Contents

Preface

Introduction: Kant’s Organicism

1. Generation and the Task of Classification

Mechanism and the Principle of Life

Leibniz’s Organic Machines

2. Buffon’s Natural History and the Founding of Organicism

Hales and the Physiology of Plants

Buffon the French Newtonian

Maupertuis, Buffon, and the Problem of Form

Natural History and the History of Nature

3. Kant and the Problem of Origin

Kant’s Eclecticism

Matter and Cosmos

The Spectacle of Life

4. The Rebirth of Metaphysics

A Philosophy Is Born

From Original Acquisition to the Epigenesis of Knowledge

Concepts and Objects: Kant’s Letter to Herz, 1772

5. From the Unity of Reason to the Unity of Race

The Unity of Reason

The Unity of Race

A Germ of Reason and a Germ for Race

6. Empirical Psychology in Tetens and Kant

Epigenesis and Evolution in Tetens’s Philosophical Essays

From Empirical Psychology to a Transcendental Theory of Imagination

Transcendental Philosophy and the Physiology of Pure Reason

7. Kant’s Architectonic: System and Organism in the Critique of Pure Reason

The Doctrine of Method: The Bauplan of the System

The Transcendental Deduction: The Bauplan at Work

Organic Logic: A Cautionary Tale

Epilogue: A Daring Adventure of Reason

Notes

Bibliography

Index