Abstract

In the Critique of Judgment Kant often uses the phrase »technic of nature«, especially in the »Critique of Teleological Judgment«. Since Hegel the Kantian theory ofthe purposiveness of nature has often been described as Aristotelian, but scientists have not paid enough attention to the fact that Kantian »technic of nature« is much closer to the Stoic theory of purposiveness which he combines with contemporary medical and biological thoughts: A Latin equivalent, »ars naturae«, can be found in Cicero, the idea of self-healing nature in the medical tradition which goes back to Hippocrates and Galen and was present in many – not only medical – works in the eighteenth century. Kant himself does not give any hints to the reader that in using the phrase he was influenced by special sources, but the consequences he draws are Stoic ones: Nature is a system in which all things are both purposive for other things and causally determined. Besides this correspondence between Kant and the Stoics special Kantian problems arise from the fact that in Kant nature can only be thought as technical by reflective judgment: A higher reason has to be postulated, the status of which cannot be totally clarified.