After all that has been said, we get to this final chapter. By now, if you have read the book in detail, you know some of the strategies that can help make lectures successful and effective. However, there is much more to lecturing than what can be covered in any book. Lecturing requires persistence to keep on trying even after numerous failures. It requires practice and experience, just as practice and experience are required in order to become a competent artist. And finally, it requires keeping in mind why you are lecturing and why you are there. Just as a doctor is often faced with life and death questions regarding patients, so is a lecturer often faced with life altering questions regarding the audience. As a result, lecturers need to be active in what they do and how they lecture. They must avoid fear of trying new things and avoid getting stuck in lecturing local minima where their performance, while okay, could be substantially improved through further experiment and effort. In the next few sections, we will take a closer look at these and other general issues.

BE PERSISTENT

The first chapter of any success story is often about failure. The first time that you give a lecture, the first time that you try something new, do not expect immediate success. While you should learn from your mistakes, do not be disappointed by them.

Kant's Critique of Judgment is known as a major metaphysical achievement concerning the concept of purpose. Under the term Naturzweck, Kant tries to legitimize the use of purposive categories in the life sciences without any theological commitment, notwithstanding the whole philosophical tradition from stoicism to natural theology. Between the Spinozist or Humean critique of fi nality as an illusory concept—conceived either from a Cartesianrationalist or an empiricist point of view—and the Leibnizian-Wolffi an assumption of fi nality as the link between natural history and theology, Kant recognized an epistemological value of the concept of fi nality while denying its major ontological implications concerning some creative intention at the source of the universe and of living beings. The natural purposes, Naturzwecke, are organisms, or organized beings, Organisierte Wesen. This main thesis of the Critique of Judgment meant that living creatures could— indeed, must—be conceived as purposive entities, that is, as possible solely according to a concept, but that this concept need not to be instantiated in reality; it merely has to be presupposed for us as a principle of knowledge. Kant called this supposition a “regulative use” of the concept of fi nality. Hence, the epistemological requirement of a specifi city for the knowledge of living beings is satisfi ed, while at the same time, no commitment is made to something outside the reach of natural science and its methods. Therefore we can ask: To what extent did Kant really naturalize purpose?

This question is as much an issue for the history of philosophy as for the history of science. Kant's metaphysical elucidation of purpose stemmed, of course, from his previous considerations about the possibility of knowledge, realism concerning an order of nature, limits of reason, and so on. As such, however, it concerns some major advances in the life sciences, such as in descriptive embryology or comparative anatomy. This is attested to by Kant's various quotations, references, and discussions of scientists in those domains; Blumenbach and the major anthropologists Plattner and Hufeland; anatomists such as Soemmering; naturalists such as Buffon, Maupertuis, and Erxleben;and the four great men of eighteenth-century physiology: Boerhaave, Stahl, Hoffmann, and Haller.

Abstract

There is a long tradition of Kant interpretation that takes seriously the importance of Kant's engagement with the sciences for understanding the aims and methods of his philosophical project. Given Kant's own explicit statements about the sciences, it is no surprise that much of the literature in this tradition focuses primarily on Kant's relationship to mathematics and physics. That is, the a priori element required by Kant for a discipline to deserve the honorifi c title of a science is most obviously met by mathematics (which is wholly a priori), and then, only slightly less obviously, by physics (which has both an a priori and an empirical element). What is somewhat surprising, however, is the relative lack of attention to Kant's engagement with another discipline that seems to concern him at least as much throughout his most productive philosophical years as does physics, namely, natural history. In this chapter, I not only suggest that natural history plays a more signifi - cant role within Kant's philosophy than is generally acknowledged, but I also argue that Kant's proposal for transforming natural history from a primarily descriptive discipline into an explanatory science represents a plausible answer to some of the most troubling questions, especially concerning generation and classifi cation, that face practicing naturalists at the end of the eighteenth century.

Introduction

In §81 of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” Kant claims that although we cannot understand the generation of organized beings according solely to what he refers to as the “mechanism of nature,” we must not exempt these beings entirely from this mechanism if we are to continue viewing them as products of nature. In the process of explaining why this is the case, he provides what may appear to be simply a summary and evaluation of the various alternatives offered in the eighteenth century for explaining how organisms are generated. He takes the theories of preformation and epigenesis to be the only legitimate possibilities for providing this explanation, and then voices support for the theory of epigenesis on the basis of both experience and reason. In so doing, however, Kant makes a claim that should strike anyone familiar with the various debates concerning generation in the eighteenth century as odd, if not simply mistaken.

