2.2 The Teleomechanists And Embryology
Last modified 07/04/2008
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As a further exploration of the 'evolution of evolutionism' we should note
that in the wake of Kant's critical philosophy with its discourse on issues of
teleology we find a school of biologists associated with his views, the
so-called teleomechanists, who in the spectrum of the Nature Philosophy of the
generation of the post-Kantian Hegel, propose a critical biology in which the
issues of mechanics and teleology were united in a single discipline. That this
work was premature, and insufficiently able to keep its distance from the
extravaganza of the Hegelian generation, should not blind us to the real facts
of the history of biology, which is that one of its first gestures was to
challenge in advance so to speak the inexorable coming of the scientism and
reductionism that we see in Darwin's one level theory. The problems with the
latter now speak for themselves, and we should consider once again the
relationship of theory and philosophy in the deliberation of science confronted
with evolution. The point here is that we have at the dawn of biology a critical
perspective on both the limits of mechanism, and the dangers of teleology,
followed by a cautious reexamination nonetheless of the teleological aspects of
biological and evolutionary organisms. In this context, of course, the mostly
quite different embryologists produced their work in parallel, sometimes in
tandem, prior to the flood of the Darwinian movement which buried the
significant contributions of this earlier era, whose warnings and premonitions
have been confirmed by the subsequent history of evolutionism.
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