Kant's Early Views on Epigenesis: The Role of Maupertuis

Zammito, John H.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511498572.015

Cited by 19 publications

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“…He argues that Kant adopted a position that is "akin to classical accounts of epigenesis" as defended by Aristotle and Harvey, "although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms". Demarest thinks that Kant's account is epigenetic for three reasons: since what is pre-formed is pre-formed as a species only, not as an individual, since Kant has no qualm with the idea of a specific, teleological principle underlying generation, and since Kant In a variety of intense papers, John Zammito (2003Zammito ( , 2006Zammito ( , and 2007 describes various epoches of the adaption to preformationist and epigenetic accounts in Kant's thought, and captures the ambivalence of Kant's position, especially in the KU. Zammito (2003, p. 88) focuses on the influences that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, his student Christoph Girtanner, Georg Forster, and Johann Gottfried Herder had on Kant's accounts of reproduction, especially on his notions of preformation and epigenesis, and notes: "First, Kant had to insist that even epigenesis implied preformation: at the origin there had to be some inexplicable (transcendent) endowment, and with it, in his view, some determinate restriction in species variation.…”

Section: Another Defender Of Epigenetic Claims Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But Aristotle developed his theory of reproduction at a time in which the preformation-epigensis controversy did not exist yet, at least not in a literal sense, and never called or even considered himself a defender of epigenesis. Aristotle is not, what Demarest calls a 'fixist epigenesist', as Goy (2018) has John Zammito (2003Zammito ( , 2006Zammito ( , 2007Zammito ( , and 2016 points out that Kant holds ambivalent views with regard to preformationist and epigenetic accounts of reproduction and heredity in different periods of his thought and that Kant was never entirely comfortable with epigenesis. Zammito bases his arguments often on detailed and learned reconstructions of Kant's relations to thinkers who held preformationist or epigenetic views, and investigates their mutual influences.…”

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Kant’s views on preformation and epigenesis

Goy

2023

Kant e-prints

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How does Kant repsond to the early modern preformation-epigenesis controversy? In part 1 of the paper, I will introduce the historical context: I provide an overview of important systematic characteristics of ovistic and animalculist preformationist (1.1) and mechanical and vitalistic epigenetic (1.2) early modern accounts of reproduction and heredity. In part 2 of the paper, I will introduce the scholarly debate (2.1) about Kant’s reception of the early modern controversy: while no one considers Kant a radical defender of preformation, some scholars consider him a more or less radical defender of epigenesis. A greater number of scholars read Kant’s position as a combination of preformationist and epigenetic elements. Others ignore or even deny any influence of the preformation-epigenesis controversy on Kant. Based on an analysis of preformationist (2.2) and epigenetic elements (2.3) in Kant’s relevant writings, I will support scholars (2.4) who claim that Kant’s position contains both, preformationist and epigenetic elements, but will do so on a far more comprehensive analysis of criteria. I will also go beyond existing discussions deciding whether Kant’s account was closer to ovistic or animalculist variants of preformation, and mechanical or vitalistic variants of epigenesis.

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Section: Another Defender Of Epigenetic Claims Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Kant’s views on preformation and epigenesis

Goy

2023

Kant e-prints

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“…In a series of careful and trenchant studies over the past three decades, John H. Zammito has demonstrated that the regulative theory of self‐organization Kant presented in his third Critique was not so much representative of epigenesis theory as a reaction formation against its radical ontological and naturalistic implications; see Zammito (, , , , , , ). On instrumentalism, see Jackson ().…”

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“…Whether Kant's theory of “self‐organization” is a theory of “epigenesis” is in fact a matter of dispute in the history and philosophy of science; see Roe (), Goldstein (), as well as Zammito (, , , , , , ) and note 3, above.…”

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Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

Goldstein

2020

Literature Compass

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This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th-century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called "biosemiotics." I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity-concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuroscience, but also in continental theory and philosophychallenges these present discourses to grasp mimesis, poiesis, and rhetoric as intrinsic to the logic of life and to any possible science of the biological sign. Uncovering this possibility means displacing Catherine Malabou's influential neo-Kantian approach to plasticity, which, like that of Kant himself, works to suppress the natural histories of meaning that epigenesis opened in the late 18th, as well as the late 20th, centuries. From the alternative, materialist perspective opened in Erasmus Darwin's work, rhetoric and poetics are implicated in the historical and actual conceptualization of epigenetic plasticity and biosemiosis not because biology is a fictive discourse, but because neural formation and communication actually comprise processes of transposition, association, double-meaning, part-for-whole substitution, and species-specific distortion for which metaphor, metonymy, allegory, synecdoche, and (anthropo-)morphism are technically correct and illuminating names. From this perspective, the most baffling and notorious feature of Erasmus Darwin's own use of words can also be conceived anew. His

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Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology

Goldstein

2017

HPLS

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Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic "self-organization" as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous "self-organization" in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of "self-organization," allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.

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Kant's Early Views on Epigenesis: The Role of Maupertuis

Cited by 19 publications

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Kant’s views on preformation and epigenesis

Kant’s views on preformation and epigenesis

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology

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