Abstract

In the British Isles, the biological theories of Kant were received within a heterodox interpretation refracted through Schelling and Coleridge. The British reception of Kant's philosophy generally went through a period of initial enthusiasm, followed by a decline of interest during the Napoleonic wars, succeeded by a revival of interest after 1814. Through the interpretations of Kant given by his British readers, a combination of Kant's and Schelling's philosophies of nature can be followed. In one remarkable synthesis of these perspectives, the British surgeon and comparative anatomist Joseph Henry Green developed in his Hunterian Lectures on Comparative Anatomy a way to combine both Lamarckian and Cuvierian perspectives and to develop a unifying picture of the history of nature that paved the way for Richard Owen's theory of the archetype. This study highlights the importance of an institutional context for the dynamic appropriation of Kantian concepts.

Introduction

Kant's refl ections on issues of biology, teleology, and function, developed particularly in the second part of the Kritik der Urteilskraft of 1790, opened up for his contemporaries and successors several new options for the interpretation of living nature in light of the critical philosophy. If Kant had denied that there ever could be a “Newton of the grassblade,” and seemed, at least until 1790, to restrict the legitimacy of genuine Naturwissenschaft to mathematical physics, he nonetheless offered a new way of looking at the issues of organic phenomena that transcended the categories of mathematical physics. Unintentionally, and even over his own objections, Kant became an important theorist of the “vitalist” revolution of the late eighteenth century in the life sciences taking place around him. This shift in the life sciences opened up new vistas for inquiry into embryology, physiology, the theory of disease, and the “history” of nature. It reinserted the concepts of teleology, vital causes, formal causation, and organicism into mainstream life science. A new distinction of the “organic” and “inorganic,” formally codifi ed in 1800 in Lamarck's conception of a new science of biologie, self-consciously opposed itself to the one-level ontology of inert matter and forces that for many represented the heritage of Newton and the mechanical philosophy.