Reply to van den Berg

In the Spring of 2002, Phillip Sloan, an expert on the history of the eighteenthcentury life sciences—and on the French naturalist Georges Buffon in particular— published a paper on Kant in the Journal of the History of Philosophy. As an historian, Sloan was interested in fitting together various statements scattered across Kant’s works that seemed to be making use of vocabulary borrowed from the life sciences. There were a number of candidates for investigation, but in this paper Sloan focused especially on three areas: on Kant’s use of Keim and Anlage in his anthropological writings, on his appeal to ‘generic preformation’ for understanding species fixity in the third Critique, and most significantly for our purposes here, on his use of the terms ‘epigenesis’, generatio aequivoca, and ‘preformation’ in the reworked centrepiece discussion of the second edition Critique of Pure Reason (1787), namely the ‘Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding’. In his piece, Sloan carefully laid out the historical background necessary for appreciating the different generation theories in play during Kant’s day. After gathering the evidence, he concluded that Kant’s theory of cognition demonstrated ‘a strongly limited version of epigenetic theory’, according to which the categories, while not ‘individually specific and implanted at the creation by an external deity’, were nonetheless significantly constrained. When Kant identified his own account with epigenesis, Sloan argued, he never intended to endorse a ‘a full-blown epigenetic thesis of some kind that overtly rejected the theory of preformed Keime and Anlagen’, because this sort of thesis would ‘mean that there would be no a priori structuring of the course of development, and all developing properties would be only as determined by a dynamic, plastic, vital force. This would undermine the fixity and determinate character of the categories and the stability of the species’ (all citations 2002:245)