The role of the 'plan of nature'in Kant's account of history from a philosophical … (original) (raw)
Kant on the history of nature: The ambiguous heritage of the critical philosophy for natural history
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2006
This paper seeks to show Kant's importance for the formal distinction between descriptive natural history and a developmental history of nature that entered natural history discussions in the late eighteenth century. It is argued that he developed this distinction initially upon Buffon's distinctions of 'abstract' and 'physical' truths, and applied these initially in his distinction of 'varieties' from 'races' in anthropology. In the 1770s, Kant appears to have given theoretical preference to the 'history' of nature [Naturgeschichte] over 'description' of nature [Naturbeschreibung]. Following Kant's confrontations with Johann Herder and Georg Forster in the late 1780s, Kant weakened the epistemic status of the 'history of nature' and gave theoretical preference to 'description of nature'. As a result, Kant's successors, such as Goethe, could draw from Kant either a justification for a developmental history of nature, or, as this paper argues, a warrant from the critical philosophy for denying the validity of the developmental history of nature as anything more than a 'regulative' idea of reason.
Neo-Kantianism and the Limits of Historical Explanation
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2021
This paper looks at the Neo-Kantian response to Darwinism as a historical science. I distinguish four responses to this aspect of Darwin's thought within the Neo-Kantian tradition. The first line of response, represented by August Stadler and Bruno Bauch, views Darwin's model of historical explanation as a fulfillment of Kant's criteria of scientific intelligibility. The second, represented by Otto Liebmann, regards historical explanation as intrinsically limited, because it cannot tell us why nature develops as it does. The third line of response questions whether we can give a historical account of qualitative change. Friedrich Lange expresses this skepticism in general terms, while Alois Riehl and Ernst Cassirer extend it to human beings specifically. Both deny that we can account for 'higher faculties' in terms of gradual change. A fourth line of response, represented by Heinrich Rickert, challenges the misperception that Darwin's theory tells us something about the meaning of history.
Estudos Kantianos, 2014
Abstract: This essay intends to show how Kant’s approach to history paves the way for his philosophy of history. In order to do so, I will first draw on some texts included in the transcripts of Kant’s Logic Lectures to articulate his views on history. I will then argue that Kant’s philosophy of history constitutes his particular way of making sense of the contingency proper to historical knowledge in light of the interests of reason.
Estudos Kantianos [EK], 2015
The paper argues that Kant’s teleology in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose can be salvaged only if the mechanism of social unsociability, considered as the true center of the essay, is a) detached from the ? by contemporary standards ? hardly defensible notion of ‘natural dispositions’ and b) understood in conjunction with general premises that Kant does not make explicit, but rather takes as self-evidently true. In this perspective, Kant’s teleology is reduced to the affirmationthat, given certain constant features of human beings (mainly, limited benevolence and ability to see their best interest through experience) as well as relatively constant objective circumstances of the world we live in (mainly, availability of finite yet sufficient resources and sustainable growth in a competitive yet peaceful system), an approximation of human affairs towards the ‘cosmopolitan constitution’ is the most likely outcome. The paper moves the first steps towards a defen...
A "PHYSIOGONY" OF THE HEAVENS: KANT' S EARLY VIEW OF UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY
2022
From 1754 to 1756 Kant wrote on such central, related topics as the axial rotation of the Earth, the theory of heat, and the composition of matter, focusing on space, force, and motion. It has been noted that each of these topics pertains to his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, in which he drew on extant cosmogonies and the analogical form of Newtonianism developed by naturalists including Buffon, Haller, and Thomas Wright. How does Kant build on these various sources? This article aims to provide a nuanced account of specific features of the relation between natural history and natural philosophy in Kant's early developmental theory of the universe and to illuminate the strategy that guides his innovative, selective appropriation of contemporaneous insights.
Kant After Kant: Towards a History of the Human Sciences from a Cosmopolitan Standpoint
The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences
This chapter considers the history of the human sciences as propaedeutic to humanity’s future self-understanding. Immanuel Kant is pivotal in this context, not merely as someone whose views about the human have been influential, but more importantly as someone who deeply problematized what it means to be “human” in ways that remain relevant. In particular, Kant updated his understanding of the Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions to project an indefinitely extendable vision of humanity, which is captured by the Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism. So, how would Kant define humanity today? The chapter explores the question largely by drawing on Kant’s fertile appeal in his later “critical” writings to the distinction between the “Stoic” and “Epicurean” worldview, both of which acknowledge the centrality of chance to the cosmos, with the Stoic adopting the more hopeful and even risk-embracing approach to such existential uncertainty. The overall import of Kant’s Stoic cosmopolitanism is to undermine the intuitiveness of the “sentimentalism” associated with the animal-based conceptions of humanity favoured by the Epicurean approach. In this respect, Kant opens the door to what transhumanists call a “morphologically free” conception of humanity that is in principle open to membership by both extraterrestrials – a prospect Kant himself entertained – and artificially intelligent machines, a move with significant implications for what the history of the human sciences has been about and might be in the future.