Abstract

The concept of function plays an essential role in the classifi cations worked out by German naturalists at the turn of the eighteenth century. Kielmeyer (1793) talks of a gradation of five cardinal functions along the animal scale. Oken (1804) asserts a classifi cation of animals based on a progression of sensitive functions. Here, we intend to describe the relationships of those theses with the Kantian tradition, and to show how some Naturphilosophen, mostly Schelling's students, assume this “teleomechanist program” (Lenoir) in their interpretations of the diversity of beings.

Introduction

The notion of vital force played an extremely important role in the life sciences in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, especially in the German world. This success reveals the deep changes undergone by these sciences at that time (failure of strict mechanism, development of vitalistic conceptions, etc.). It was closely associated with the notion of function, from which it was not always distinguished very clearly. Of course, these notions shared an eminently teleological component, and this aspect was frequently discussed by scientists and philosophers. In particular, Kant's position on the value of teleological principles in life sciences was supported, challenged, or transformed in different ways by German biologists such as Blumenbach, Kielmeyer, and Reil. Many historians, such as James Larson and Timothy Lenoir, have studied this diffi cult question.

Here we do not go into details of the philosophical implications of the development and the status of the refl ection on vital forces in the history of biology, but we would rather provide some elements on a particular topic, namely, the meeting point of these problems and another crucial issue that was central in biology at that time, that is, the classifi cation of living beings, particularly of the animals, and the use of physiological and anatomical arguments in the construction of the natural system. This is quite relevant to a study of what could be termed “Kantian biology,” since classifi cation is explicitly for Kant the focus of one kind of Naturlehre, exemplifi ed by Linnaeus’ natural history.

Abstract

At B167 of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Immanuel Kant drew a remarkable analogy between the idea of epigenesis in the theory of generation and his own idea of transcendental philosophy. Not only does this analogy still demand convincing elucidation, it raises questions about exactly what Kant understood by epigenesis and how he felt about that idea. My contention will be that neither before nor after this now somewhat famous analogy was Kant entirely comfortable with the idea. Indeed, I argue that Kant proved resolutely hostile to the idea in both published and unpublished sources from his fi rst mention of it in the 1760s until as late as 1787, making the comment at B167 all the more perplexing. Further, I argue that in the immediately ensuing years leading up to the publication of the Critique of Judgment in 1790, and in particular in relation to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Kant remained more ambivalent than has frequently been contended. It is not altogether clear that Kant and Blumenbach really understood the full implications of their respective positions and consequently may well have overestimated the convergence of their views.

One can only grasp in what an enormous confi guration of history of science and philosophy this epigenesis model is situated, when one has reconstructed the main arguments of the fi ercely conducted debate over the phenomenon of generation after the middle of the eighteenth century. What emerges is that answers to this question of how one should think about the biological origin of humans are not just some scientifi c paradigms among many but without question comprehend, in their speculative disclosure of abysses [Abgründlichkeit], the discourses of theoretical and even practical philosophy. (Helmut Müller-Sievers, Epigenesis: Naturphilosophie im Sprachdenken Wilhelm von Humboldts [Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993], 29.)

Introduction

“The system of epigenesis does not explain the origin of the human body, but says far more that we don't know a thing about it.” These words of Immanuel Kant represent what I take to be the essential stance he took on epigenesis across his philosophical career, and they problematize profoundly not only his famous analogy at B167 of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), but also the widely celebrated formulation in his Critique of Judgment (1790).

Abstract

The problem of generation has been, for Kant scholars, a kind of test of Kant's successive concepts of fi nality. Although he deplores the absence of a naturalistic account of purposiveness (and hence of reproduction) in his pre-critical writings, in the First Critique he nevertheless presents a “reductionist” view of fi nality in the Transcendental Dialectic's Appendices. This fi nality can be used only as a language, extended to the whole of nature, but it must be fi lled with mechanistic explanations. Therefore, in 1781, mechanism and teleology are synonymous languages. Despite the differences between its two authors, the Wolffi an embryology, exposed in the Theorie der Generation (1764) and debated by Blumenbach's dissertation on Bildungstrieb, enabled Kant to resolve the philosophical problem of natural generation, and subsequently to determine what is proper to the explanation of living processes. Thus, in the Third Critique he could give another account of purposiveness, restricted to the organism and more realist than his former one; this philosophical reappraisal of purposiveness in embryology required the new concept of “simply refl exive judgment” and the correlated notion of “regulative principle.” Thus framed, this naturalized teleology provided some answers to the Kantian problem of order and contingency after the end of classical (Leibnizian) metaphysics.

