Kant’s account of organic form

This chapter discusses a reconstruction of Immanuel Kant’s account of organic form. It argues that Kant’s account of organic form has at least three essential features: organisms have interdependent parts and wholes, the interdependence of part and wholes proper to organisms are contingent rather than necessary, and organic parts and wholes can be properly characterized in reflective judgments as reciprocal means-end or purposive relations. The chapter shows that Kant’s conception of the unity of organic forms operates with an epistemological formalism or one-sidedness and that a stronger epistemological realism involved in a phenomenological approach can provide a better alternative. It also argues argue that this phenomenological alternative is uniquely suited to philosophically complement the notion of “growth form” in Eugene Warming’s pioneering approach to physiographic ecology. The chapter suggests that proximate explanations in functional biology are indispensable and legitimate features of contemporary biological inquiry.