quote:
Originally posted by Punisher:
Has anyone read his work "Critique of Pure Reason"? I haven't put this in book review forum because I wanted to get evo's opinions regarding his influence. I've read only excerpts thus far.
I'm not sure what you're after, but I'll try to answer - Kant touches on issues which relate to the philosophy of science in many places, but his influence is still most strongly felt in ethics and the theory of mathematics.
He did have some interesting views on teleology (very roughly, the argument from design), for example that we can use the "design inference", as it would now be called, to study nature to "bring it under principles of observation and research by analogy to the causality that looks to ends, while not pretending to explain it by this means."
Kant recognised that the processes of life undoubtedly affected the development of living things, but saw also that the results appeared to meet needs that had not yet arisen, as if the processes were directed towards some end. But he rejected that any influence of a designing God could be seen in this because it was not objectively defensible. "No synthetical proposition can be made with
reference to what is beyond sensory perception."
Kant does see an analogy between thinking about nature as a purposive system and theology - he often describes it as logically equivalent: "it must be a matter of complete indifference to us ... whether we say that God in his wisdom has willed it to be so, or that nature has wisely arranged it thus."
God
is the underlying order of nature and talk of God is not needed to explain nature. Indeed to explain how God and the world relate is outwith the realms of possible experience.
It would be most interesting to know what Kant would make of modern evolutionary and views of nature as a self-organizing system, but of course we can only speculate.
His work has had great influence on the Gaia movement.
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