“Blumenbach, Kant and the Rise of German Biology”

Andrea Gambarotto (Université Catholique de Louvain)

Since the publication of Timothy Lenoir’s seminal monograph about teleology and mechanics in nineteenth-century German biology, the vast majority of scholarly work dedicated to this historical period has addressed the emergence of biology in Germany using the vocabulary introduced by Imre Lakatos to discuss the methodology of scientific research programs. In fact, the idea of a Kant-Blumenbach “teleomechanical” research program for biology, which was first formulated by Lenoir in 1982, is still largely endorsed in recent studies. I argue that this notion of a Kant-Blumenbach research program is inadequate to account for the rise of biology in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. In fact, Kant did not consider biology a proper science, i.e. treating its objects wholly according to a priori principles, because such consideration of living beings for him implied teleological principles, and in his view, teleological principles have a regulative (i.e. heuristic) character that make them insufficient to ground a theory. Despite Kant’s denial, in the late eighteenth century the term “biology” began to appear in the works of several naturalists, the most important instance being in the monumental Biologie, oder Philosophie lebenden für Natur und der Naturforscher und Ärtzte (1802-1822) by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus. My talk addresses the following question: what happened shortly after Kant’s denial to induce naturalists like Treviranus to label “biology” the scientific field concerned with physical life as a natural phenomenon?

“What’s an Organism among Friends? Reassessing Blumenbach and Kant’s Intellectual Relationship”

Ryan Feigenbaum (History of Science Society)

Scholars continue to find a critical moment for the history of biology in Blumenbach and Kant’s intellectual relationship. Yet, the terms of that relationship remain contested. Did Blumenbach implement the methodological best practices suggested by Kant, arming a generation of life scientists with them in the process? Or did Blumenbach take Kant’s philosophical positions in name only, having already come to his own methodology long before reading Kant’s work? Foregoing interpretations that answer questions such as these have focused on the possibility of Kant’s influence on Blumenbach, while largely ignoring or denying the latter’s possible influence on the former. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this view by asserting that Kant did owe Blumenbach an intellectual debt, as Kant himself acknowledged in the only letter he ever sent to him in 1790. Analysis of the language and logic of §64 of the third Critique reveals that Blumenbach’s essay on the formative drive is an essential source for Kant’s preliminary definition of organized being. Moreover, Kant’s remark in his letter that Blumenbach provided a successful model for the unification of mechanical and teleological principles is not empty praise, but rather indication that the Bildungstrieb concept offered a true source of this unification―one that Kant utilized in his own work thereafter. Hence, Blumenbach was essential to Kant’s philosophy of the organic world, which reaffirms the indispensability of this intellectual relationship for any understanding of the epistemic foundations of biology.

“Kant’s Preformationism Revisited: Implications for Interpreting the “Kantian Legacy” in Natural History”

Phillip Sloan (University of Notre Dame)

In a 2002 paper “Preforming the Categories: Kant and Eighteenth Century Generation Theory,” I argued that a careful reading critical texts underlying Kant’s argument for the necessity of the categories indicated his clear endorsement of a form of biological preformationism—the Keime-Anlagen theory—which seems to have been Kant’s own theoretical creation. Criticisms of these claims by some Kant scholars (e.g. Marcel Quarfood, 2004) have challenged this argument. Further studies and discussions in the literature (Zammito, Mikkelsen) have, in my view, served to reinforce, rather than weaken, my arguments. In this paper I will revisit my earlier arguments against the criticisms raised since 2002, and I will provide a deeper positioning of these arguments against the embryological theory of the late eighteenth century. The goal will be to elucidate more deeply the degree to which Kant’s encounter in the late 1780s with Johann Blumenbach’s changed views on biological preformationism may or may not have altered Kant’s own sophisticated version of this theory, with implications for his concept of categorical necessity and its bearing on his heritage in natural history.

“Does Kant abandon Natural History in the Critique of Judgment?”

Peter McLaughlin (Universität Heidelberg)

Kant made a somewhat idiosyncratic distinction between natural history and natural description, naming what everyone else called historia naturalis ‘Naturbeschreibung’ in contrast to his own favored discipline ‘Naturgeschichte’. There was a model of sorts for this in the division of labor between Buffon (histoire) and Daubenton (description) in the Histoire naturelle project. In the Methodology of the Critique of Judgment (§79) Kant seems to reverse course, placing his own efforts squarely within natural description and characterizing natural history as “an adventure of reason” to which sometimes even the best minds unfortunately succumb. In this talk I will look for an explanation of this reversal in the view of the organism (in §65) as the analogue of art and life, such that the idea of the whole is not viewed as if it were the ground of the phenomenon, but merely as the cognitive ground of its unity.