Order and Contingency in Kant: from the cosmology to the men as supreme end

• Grant number: 21/12675-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): September 01, 2022
• Effective date (End): March 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta
• Grantee: Giovanni Sarto
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Following up the internal development of the Kantian contingency concept comprehension, we locate ourselves in a debate which assembles cosmology and moral, and whose conceptual operator is the notion of order. Simultaneously, we identify two theorical movements which we have called "interiorization of contingency" and "transcendentalization of the order". With the aim of tracing the path of these concepts, we propose to investigate the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment. This investigation gains interest since the Appendix to the Critique of Teleological Judgment suggests a link between the impossibility of the nature to have an objective systematic organization and the emergence of men as the single being, in the world, capable of purposing ends, and, along with that, an order of his own. In opposition, if the cosmos presents itself as endowed with order, men does not seem necessary for granting meaning for it and, thus, there's no need to consider him the ultimate end [Endzweck] of creation. Kant seems to have endorsed human order over the cosmological one, however, by interpretating this text in the light of the shifts brought by the third Critique, it is possible to gather signs that there is a meaning that the subject only reencounters, instead of producing. The own idea of reflection, depending on how it may be interpreted, can support that claim. It is clear, therefore, that the validity of a whole interpretation of the Critique oeuvre depends on the dissolution of this ambiguity, task in which we dwell on.