The conflict between Darwin’s naturalism evolucionism and the Kant’s trascendental philosophy

Abstract

This paper analyzes the philosophical conflict between Darwinian naturalism and Kantian transcendental philosophy regarding the origin and nature of human reason. It argues that philosophical Darwinism, insofar as it conceives rationality as a product of biological evolution, involves an explanatory circularity by presupposing the transcendental conditions it seeks to ground. From a Kantian perspective, reason, the categories of understanding, and the unity of apperception cannot be derived from empirical processes, since they constitute the conditions of possibility of experience itself, including scientific knowledge of evolution. The paper also examines contemporary extensions of this naturalistic framework in transhumanism, showing that its claims concerning the technological overcoming of the human mind disregard the transcendental limits of knowledge. It concludes that evolution may account for empirical transformations of organisms, but cannot explain the genesis or alteration of reason as an a priori condition of phenomena.