Purposiveness, Necessity, and Contingency

This paper investigates the relationship between Kant's analytics of biology, and the metaphysical conceptions of contingency and necessity in §§76–7 of the CPJ. In general, the connection between purposiveness and contingency is attested within the very project of a critique of a power of judgment. Indeed, the many particular, empirical laws of nature seem contingent regarding the universal laws of nature (like Newton's laws of mechanics) that are explicated transcendentally by Kant in the first Critique, and that account for what happens in nature, conceived of as a set of objects under laws. 'Reflective judgment', as explored in the third Critique, deals with such empirical laws, and seeks to discover them when some phenomena are identified: the power of judgment therefore deals with the contingency proper to these laws. Since purposiveness designates the principle proper to the power of judgment (CPJ V 182– 4), a deep connection between purposiveness and contingency will be the object of the transcendental investigation of the power of judgment in the CPJ. The present paper addresses more specifically the connection between contingency and purposiveness as a concept proper to life sciences, namely "natural purposes". My Leitfaden here is the general relation Kant maintains between necessity, purposiveness, and contingency in arguing that purposiveness is the "lawfulness of the contingent as such" (First Introduction XX 217.28). I argue that Kant's understanding of purposiveness as a specific kind of lawlike contingency makes sense of several features of biological judgments, and must in turn be conceived of in relationship with the finiteness as discursiveness of our understanding, because natural purposiveness provides the reflection of such finiteness in a specific concept. This finally provides groundings for the solution of