When Metaphysics Meets Biology by Philippe Huneman

When Metaphysics Meets Biology by Philippe Huneman

This book explains the background and meaning of Kant’s account of the life sciences in the Critique of the Power of Judgement by reading the development of Kant’s ideas on the living since his 1763 precritical essays, in parallel with analyzing several milestones in the constitution of the concept of organism as a self-organized totality, studied by biology.

This parallel reading frames Kant’s account of biology against influential theories developed by earlier scientists and naturalists, including Leibniz, Stahl, French vitalists, Albrecht von Haller, Caspar Wolff, and Buffon, as well as his almost contemporaries such as Goethe and Cuvier. It reveals that Kant’s inquiry about teleological judgment ties in with important advances in his time about the organism as an integrated, functioning, and self-organizing entity. It explains how Kant’s idea of purposiveness, formulated in the context of a metaphysical inquiry about the order of the world and its knowledge, hence of contingency generaliter, became detached from the notion of intention, thus ascribing it a new meaning tied to autonomous biological practice. Then, considering 19th-century biologists, it provides the genealogy of a post-Darwinian theoretical space in which biologists formulate complementary or competing accounts of organisms as developmental systems in evolution and within which theoretical cleavages are generated. It thereby explains how the two theoretical trends known as form-centered and function-centered biology, now defined as “developmental” and “adaptationist“ viewpoints, emerged as two distinct perspectives from a concept of “natural purposiveness” unified by Kant’s transcendental perspective; then it unravels the way they currently articulate, against the background of their genesis.

When Metaphysics Meets Biology offers a philosophical interpretation of the emergence of biology in relation to Kant’s thinking and sheds light on the philosophical issues currently embedded within the conceptual structure of biology. It is of interest to philosophers of biology and philosophers interested in metaphysics and its history.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Philippe Huneman is a philosopher of science Research Director at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/Université Paris I Sorbonne). He authored Why? The Philosophy behind the Question (2023), Death: Perspectives from the Philosophy of Biology (2023), and Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric (2025).