Kant and biological evolution, contra Ralph Cudworth’s deus ex machina
Abstract
The relationship between Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and the modern theory of biological evolution has been a topic of much scholarly debate with little consensus. It has been generally contended that the amassed confusions about Kant’s views are due to ambiguities in his own thinking, and, as such, perplexed interpretations subsequent to his writings were broadly articulated even in 19th-century Germany. More recent philosophers have sought to emphasize how Kant changed his mind from 1785 when he found evolutionary theories “so monstrous that reason recoils before them” to a reconsideration that “one species would have arisen from the other” as a mere “daring adventure of reason” in 1790. Alternatively, this paper will argue that Kant’s philosophical commitments to biological evolution can be traced to an earlier point, specifically, in his encounter with the deus ex machina concept of Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) in his True Intellectual System, translated at Jena in 1733. Kant had read Cudworth’s text sometime before writing his Universal Natural History in 1755, influencing his professed adherence to universal physical laws and metaphysical teleology, as well as his opposition to the deus ex machina fallacy of divine interference in the natural biological order. Similar arguments against the deus ex machina concept are also frequently found among evolutionary biologists throughout the 19th–20th centuries, thus placing the pre-critical Kant even among their philosophical ranks. This paper will evaluate these important sources and demonstrate Kant’s continuing relevance to the philosophy of evolutionary biology, including his perspective on teleological judgments.
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