Towards a Modern Philosophy of Biology: Critique of the Teleological Judgment

The article considers the Kantian methodology of the studies of living nature systematically detailed in the Critique of Judgment. The relevance of the work lies in the fact that critical epistemology is associated with a conceptual shift in the problem of substantiation of scientific knowledge. Critique of the teleological judgement, forming the second part of the Critique of Judgment, is the completion of Kantian epistemology. The teleological method, initially rejected in Kant's justification of science, was justified in the study of the organic world. The article shows that the turn to the development of the methodology of biological knowledge is associated with the internal logic of Kant's system, and its development has led to the development of important principles of biological knowledge. In contrast to natural philosophy, Kant's critique of the teleological judgment was based on the scientific knowledge of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, many biological disciplines emerged or took shape, and its characteristic feature was the penetration of experimental methods into the practice of studying the organic world. In biological research, the difference and contradiction between the causal and teleological approaches to the understanding of life phenomena was clearly marked. The desire to determine the specifics of the object of research and the features of biology itself as a science occupied many major scientists. The key idea of Kant's methodology of biology is as follows: in the study of the organic world, the researcher has the right to use one of the alternative languages, the use of each of which is equally legitimate. Kant admits that living systems can be thought in fundamentally different ways: causally and purposefully, on the basis of mechanical explanation and teleological understanding. The methodology he developed has become a consistent application of the principle of complementarity in the study of life. Causal explanations can never go beyond the mechanism of nature. However, this approach is not the only acceptable one. In the study of living nature, it can be supplemented by the teleological approach, when organisms are thought of as purposeful systems. The idea of internal expediency is the second basic principle of Kant's methodology of cognition of the living. Teleology in Kant's interpretation does not claim to know the organic world, but equips researchers with regulatory principles through which it becomes possible to study nature. It is concluded that in the Critique of Judgment the essential characteristics of biological reality and logical-epistemological parameters of its study are determined.

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