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  • Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy by Jennifer Mensch
  • Jocelyn Holland
Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy. By Jennifer Mensch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 246. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 978-0226021980.

For all the subtleties of its argument, the thesis underlying Kant’s Organicism is striking for its clarity and the new perspectives it opens into both Kant’s precritical work and the conception of his Critique of Pure Reason. Simply put, Mensch’s study is devoted to showing how epigenesist models of organic generation dating from the mid- to late eighteenth century “had a significant role to play in Kant’s theory of cognition,” such that one could even speak of an “epigenesist philosophy of mind” (2).

Rather than limiting her discussion to the years surrounding the first critique, Mensch devotes as much attention to the precritical decades. She offers her readers a thorough review of the debates between preformative and epigenesist theories of reproduction that flourished during that time period, particularly as they relate to theories of species classification, and details Kant’s response to them in his essays and academic lectures. The beginning of her study describes the theories of Locke and Buffon in their historical context and concludes with Buffon’s attempt to “grasp a living nature, to grasp species across time and, as a consequence, to base the classification of species upon genealogy” (50)—a project that sought the underlying unity of nature, rather than divisions. The narrative then reconsiders this idea from the perspective of Kantian metaphysics. Mensch describes how Kant borrows from the language of life sciences (embryological debates) in his discussions of metaphysics, which he sought to “redefine … as a science of limits, of claims limited by the extent and possibilities of our knowledge” (53). The question of limits also informs the discussions of organic constructions, which “could not be grasped through mechanical laws” (56).

For a reader who admittedly falls into the category Mensch refers to as those “literary critics and historians” who “pay tribute” to Kant’s contributions to organicist thinking almost exclusively with reference to the third critique (2), Mensch’s discussion of the years from around 1769–1771 are the most interesting and informative. She describes how Kant struggled with the problem of surreptitious concepts, i.e., “the crossing of fields of knowledge meant to be separate,” (70) as he attempted to navigate between two models while adhering to his belief that “cognition as twofold exercise, both sensitive and intellectual” (79). On the one hand, she writes that he could not be satisfied with “Locke’s account of empirical concepts abstracted from the senses,” yet on the other hand, “the harvesting of truths grown up from seeds that God had sown in the mind” (the model that preformation theory provided) was also unsatisfactory given that Kant sought to avoid innate ideas. Mensch makes a convincing case (while remaining cognizant of the limited material available) when she argues that in rejecting supernatural and mechanical accounts of generation it seems likely that Kant had some form of epigenesis in mind when describing the mind’s [End Page 162] generation or ‘original acquisition’ of concepts” (80). In this discussion Mensch also raises an intriguing question—one taken up again at the end of the book—about the difference between Kant’s appropriation of epigenesis in the context of metaphysics and his actual views on organic theory in the life sciences. The first context in which this question arises is when Kant introduces an explicit discussion of epigenesis into his 1769 course on metaphysics even though at that time, Mensch notes, most of Kant’s commentary to Baumgarten’s metaphysics prefers preexistence theory. In notes from just a few years later, composed after the writing of the Dissertation, she also shows how Kant connects theories of generation to systems of reason and claims regarding the origin of ideas, writing that although it “cannot be said for certain that Kant took as his model when first drawing up his account of the origin of knowledge in 1770 … evidence from 1769 suggests it” (81). This same constellation returns at the end...

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