The transcendental place of the organism: on the concept of organism in Immanuel Kants Critique of Judgment

Abstract

The scope of the research project is the Critique of Teleological Judgment, the second part of the third critique of Immanuel Kant, and the privileged object is the concept of the organism as it appears in this text. To find a unitary and coherent interpretation of this object, we make use of the wide range of Kant's commentaries on this theme and also of historiographical studies of Natural History/Biology on Kant's activity period. The chosen path to our investigation begins from a comprehension of the teleological maxim, the core of our main text, according to the general topology of the resolution of Kantian antinomies. This guides us to the resolution of two main problems: 1) "how does works the analogical language in which the Kantian concept of an organism is discussed and how is it different from the schematism of the Critique of Pure Reason?"; 2) "how the Kantian text enriches and is enriched by, some concepts of the Natural History of his time?".(AU)