The notion of the organism has a somewhat ambiguous status in Kant’s philosophy. On the one hand it belongs to natural science, on the other hand it is based on an analogy with the structure of reason. Biology therefore has a peculiar place among the sciences according to Kant: it is a natural science constituted by the use of a regulative maxim. The present study places Kant’s views on biological teleology in the larger context of transcendental idealism. It consists of five essays. The first one treats the notions of things in themselves and appearances, arguing for an interpretation in terms of two aspects or perspectives rather than two worlds. The importance of the discursivity of our cognitive capacity is stressed, as well as the need to separate Kant’s various reflective perspectives. In the second essay this interpretation is applied to the third section of the Groundwork, arguing that this text does not belong to theoretical metaphysics, but rather to the articulation of a specifically practical perspective. The third essay discusses similarities and differences between Kant’s a priori conditions for cognition and conceptions of innate ideas in the rationalist tradition. Kant’s comparison of the system of categories with the biological theory of epigenesis is considered in connection to eighteenth century theories of generation. The comparison is viewed as an analogy rather than as a naturalistic theory of the a priori. In the fourth essay Kant’s account of functional attribution in biology is explicated in the context of the present day debate of the issue. It is claimed that Kant’s neo-Aristotelian approach avoids some of the difficulties in the dominant naturalistic accounts of today. Kant’s view differs from the Aristotelian in that it involves a distinction of levels, making it possible to take functional attributions on the one hand as objective from the standpoint of biology but on the other hand as having a merely regulative status from a philosophical point of view. In the fifth essay an interpretation of the antinomy of teleological judgment in the Critique of Judgment is offered. The antinomy is taken to consist in the dialectical tendency to treat the regulative maxims of teleology and mechanism as constitutive principles. The difference between the discursivity of the human understanding and the idea of a non-discursive understanding, an important theme in Kant’s solution of the antinomy, puts the question of biological teleology in relation to central tenets of transcendental idealism.

Cette étude se propose de rendre compte du conflit qui opposa Plotin aux Gnostiques. Uneintroduction met en scène les protagonistes et décrit les circonstances de leur l’affrontement.Une première partie étudie la forme de cette polémique exceptionnelle dans les traités dePlotin, la rapproche de celle des hérésiologues chrétiens à l’encontre de ces mêmesGnostiques et fait l’hypothèse qu’elle ne fut pas ignorée de Plotin. Les parties suivantesprésentent la philosophie de Plotin pour l’opposer à la doctrine gnostique dans les domainescosmologique, théologique et anthropologique. Elles présentent et étudient, en chacun de cesdomaines, les critiques de fond que Plotin adresse aux thèses de l’adversaire, lui reprochant deméconnaître la nature des réalités dont il traite, de tenir des discours dépourvus de logique, dene proposer aucune méthode pour réaliser ses objectifs (le salut). Les critiques de Plotin àl’encontre des Gnostiques constituent une défense du platonisme et de la philosophie elle-même,ainsi que de toutes les valeurs sur lesquelles se fonde toute la pensée de Plotin. / This study accounts for the conflict between Plotinus and the Gnostics. The introductionportrays the protagonists, and describes the circumstances of their confrontation. The first partstudies the form of this exceptional controversy in the treaties of Plotinus, draws a parallelwith the controversy between the Christian Heresiologists and the Gnostics, and hypothesizesthat the later was not unknown to Plotinus. The subsequent parts explain the philosophy ofPlotinus and contrast it with the Gnostic doctrine in the cosmological, theological andanthropological domains. They present and analyse, in each of these areas, the fundamentalcritiques that Plotinus addresses to his opponents, accusing them of misunderstanding thenature of the realities that they deal with, of making speeches devoid of logic, and ofproposing no method to achieve their aims (salvation). The critiques of Plotinus against theGnostics constitute a defense of Platonism and of philosophy itself, and also of all the valuesthat underlie the thought of Plotinus.

An ontology of the intelligible world cannot explain the phenomenon of a „free will“, which is able to decide between good and evil. It follows that a Moralontologie also cannot explain an agents freely determining his actions as good or evil.