Il trascendentale contingente. La finalità del corpo vivente nella Critica del Giudizio di Kant.

The dissertation focuses on Kant’s development of the concept of “life” (Leben) in the period between 1780 and 1790 (the year of the publication of the Critique of the Power of Judgment). In the third Critique, natural teleology is grounded on the concept of natural purpose (Naturzweck). The contingent structure of the organism and its vegetative processes force the Power of Judgment to reflect on nature as if in the latter a non-phenomenal connection with purposes was at work. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment the relationship between perception and the organic body remains though not justified. Since the essential characteristics of living natural beings are sensation and appetition, such a concept remains paradoxically overlooked in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Therfore the dissertation aims to find a definition of “life” in the precritical period and in the Metaphisical foundation of natural science (1785), in order to highlight a persistent dualism, which is never completely justified by Kant, between perception and the sentient body. As long as the interaction between the two is placed beyond phenomenal experience, it remains inaccessible to theoretical philosophy, but it is at the same time a transcendental condition of experience itself.