Kant's Notion of Intrinsic Purposiveness in the Critique of Judgment A Review Essay (and an Inversion) of Zuckert's Kant on Beauty and Biology

Zuckert's Kant on Beauty and Biology (2007) marks an important moment in the re assessment of Kant's conception of organismic purposiveness. This essay first offers a grasp of Zuckert's accomplishment, then tries to draw from it-against the grain of her reading and, indeed, against Kant's own view-support for a post Kantian recognition of (objective) intrinsic purposiveness in organisms as a feature of the natural world, not just our cognitive limitations. The whole language of purposiveness with reference to biology, Zuckert correctly observes, is an act of "domestication" to the critical system, at the ex pense of any objectivity in the discernment of organisms in nature. But it is Kant's system of science that needs to be "domesticated" to the actuality of nature: this is a "constraint" that Zuckert insists the world must, even for Kant, exercise upon our logical construals.