Kant’s Natural Teleology? The Case of Physical Geography

The article comprehensively examines Kant’s conceptions of organisms, animals, nature’s agency, and apparent design in essays and physical geography from the 1750s to 1790s: manuscripts “Holstein”, “Kaehler”, “Dönhoff”, and “Dohna”. The methodological distinctions between empirical science and pure, transcendental philosophy, and between popular, worldly philosophy and scholastic philosophy, are crucial for understanding his use of teleological principles in the geography course. Kant applies teleological principles to nature in a rather ‘direct’ fashion in these lectures, although this should not be taken to mean that he considers the teleological judging of organisms to be incompatible with judging them mechanistically.