History

Naturalism' is the aspiration of contemporary philosophy of biology, and Kant simply cannot be refashioned into a naturalist. Instead, epistemological 'deflation' was the decisive feature of Kant's treatment of the 'biomedical' science in his day, so it is not surprising that this might attract some philosophers of science to him today. A certain sense of impasse in the contemporary 'function talk' seems to motivate renewed interest in Kant. Kant-drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors-provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that it was impossible to explain it. Its 'inscrutability' was intrinsic. The third Critique essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of pre-scientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity, to have its 'Newton of the blade of grass'. By contrast, for Locke, and a fortiori for Buffon and his followers, 'intrinsic purposiveness' was a fact of the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant's distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. If biology must conceptualize self-organization as actual in the world, Kant's regulative/ constitutive distinction is pointless in practice and the (naturalist) philosophy of biology has urgent work to undertake for which Kant turns out not to be very helpful.

The essay, 'A renewed attempt to answer the question: "Is the human race continually improving?"' appeared as Part II of Kant's 1798 publication, The conflict of the faculties, where it was subordinated under a second title: 'The conflict of the philosophy faculty with the faculty of law'. How did this new situation (and title) affects the meaning of the essay? My argument considers first, the conflict of the faculty of philosophy with the faculty of law; second, the earlier philosophy of history Kant had developed; and, finally, the revision of this position in 'A renewed attempt'. The situation of his argument in the contest between the philosophical and the legal faculties points to other veins of argumentation in Kant's political theory, particularly his appeal to a principle of publicity, but they hardly achieve the theoretical clarity or the systematic centrality they should command. They are displaced in the quest for prediction of th...

Timothy Lenoir launched the historical study of German life science at the end of the 18th century with the claim that J. F. Blumenbach's approach was shaped by his reception of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant: a 'teleomechanism' that adopted a strictly 'regulative' approach to the character of organisms. It now appears that Lenoir was wrong about Blumenbach's understanding of Kant, for Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb entailed an actual empirical claim. Moreover, he had worked out the decisive contours of his theory and he had exerted his maximal influence on the so-called 'Göttingen School' before 1795, when Lenoir posits the main influence of Kant's thought took hold. This has crucial significance for the historical reconstruction of the German life sciences in the period. The Lenoir thesis can no longer serve as the point of departure for that reconstruction. 1 'My principal thesis is that the development of biology in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century was guided by a core of ideas and a program for research set forth initially during the 1790s. The clearest formulation of those ideas is to be found in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. I do not claim that German biologists discovered a program of research in Kant's writings which they set out to realize in practice rather that in the latter part of the eighteenth century a number of biologists were seeking to establish a foundation for constructing a consistent body of unified theory for the life sciences which could adapt the methods and conceptual framework of Newtonian science to the special requirements of investigating biological organisms. Kant stepped into this ongoing dialogue and set forth a clear synthesis. It was through Blumenbach and his students that Kant's special brand of teleology entered biology.

Ankersmit's articulation of a postmodern theory of history takes seriously both the strengths of traditional historicism and the right of historians to decide what makes sense for disciplinary practice. That makes him an exemplary interlocutor. Ankersmit proposes a theory of historical "representation" which radicalizes the narrative approach to historiography along the lines of poststructuralist textualism. Against this postmodernism but invoking some of his own arguments, I defend the traditional historicist position. I formulate criticisms of the theory of reference entailed in his notion of "narrative substance," of his master analogy of historiography with modern painting, and finally of his characterization of historical hermeneutics. In each case I find him guilty of the hyperbole which he himself cautions against. While it is true that historical narratives cannot be taken to be transparent, in taking them to be opaque Ankersmit puts himself in an untenable position. Finally, Ankersmit seeks to buttress his theoretical case by an interpretation of the new cultural historical texts of authors like Davis and Ginzburg. While this is a concreteness heartily to be welcomed in philosophers of history, I cannot find his construction of this new school's work plausible.

