Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, 100 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2020 Oct;83:101294. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2020.101294. Epub 2020 Jun 23.
Ecology arguably has roots in eighteenth-century natural histories, such as Linnaeus's economy of nature, which pressed a case for holistic and final-causal explanations of organisms in terms of what we'd now call their environment. After sketching Kant's arguments for the indispensability of final-causal explanation merely in the case of individual organisms, and considering the Linnaean alternative, this paper examines Kant's critical response to Linnaean ideas. I argue that Kant does not explicitly reject Linnaeus's holism. But he maintains that the indispensability of final-causal explanation depends on robust modal connections between types of organism and their functional parts; relationships in Linnaeus's economy of nature, by contrast, are relatively contingent. Kant's framework avoids strong metaphysical assumptions, is responsive to empirical evidence, and can be fruitfully compared with some contemporary approaches to biological organization.
生态学可以说起源于 18 世纪的自然史，例如林奈的《自然经济》，它根据我们现在所说的环境，对生物体进行整体的和最终因果的解释。在简述了康德关于仅在个体生物体的情况下最终因果解释的不可或缺性的论点，并考虑了林奈选择之后，本文考察了康德对林奈思想的批判反应。我认为，康德并没有明确拒绝林奈的整体论。但是，他坚持认为，最终因果解释的不可或缺性取决于生物体及其功能部分之间的稳健模态关系；相比之下，林奈的自然经济中的关系则相对偶然。康德的框架避免了强烈的形而上学假设，对经验证据有反应，并且可以与一些当代生物学组织方法进行有益的比较。
