Nature Looks Designed. Is It?
Reed Winegar
In this lecture, Reed Winegar explores Kant's complex treatment of natural teleology across his career, with a focus on the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The lecture begins by situating Kant's interest in teleology within the broader architecture of the three Critiques, particularly the gulf between freedom and nature. Winegar then traces Kant's engagement with physico-theology from the early Beweisgrund through the first Critique's rejection of traditional arguments for God's existence. The heart of the lecture examines how the third Critique develops a nuanced position on organisms as self-organizing beings that resist mechanical explanation, while also resisting the physico-theological argument. Winegar analyzes Kant's discussion of the intuitive understanding, the three options regarding organisms and the supersensible, and why teleological thinking remains necessary despite its limits. The lecture concludes by showing how Kant's account of teleology ultimately connects to the highest good, unifying our practical and theoretical engagements with the world.
Suggested reading:
Associated Kant Readings:
Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic: The Ideal of Pure Reason, Of the Impossibility of a Physico-Theological Proof and the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic
Critique of the Power of Judgment, Preface and Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment
The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of God (often simply called the "Beweisgrund")
Winegar further examines Kant's critical attitude towards physico-theology in "Kant's Criticisms of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23: 888-910 (2015).
Winegar discusses Kant's notion of intuitive understanding further in "Kant on Intuitive Understanding and Things in Themselves," European Journal of Philosophy 26: 1238-1252 (2018) and "Kant on God's Intuitive Understanding: Interpreting CJ §76's Modal Claims," Kantian Review 22: 305-29.
Winegar further treats the relationship between teleology in nature and Kant's moral teleology in "Why is there Something rather than Nothing? Kant on the Final End of Creation," Kant on Freedom and Human Nature, edited by Luigi Filieri and Soie Möller, Routledge (2023).
For another influential assessment of what the third Critique adds to Kant's overall moral picture that Kant's earlier Critiques did not already address, see Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, Cambridge University Press (1993).
For a prior suggestion that Kant's conception of human being in the Critique of the Power Judgment should be understood in terms of the traditional notion of a rational animal, see Otfried Höffe, "Der Mensch als Endzweck (§§82-84)," Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, edited by Otfried Höffe, de Gruyter (2018).