Epigenesis has become a far more exciting issue in Kant studies recently, especially with the publication of Jennifer Mensch’s Kant’ Organicism. In my commentary, I propose to clarify my own position on epigenesis relative to that of Mensch by once again considering the discourse of epigenesis in the wider eighteenth century. In order to situate more precisely what Kant made of it in his own thought, I distinguish the metaphysical use Kant made of epigenesis from his rejection of its aptness as a theory for life science. In that light, I raise questions about the scope and authority of philosophy vis a vis natural science.

The notion of Trieb, constitutive for Blumenbch's greatest conceptual intervention, the Bildungstrieb, intentionally separated it from the other Bildungskräfte that had been identified in the physical (and even the organic) world. This discrimination proved decisive for Kant (and, later still, to Goethe and Schelling). Thus we must endeavor to reconstruct the source and the significance of Blumenbach's conceptual departure. My argument will be that in his turn to Trieb, Blumenbach drew upon the pioneering work of Hermann Reimarus. Thus, my argument will have three components: first, the conceptualization of Trieb in Reimarus; second, the introduction of that term into Blumenbach's own theorizing, in the notion Bildungstrieb; and, finally, how that figured in the reception of Blumenbach by Kant.

The notion of Trieb, constitutive for Blumenbch's greatest conceptual intervention, the Bildungstrieb, intentionally separated it from the other Bildungskräfte that had been identified in the physical (and even the organic) world. This discrimination proved decisive for Kant (and, later still, to Goethe and Schelling). Thus we must endeavor to reconstruct the source and the significance of Blumenbach's conceptual departure. My argument will be that in his turn to Trieb, Blumenbach drew upon the pioneering work of Hermann Reimarus. Thus, my argument will have three components: first, the conceptualization of Trieb in Reimarus; second, the introduction of that term into Blumenbach's own theorizing, in the notion Bildungstrieb; and, finally, how that figured in the reception of Blumenbach by Kant.

Marx is dead. Long live Marx. Such a slogan still has appeal even in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the jarring political transformations in Eastern Europe, and the attendant crises these have provoked within almost every strand of Marxian theory. Marx's own time was similarly marked by a series of turbulent social, political, and economic upheavals, all of which helped shape and produce Marxism. So it should come as little surprise that this newest wave of global crises has spurred renewed interest in Marxism, in its origins, and in its continued contemporary relevance. In his 1999 Cambridge University Press book, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self, Warren Breckman provides us with a post-Marxist intellectual history of pre-Marxist social and political thought. Favoring a more nuanced account of the relationship between the overtly political writings of the young Marx and the more theologically oriented Young Hegelians, Breckman emphasizes the continuities and shared concerns that exist between the two rather than their more commonly highlighted disparities.

This article suggests that the ‘Disputation of Ceuta’ provides a link between the Christian anti-Jewish polemical discourse of the twelfth century, produced largely for internal consumption, and the active missionising of the thirteenth century. Having purportedly taken place in the North African port of Ceuta between a Christian merchant from Genoa and a Jew from Ceuta at the time of Almohad rule (1179), the disputation displays the signs of a major shift in the Christian contra Judaeos strategies. Unlike other twelfth-century works of
this genre, which address a variety of points central to Jewish-Christian debate, the Ceuta Disputation is remarkably consistent in its emphasis on one particular issue e that of the
coming of the Messiah. The messianic content of this disputation thus foreshadows the central thrust of the thirteenth-century Dominican mission to the Jews, which finds its fullest
expression at the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. The article explains the prominence of this theme in the period by suggesting that the extraordinary emphasis on the Messiah in the Ceuta Disputation could be the result of the Christian protagonist’s meeting with the North African Jew face-to-face and discovering that the Messianic promise was a subject of considerable interest for his opponent. More importantly, regardless of whether the discussion in Ceuta had or had not taken place, the new Christian attitude towards anti-Jewish polemics expressed in the Disputation’s text was most likely inspired by real-life discussions between Jews and Christians.