Precis of Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

It is hard to say where intellectual history belongs at present. It has almost entirely disappeared from the history departments in the USA, and the anti-historical bias of philosophy departments there is of course well-known. Indeed, the sign Gilbert Harman put on his door at Princeton - “History of Philosophy: Just Say No!”—has become the stuff of legend. This attitude on the part of analytic philosophers has perhaps softened in recent years, but it has not changed the fact that scholars doing intellectual history are now more likely to be found in English and German departments than anywhere else. Even in these settings, however, amidst the intellectual energy and fun you generally find among the eighteenth-century studies crowd, the history of science captures only a marginal interest. “You’re doing history of science?”, a friend from the history department once said, “now that’s a real ghetto!” When I began to think about a book on Kant and the life sciences, the idea that Kant would ever have been influenced by the ideas coming out of this field seemed impossible to believe. In fact I spent an entire Summer determined to prove that my thesis was wrong. The problem was, I kept finding evidence in support of it (fully one third of Kant’s Organicism is devoted to a glut of historical research filling up the endnotes, research stemming, for the most part, from an initial disbelief in my own hypothesis). The majority of the scholars who had considered this connection before me had had their training in the history of science. My situation was different, I had been trained in philosophy. I knew my Descartes but I had never read Harvey; I had written on Locke but I had never heard of Ray.