ABSTRACT
The analysis of the concept of purposiveness preoccupied Kant in various ways. We have seen how, around the time of his “essays on races,” animals and plants required a teleology, even though in the first Critique, life enjoyed no particular positive status, and purposiveness immediately sounded as a language generalized to nature overall. In this sense, his teleology of the living creature in development, materialized in the vocabulary of germs and dispositions, required a re-elaboration of the concept of purposiveness.
