The Digital Kant Center NRW
is organizing its next Digital Kant Lecture. Edward Kanterian (University of Kent) will speak on the following topic: Neither Ruin nor Predestined Abode - Kant (and others) on our relationship to the Earth.

The lecture will take place online (via Webex). The language of the lecture will be German.

Webex link:

https://uni-siegen.webex.com/uni-siegen/j.php?MTID=mdd8ef244fdc25620de1b61091b41122e

Abstract:

From time immemorial, the earth has been seen as the ideal dwelling place specially tailored to us humans. Accordingly, the earth tended to be regarded as an all-giving, inexhaustible mother. Until the 17th century, few people questioned these assumptions (Lucretius, for example). This changed with the advent of scientific thinking. Theories of the earth, often intertwined with theological themes, began to make the rounds. One particularly pessimistic one was formulated by the Briton Thomas Burnet in 1681: The post-Flood Earth was "ruin and garbage", "a little dirty planet". The response of the more contemporary optimists was not long in coming; authors such as Woodward and Derham insisted on the providential purposefulness of the earth, whose "defects" were merely intended to drive man to diligence and progress. This physico-theological argument, which could easily turn into Promethean hubris, was also continued in France, for example by Fontenelle and the Jesuit Jean François. Then came Hume - he renewed Burnet's gloomy vision and, it seemed, put a stop to any physico-theological view of our planet. Until finally Kant also addressed the issue, particularly in the Critique of Judgment. In my lecture, I would like to take a closer look at his answer and ask whether his attempt to mediate between the pessimistic and optimistic positions was successful. Much depends on whether we can still accept his theory of the objective purposes of nature, i.e. of organisms and life, as merely regulative phenomena to be described today, especially in the light of neo-Aristotelian attempts in biology (Ernst Mayr, Denis Noble) and philosophy (Anthony Kenny, Peter Hacker) to reintroduce purpose as a constitutive category. In this context, I am also interested in the question of whether the Kantian vision really helps us not only not to perceive the earth as "ruins and garbage", but also not to bring it into this state in the first place.