverse is what unifies the discussion of systematicity of natural laws in the introduction to the CPJ and the accounts of beauty and organisms, leaving out the sublime and the theological considerations at the end of the book. Ina Goy’s new book likewise does not cover all the topics discussed in the CPJ, for it does not discuss aesthetic judgements at all. It does, however, explicitly relate the practical question of the realizability of human purposes in the world from the introduction, as well as Kant’s discussion of the proofs for God’s existence in the Appendix, to the topics treated in the main body of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgement. With the appearance of Goy’s book, we now have overlapping book-length treatments of multiple topics discussed in the CPJ. Therefore, while a unified account of the CPJ as a whole is still a desideratum for Kant scholarship, we are now much closer to having one than we were before.

The book has three parts as indicated in its subtitle. The first part, which accounts for about a half of the book, is largely a detailed commentary on the parts of CPJ on which Goy focuses. The second develops Goy’s interpretation of Kant’s position as it is developed in these texts. The third situates Kant’s theory of biology in the context of preformationist and epigenetic theories of animal development of his time and examines Kant’s own changing attitude towards these theories. I will focus on the second part here.

According to Goy, Kant considers organized beings from three perspectives: as mechanical machines governed by mechanical forces and laws, as physically teleological beings directed at natural purposes and as beings which serve as means for the realization of moral purposes. After providing an account of these three perspectives, she argues that their unity is guaranteed by the critically interpreted idea of God.

Although Kant claims that, at least for us humans, organized beings are not fully mechanically explicable, Goy plausibly claims that they are also mechanical machines, although not only that (chapter 2.1). She then investigates the meanings of ‘mechanism’ at play in the CPJ and argues that there are three senses in which Kant employs the term ‘mechanical’. In one sense, mechanism refers to efficient causality as it is explicated in the Second Analogy. In another, more specific sense, it refers to the laws of matter elaborated in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Both of these senses of mechanism are already well-covered in the literature on the CPJ. The third sense that Goy distinguishes is less discussed, and it refers to the multitude of empirical laws of mechanics that govern bodies of a specific constitution. The distinction between these distinct senses of mechanism allows Goy to provide an answer to a question that has bothered Kant scholars for some time, namely, how mechanism can be understood as a regulative principle in the antinomy of teleological judgement: although mechanical laws are used constitutively when understood in the first two senses, they are used regulatively when one attempts to unify multiple specific mechanical laws under a more general law, or when one attempts to specify a more general mechanical law in order to mechanically explain a particular phenomenon.

In her account of organized beings qua physically teleological (chapter 2.2) Goy argues against commentators such as Ginsborg and van den Berg, who try to weaken the connection between organized beings and God’s intentions in Kant’s account. Goy suggests that physically teleological laws must be understood as ‘hypothetical regulative rules, which prompt men to judge all mechanical properties of an organized being as if it was produced in order to conform to what it means to be this [kind of] organized being’ (p. 219). In this account ‘produced’ means ‘produced by God’, and thus the unity of organized beings that is not mechanically explicable is explicitly, although only reflectively, referred to God’s intentional activity.

A closely related thesis defended by Goy is that natural purposes are ideas of reason that are empirical and yet a priori. This formulation is somewhat paradoxical since, for Kant, apriority involves independence from experience. What Goy means is that, although the idea of natural purpose can be referred to an object given in experience, it has an a priori feature, namely, an implicit claim to the necessary unity of all properties of that object. For example, when it is applied to a bird, it requires us to judge every property of that bird as contributing to the purpose for which that bird was produced (by God, as we must reflectively judge), an aspect of which might be its ability to fly.

There is something unsatisfactory about this account, given that Kant initially (in §§64–6) seems to provide an account of natural purposes as being internally purposive without any reference to God’s intentions. Goy argues, though, that even Kant’s famous discussion of the example of the tree in §64 can be read as compatible with her account. More importantly, this account allows her to explain why Kant makes the transition from his account of organisms to the discussion of nature as a whole as a system of ends, that is, back to external teleology (§68), and finally to the discussion of how nature thus understood may be judged to be aimed at the end that lies beyond nature itself (§§82–4). Ultimately, I am inclined to think that what is unsatisfactory here must be ascribed to Kant himself and not to Goy’s reading.

The third perspective on organized beings, as just mentioned, is that of means to ultimately non-natural, that is, moral, ends (chapter 2.3). In this connection, Goy discusses Kant’s account of the highest good from his works on moral philosophy and relates it to his discussion of the final end of nature in the CPJ. In order to achieve moral purposes, man must not only ‘build and shape the internal purposive order of the organized nature of one’s own body in a specific physically teleological way’ (p. 244), but also use organized beings found in nature as means for those moral ends.

Finally, Goy argues that the critically interpreted idea of God allows Kant to unify these three perspectives. This is achieved in three steps. First, mechanical and physically teleological laws and forces are thought to be unified in the idea of the supersensible substratum of nature that Kant refers to in particular in §§77–8; here Goy builds on the work of Förster (most recently, chapter 5 in Reference Förster2012) and Zuckert (Reference Zuckert2007). This idea is ultimately identified with the idea of God insofar as God is thought as an intelligent being that possesses theoretical reason, to which idea we are led through the physico-theological argument for God’s existence in §85 (chapter 2.5). Second, with the help of the ethico-teleological argument for God’s existence, Kant is able to think of natural laws and forces (both mechanical and physically teleological) as harmonized with the moral purposes of man. The idea of God that is needed to guarantee this harmony is that of the highest being with both theoretical and practical reason, possessing all the traditional divine attributes (chapter 2.6). Finally, Goy considers whether the two arguments for God’s existence lead to distinct ideas of God, and whether Kant regards the physico-theological argument as dispensable. She argues that the most plausible way to think about these issues is that the two arguments disclose two different aspects of the same God from the human perspective. Both arguments retain significance because they start from different aspects of the human epistemic situation (chapter 2.7).

Recently, a number of prominent scholars have attempted to find fruitful ideas about natural teleology in Kant that could bear on contemporary debates in philosophy of biology. Many of these scholars have downplayed the connections between Kant’s considerations on that topic and his moral-theological thought. What becomes clear from Goy’s reading is that a full account of the CPJ cannot bracket those connections, and that in the end Kant did not provide a genuinely naturalistic account of teleology (even if nature is understood in a more inclusive sense than on a purely mechanistic worldview). In my view, this suggests that scholars would do well to extend their search for such productive connections beyond Kant, in the direction of post-Kantian philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel, who arguably did provide an account of the peculiarity of living organisms without relating it to theology.