Aaron Wells (University of Notre Dame)
Recent scholarship has highlighted Kant's contributions to debates in the life sciences, but comparatively little attention has been paid to his engagement with Linnaeus's 'Economy of Nature' program. As this paper explores, Kant argues that there is no need, even in a merely 'regulative' sense, to posit teleological relationships between species in a community. Unlike some contemporary arguments, Kant's does not proceed from a priori reductionism but attempts to show that living collectivities fail empirically to meet key conditions of teleological organization - especially mutual causal determination - in any non-accidental way.
