Kant and Final Causality

Abstract Kant and Final Causality is my contribution to a festschrift in memory of Chung-ying Cheng. It mainly contains a version in print of a lecture I delivered earlier on this topic in Beijing. It expounds and critically explores Kant’s contrast in his Critique of the Power of Judgment between the objectivity of mechanical causality and the subjectivity of final causality that deals with organized beings, where we must consider each of their parts in relation to one another and the wholes of which they are parts as both causes and effects and having mutual relations of means and ends. The paper ends by exploring what contributed to Chung-ying’s designation of his own philosophy as “onto-hermeneutics” and the value of his method in dealing with two issues raised at the end of the lecture at the heart of my contribution.