Teleology and the organism: Kant's controversial legacy for contemporary biology

This paper distinguishes two ways in which Kant's ideas concerning the relation between teleology and biological organization have been taken up in contemporary philosophy of biology and theoretical biology. The first sees his account as the first instance of the modern understanding of teleology as a heuristic tool aimed at producing mechanistic explanations of organismal form and function. The second sees in Kant's concept of intrinsic purposiveness the seed of a radically new way of thinking about biological systems that should be developed by turning teleology into a legitimate concept of natural science. We name the two approaches heuristic and naturalistic, respectively. Our aim is to critically evaluate these approaches and suggest that the naturalistic option, which remains a minority position, deserves to be taken more seriously than it currently is in contemporary biological theory. While evolution by natural selection closes the case on intelligent design, it does not close the case on teleology in general. In fact, the current return of the organism and the recent calls for an agential perspective in evolutionary biology point out that we still have some thinking to do concerning this side of Kant's legacy.