Introduction

The First and the Third Critiques deal with purposiveness. Although sometimes convergent, their accounts differ slightly. Here I want to clarify the need for a reassessment of purposiveness in the Critique of Judgment, and the changing meaning of this concept. I argue that one central motive for this shift is the embryological question and the epigenetist theory, and I show that this problem is longstanding in Kant's thinking. But the issue raised by this problem and its eventual solution deeply concerns some major conceptual problems, which stem from Kant's criticism of Leibnizian metaphysics.

I begin by giving the background of the concept of purpose in the dialectics of the First Critique, which can be traced back to some of the precritical writings.

Abstract

In 1768, the German embryologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733–94), recognizing the uselessness of further theoretical argument with Bonnet and Haller on invisibility, felt at an impasse in advancing his views about vis essentialis and formative causes, though he would return to these later in his discussions with Blumenbach. For the moment, it was necessary to produce a work whose professionalism would equal that of Haller on the heart: hence he produced De formatione intestinorum. After summarizing ideas about generation developed in his medical thesis of 1759 (Theoria generationis), Wolff minutely analyzed the development of the internal organs, mainly the digestive system. Recounting the genesis of this work, my chapter suggests that—because it described intermediate embryonic forms, and because it broke with the dominant preformationism as well as with the ancient epigenesis inherited from Aristotle—it appears to be the fi rst great text of modern embryology. Setting the vis essentialis debate apart from the epigenetic problem in embryology, this text made realization of the Kantian teleomechanistic research program an actual possibility.

Introduction

According to the German embryologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733–94), the body cannot be conceived without the existence of a epigenetic force. Wolff thus introduces a deep transformation of biology, releasing it from a conception of organization strictly modeled after the physical world. Even though this liberation is still only partial, and even though it is to Blumenbach and not to Wolff that Kant refers for that reason in the third Critique, Wolff's embryological works do represent a condition of realizability of the Kantian project for the biology.

However, this required fi rst a scientifi c demonstration of the reality of the epigenesis. This actual demonstration came in the De formatione intestinorum, published in the Reports of the Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg.Once he had reminded readers of the ideas about generation that he had already explained in his doctoral thesis in medicine in 1759, Wolff went on to study the development of the internal organs, mainly those of the digestive system, in minute detail.

Abstract

Though it might provoke a throat seizure to pronounce the adjectives “erotic” and “Kantian” in the same breath, these terms best describe the bichambered heart of Goethe's morphological theory. While traveling in Italy in 1786–88, Goethe underwent transforming personal experiences that provided a deeply felt appreciation of the human form. He supposed that such appreciation depended on certain ideal structures; indeed, he even thought of these ideal structures as nature's creative instruments. Shortly after he returned to Weimar, he began a study of Kant's First Critique; and in 1790, he read the Third Critique. He resisted the fi rst, but fell in love with the third. Kant's notions of an archetype and an archetypus intellectus provided just the theoretical structures to support his erotic inclinations; but under the tutelage of Schelling, he gave these Kantian regulative ideas a determinative use.

Introduction

By the end of July 1786, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had become mentally exhausted. His duties as civil administrator to the dukedom of Carl August (1757–1828) of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach occupied increasing amounts of time. His relationship with Charlotte von Stein (1742–1827), a sexually enticing woman of considerable intellectual agility, had dissolved into a tame companionship that emphasized for Goethe his decline into domesticity.

Ten years before, when the fi ery young author of Leiden des jungen Werthers (“Sorrows of Young Werther,” 1774) had arrived in Weimar to serve as companion to the young prince, all seemed possible. He composed plays and acted in them, carried on fl irtations, and then worried about the repair of roads and the fl ooding of the silver mines of Illmenau, all with equal energy—the kind of energy that fueled his reckless infatuation with von Stein, hardly to be deterred by her husband and three children. But those days had passed.

