INTRODUCTION

Kant pretended to expertise in many nonphilosophical subjects, including the history of civilizations and infant care. He offered up his thoughts on human evolution, skin coloration, formative forces, and competitive social behavior in numerous essays and reviews, and he also composed an essay on animal form, the Critique of Judgment, Part II. One might suppose him to be a key contributor to the flowering of the human and social sciences in the eighteenth century, not their unhappy observer. Yet, as John Zammito has noted in his insightful study of the Critique of Judgment, there is something remarkable about Kant's attitude. His desire to affirm the utter mystery of life and the inexplicability of its origins and the distinction between man and the rest of nature left him, in Zammito's terms, “sharply estranged from the [eighteenth century's] most effective currents.” “A large part of [Kant's] critical philosophy,” he suggests, “can be interpreted as an effort to balance his recognition of the limitations of speculative rationalism or ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ with his recognition of the essential human interest in metaphysics, the unavoidable problems of God, freedom and immortality.” Zammito argues that “Kant's personal commitment to a ‘theistic’ if not outright Christian posture strongly colored the ultimate shape of his work.”

An example of this pattern of partial engagement with and partial estrangement from the life sciences can be found in Kant's writings on generation.