This project intends to investigate the contentious relation between German idealism and life sciences. It pays, on the one hand, the limited yet due historical attention to the affinity and distance between Darwin’s theory and his German idealistic precursors, and, on the other hand, the major philosophical attention to how German idealistic philosophy takes up the concepts of evolution and living organisation.
I read Kant’s critical philosophy and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie with regard to the so-called inscrutability of the inner possibility of the living organisation. I contend that this problematics of knowing living organisations remains a dialectic, whether approached through a transcendental-logical critique like Kant or through a naturalistic-dynamic construction like Schelling. There is always an epistemological price to pay in claiming a biological cognition. There is a ever present locuna in the ever newly charted biological domain. This fundamental missing invites methodological and disciplinary ramificaitons and interrelations. On the other hand, nevertheless, Kant's and Schelling's sophisticated philosophical considerations provide substantial apparatuses for following appropriations, including Darwin’s evolutionary theory and various modern ideas such as autopoiesis and organisational closure.
The final doctoral dissertation is a collection of four articles, respectively addressing 1) the transcendental logic of Kant’s teleological critique of the concept of a natural purpose; 2) the naturalistic-dynamic construction of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in defining living organisation; 3) the concept of evolution and the possibility of transmutation in Kant and Schelling; and 4) Darwin’s debts to German idealistic and romantic science and philosophy.