During the middle part of the 1780s, he had been working on a semi-autobiographical novel, which like many of his other artistic projects lay as a conceptus interruptus.

Abstract

In the British Isles, the biological theories of Kant were received within a heterodox interpretation refracted through Schelling and Coleridge. The British reception of Kant's philosophy generally went through a period of initial enthusiasm, followed by a decline of interest during the Napoleonic wars, succeeded by a revival of interest after 1814. Through the interpretations of Kant given by his British readers, a combination of Kant's and Schelling's philosophies of nature can be followed. In one remarkable synthesis of these perspectives, the British surgeon and comparative anatomist Joseph Henry Green developed in his Hunterian Lectures on Comparative Anatomy a way to combine both Lamarckian and Cuvierian perspectives and to develop a unifying picture of the history of nature that paved the way for Richard Owen's theory of the archetype. This study highlights the importance of an institutional context for the dynamic appropriation of Kantian concepts.

Introduction

Kant's refl ections on issues of biology, teleology, and function, developed particularly in the second part of the Kritik der Urteilskraft of 1790, opened up for his contemporaries and successors several new options for the interpretation of living nature in light of the critical philosophy. If Kant had denied that there ever could be a “Newton of the grassblade,” and seemed, at least until 1790, to restrict the legitimacy of genuine Naturwissenschaft to mathematical physics, he nonetheless offered a new way of looking at the issues of organic phenomena that transcended the categories of mathematical physics. Unintentionally, and even over his own objections, Kant became an important theorist of the “vitalist” revolution of the late eighteenth century in the life sciences taking place around him. This shift in the life sciences opened up new vistas for inquiry into embryology, physiology, the theory of disease, and the “history” of nature. It reinserted the concepts of teleology, vital causes, formal causation, and organicism into mainstream life science. A new distinction of the “organic” and “inorganic,” formally codifi ed in 1800 in Lamarck's conception of a new science of biologie, self-consciously opposed itself to the one-level ontology of inert matter and forces that for many represented the heritage of Newton and the mechanical philosophy.

This chapter introduces several of the main themes of the book by addressing the following two questions:

• Can science compel action?

• What are “policy,” “politics,” and “science”?

The answer to the first question is “sometimes,” but only in very specific decision contexts characterized by general agreement on valued outcomes and little uncertainty between particular actions and the achievement of outcomes associated with those actions. Such situations are rarely controversial. The answers to the second question are that “policy” is a decision, a commitment to a particular course of action. “Politics” refers to bargaining, negotiation, and compromise in pursuit of desired ends. Understanding these concepts can provide a bit of analytical rigor in defining concepts such as the “politicization of science” and “scientization for policy.” Understanding the complex interrelationship of science, policy, and politics is a first step toward making sense of the different roles of scientists who seek to contribute to effective decision-making and sustaining the scientific enterprise.

Can science compel action?

Late at night on July 1, 2002, high over southern Germany two planes streaked across the sky on a collision course. One was a DHL cargo jet and the other a Russian charter carrying students on their way to vacation in Spain. As the planes approached each other, the onboard computerized collision avoidance system on the Russian charter warned the pilot to climb higher. But at just about the same instant over the radio a ground controller told the Russian pilot to dive.

This chapter seeks to answer four questions:

• What is “uncertainty”?

• Why is it that some equate the reduction of scientific uncertainty with an increased likelihood of reaching a political consensus?

• Why is scientific uncertainty fundamentally irreducible in some contexts?

• Why does uncertainty matter in how we think about science in policy and politics?

There are several answers to the first question to be found in the scientific literature, and they share a common characteristic. The answer to the second question lies in a conflation of different types of uncertainty. The answer to the third question lies in an appreciation of the nature of science in the context of a complex world. Efforts to reduce uncertainty through scientific research often have the exact opposite effect of increasing uncertainty. The answer to the fourth question builds on the arguments developed in the previous chapters that information by itself does not compel a particular decision. The reduction of scientific uncertainty does not necessarily compel a political consensus.

What is “uncertainty”?

Uncertainty means that in a particular situation more than one outcome is consistent with our expectations. An “outcome” simply refers to an actual situation (i.e., some realized or true condition) in the past, present, or future, such as the number of whales in the ocean, the current temperature you feel on your skin as you read this sentence, or the roll of a dice.