«Transcendentalism» and «Transformism»

Kantian Inheritances in the Evolutionary Biology of Yesterday and Today

Abstract

The first two sections of this paper document the fact that Kant disseminated cautious but clear references to the then emerging question of the fixity or modifiability of species throughout his written production, taking a stand, albeit oscillations and ambiguities that recent studies have highlighted (Wilson 2005; Zammito 2012; Gambarotto, Nahas 2022), in favor of the idea of a common origin of all the living beings and of the hypothesis of  the animal origin of man. The third paragraph suggests some reflections on the tension between the transcendental and the historical-genealogical approach that runs through the Kantian anthropological writings. According to the first the way the basic forms of human knowledge are organized is totally independent of human experience, prehistory and history. For the second, however, these forms have evolved precisely through the confrontation of human groups with the difficulties and opportunities that their living environments presented. This tension, which does not seem to find full theoretical reconciliation in Kant’s writings, gave rise, in the following centuries, to numerous attempts to make the connection between natural history and forms of knowledge comprehensible, through a historical-genealogical reinterpretation of the Kantian theoretical apriorism and methodological finalism. The last three paragraphs briefly reconstruct some developments of three Kantian issues in the evolutionary biology of the twentieth century and in the contemporary evo-devo biology: a. the question: how to rethink the Kantian distinction between a priori and a posteriori in physiological and genealogical, historical-cultural and biographical terms, after the discovery of genetic and epigenetic inheritance? b. the question of the «regulatory» use of the Kantian teleological model in evolutionary biology; c. the question of the functions that the Kantian concept of the organism as both an organized and a self-organizing being» can perform in the current evo-devo biology.