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Two Kinds of Mechanical Inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle

KANT’S ANTINOMY OF TELEOLOGICAL JUDGMENT describes an apparent opposition between two maxims or principles of scientific investigation. According to the first, or mechanical, principle, “all production of material things and their forms must be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws” (§70, 387).1 According to the second, or teleological principle, “some products of material nature cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws (their judging requires quite another law of causality, namely that of final causes)” (ibid.). What necessitates this second principle is the existence of what Kant calls “organized beings,” that is plants and animals. For these, Kant claims, cannot be mechanically explained by human beings. As he puts it in a famous passage, “it is quite certain that we cannot sufficiently get to know, still less explain, organized things and their inner possibility according to merely mechanical principles of explanation; so certain indeed that we can say boldly that it is absurd for human beings even merely to envisage such an attempt, or to hope that some day another Newton could arise who would make conceivable even so much as the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no intention has ordered” (§75, 400). What does Kant mean by saying, in this context, that organisms are mechanically inexplicable? Some recent discussions appear to link the answer to a distinc-