This book provides a novel treatment of Immanuel Kant’s views on proper natural science and biology. The status of biology in Kant’s system of science is often taken to be problematic. By analyzing Kant’s philosophy of biology in relation to his conception of proper science, the present book determines Kant’s views on the scientific status of biology. Combining a broad ideengeschichtlich approach with a detailed historical reconstruction of philosophical and scientific texts, the book establishes important interconnections between Kant’s philosophy of science, his views on biology, and his reception of late 18th century biological theories. It discusses Kant’s views on science and biology as articulated in his published writings and in the Opus postumum. The book shows that although biology is a non-mathematical science and the relation between biology and other natural sciences is not specified, Kant did allow for the possibility of providing scientific explanations in biology and assigned biology a specific domain of investigation.

Brings together work by Kant never before available in English, along with new translations of his most important publications in natural science. The volume is rich in material for the student and the scholar, with extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, editorial introductions and a glossary of key terms.

Kant denied biology the status of proper science, yet his account of the organism has received much attention from both philosophical and historical perspectives. This book argues that Kant's influence on biology in the British Isles is in part due to misunderstandings of his philosophy. Highlighting these misunderstandings exposes how Kant influenced various aspects of scientific method, despite the underlying incompatibility between transcendental idealism and scientific naturalism. This book raises criticism against scientific naturalism as it demonstrates how some concepts that are central to biology have been historically justified in ways that are incompatible with naturalism. Approaching current issues in philosophy of biology from a Kantian orientation offers new perspectives to debates including our knowledge of laws of nature, the unity of science, and our understanding of organisms. Moreover, new avenues are forged to demonstrate the benefits of adopting Kant-inspired approaches to issues in contemporary philosophy of science.

There has been an increasing interest in Kant and philosophy of science in the past twenty years. Through reconstructing Kantian legacies in the development of nineteenth and twentieth century physics and mathematics, this volume explores what relevance Kant's philosophy has in current debates in philosophy of science, mathematics and physics.

Immanuel Kant was a prominent 18th-century German philosopher. Kant is often considered to be the first modern philosopher and he contributed significantly to many fields including ethics, political theory, and metaphysics. Kant also believed that perpetual universal peace could be achieved through democracy and international cooperation. The Science of Right is a book that Kant wrote on the right of individual property ownership.

This book develops a new reading of the Metaphysical Foundations and articulates an original perspective of Kant's critical philosophy as a whole.

The most neglected sector of Kant's Critical Philosophy is his collec tion of remarks about biological phenomena in the second part of the Critique of Judgment, the Critique of Teleological Judgment. The reasons for this are numerous, but since in Kant, everything comes in threes, a three-fold collection will suffice. The Critique of Teleological Judgment itself is one reason. More than most of his writings, this segment of the Critical corpus suffers from what can most charitably be termed "mistakes of exposition. " In this part of the third Critique, it is commonplace to find sub-arguments in Kant's general position somewhere other than their logical niche. The result is that the general theme behind his remarks about living phenomena is obscured. This difficulty has done much to discourage even the most enthusiastic of Kant admirers from investing their time on this work. Secondly, in this century, until very recently, there has been little interest in philosophical questions about biology. Twenty-one out of thirty-one sections of the Critique of Teleological Judgment (sections #61 and 63-83) deal either directly or indirectly with issues of interest in the philosophy of biology. Finally, the Critique of Teleological Judgment has been placed among the last on that list "of writings thought to formulate Kant's Critical system. This is not merely because of its temporal position.