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Posted: 03 Mar 2023

Taken: 02 Mar 2023

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Idea of a Universal History •
with a Cosmopolitan Aim •
Immanuel Kant •
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Amelie Rorty •
James Schmidt •
Alex Rosenberg •
Alex Rosenberg II IMage •

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There is no Newton of a blade of grass

There is no Newton of a blade of grass
www.ipernity.com/doc/308605/45814598

Nouchetdu38, Fred Fouarge, Heide, Makrofan and 4 other people have particularly liked this photo

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.20381#:~:text=In%201790%2C%20Immanuel%20Kant%20makes,inanimate%20matter%E2%80%9D%20%5B1%5D.



In 1790, Immanuel Kant makes the famous statement in his critique of judgment: “there will never be a Newton of the blade of grass, because human science will never be able to explain how a living being can originate from inanimate matter” [1].1 The German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, about 70 years later, celebrates Charles Darwin to be such a “Newton of the grass blade” [2] Haeckel's enthusiasm about Darwin was not shared among his contemporaries and is not too widespread today, although the path-breaking role of Darwin's scholarly work is not the least doubted or questioned. The American philosopher, physicist, and molecular biologist, Evelyn Fox Keller, says that considering Darwin as the Newton of biology is simply wrong: [3] “Darwin himself has systematically avoided dwelling upon the question how life has originated from inanimate materials. Natural selection begins with a living cell.” Kant's statement has a philosophical dimension and clearly addresses the popular origin-of-life [4] problem that will not be pursued further here. At the same time, Kant's issue has a historical and a technical scientific issue, which boils down to the problem of erecting modern biology on a solid basement of physics and chemistry supported by mathematics or in other words, bridging the gap between physics and chemistry on one side and biology on the other. Precisely, it is the relation between mathematics, physics, and biology that we shall try to illustrate in the light of historical developments and present-day life sciences.

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15 months ago. Edited 15 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Kant is insistent that all genuine explanation in natural science is mechanistic. Although there is some controversy about what this means, I take the basic idea to be that the explanation of all physical wholes must be in terms of the causal and reciprocal interaction of their parts. But according to Kant, living organisms cannot be understood in this way, since the function and interaction of their parts can be understood only in relation to the whole. In short, in the case of organic beings, the whole is (conceptually) prior to parts. That is why Kant notoriously denied that there could ever be a Newton to a blade of grass. ~ Page 32.

KANT'S Udea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim
15 months ago. Edited 15 months ago.
 Stephan Fey
Stephan Fey club
Very nice capture with the drops hanging on the grass!
15 months ago.
 Makrofan
Makrofan club
Sehr schöne Aufnahme!
15 months ago.

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