What Nature Is For

A cut heals itself. A watch, taken apart, stays taken apart. Immanuel Kant thought the difference between those two facts forces an idea on us that we can neither prove nor abandon: that nature looks designed. Paul Guyer follows the argument through the second half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where organisms push us toward a designer, and a designer pushes us toward a question nobody gets to duck: what would all of this be for? The answer runs through goodwill, through discipline, through one surprisingly successful criminal, and lands on a thought Guyer suspects Kant himself never quite finished.