‘This inscrutable principle of an original organization’: epigenesis and ‘looseness of fit’ in Kant’s philosophy of science

Zammito, John H.

doi:10.1016/s0039-3681(02)00092-4

Cited by 49 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…52 On these questions, their context, and the preformationism debate throughout the century, see Roger (1963), Roe (1980), Reill (1998Reill ( , 1999, Bowler (1971). On Kant's position see Sloan (2002); Ingensiep (1990); for a contrasted account of Kant's epigeneticism, Zammito (2003) vs. Huneman (2007). 53 On Kant's theories of heredity and generation, among numerous valuable contributions, see Lenoir (1980); Sloan (1979); Richards (2000).…”

Section: Leibniz Kant and Generation: Some Prospective Insightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kant vs. Leibniz in the Second Antinomy: Organisms Are Not Infinitely Subtle Machines

Huneman

2014

Kant-Studien

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This paper interprets the two pages devoted in the Critique of Pure Reason to a critique of Leibniz's view of organisms as infinitely organized machines. It argues that this issue of organisms represents a crucial test-case for Kant in regard to the conflicting notions of space, continuity and divisibility held by classical metaphysics and by criticism. I first present Leibniz's doctrine and its justification. In a second step, I explain the general reasoning by which Kant defines the problem of the Antinomies, and then I specify the case of the Second Antinomy. Then, I ask why the organism raises specific issues for Kant's solution of the Second Antinomy, and why it sheds light on the nature of Leibniz's metaphysical assumptions about organisms. The last section considers this critique of Leibniz from the perspective of Kant's future theory of organisms in the third Critique, specifying its role in the development of a Kantian view of organisms with regard to the changes occurring at the same time in the life sciences.

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Section: Leibniz Kant and Generation: Some Prospective Insightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kant vs. Leibniz in the Second Antinomy: Organisms Are Not Infinitely Subtle Machines

Huneman

2014

Kant-Studien

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“…22 By the time of the third Critique in 1790, Kant had reconciled these opposed goals through a conception of epigenesis as an emergent vital materialism guided by ''internally purposive predispositions that were imparted to its stock,'' or what he called ''generic preformation.'' 23 Kant was able to grant epigenesis a leading role only by merging within this concept both the idea of selfgeneration and the caveat that this generation occurred within the boundaries of fixed types (i.e., Kant's epigenesis was not a mechanism of continuous random variation, as in Darwinian differentiation).…”

Section: Computational Epigenesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Beauty, Genius, Epigenesis: The Kantian Origins of Contemporary Architecture

Keller

2012

Journal of Architectural Education

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This essay explores parallels between computationally based architecture—here represented by the work of Greg Lynn—and three major themes in the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant: aesthetic value (beauty), artistic generation (genius), and natural generation (epigenesis). Further, it interprets architecture’s place within Kant’s aesthetics as antinomic—that is to say, inexorably contradictory—and suggests that this interpretation offers a theoretical basis for the entanglement of computational methods with typological concerns.

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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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confidence: 99%

“…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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confidence: 99%

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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‘This inscrutable principle of an original organization’: epigenesis and ‘looseness of fit’ in Kant’s philosophy of science

Cited by 49 publications

References 27 publications

Kant vs. Leibniz in the Second Antinomy: Organisms Are Not Infinitely Subtle Machines

Kant vs. Leibniz in the Second Antinomy: Organisms Are Not Infinitely Subtle Machines

Beauty, Genius, Epigenesis: The Kantian Origins of Contemporary Architecture

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

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