Ecology arguably has roots in eighteenth-century natural histories, such as Linnaeus's economy of nature, which pressed a case for holistic and final-causal explanations of organisms in terms of what we'd now call their environment. After sketching Kant's arguments for the indispensability of final-causal explanation merely in the case of individual organisms, and considering the Linnaean alternative, this paper examines Kant's critical response to Linnaean ideas. I argue that Kant does not explicitly reject Linnaeus's holism. But he maintains that the indispensability of final-causal explanation depends on robust modal connections between types of organism and their functional parts; relationships in Linnaeus's economy of nature, by contrast, are relatively contingent. Kant's framework avoids strong metaphysical assumptions, is responsive to empirical evidence, and can be fruitfully compared with some contemporary approaches to biological organization.

可以说生态学可以追溯到18世纪的自然历史，例如Linnaeus的自然经济，这为我们现在所说的生物环境提出了对生物进行整体和最终原因解释的理由。在仅就单个生物体勾勒出康德关于最终因果关系不可或缺的论点，并考虑了林奈的选择之后，本文考察了康德对林奈思想的批判性回应。我认为，康德并未明确拒绝林奈的整体主义。但是他坚持认为，最终因果关系的解释必不可少，取决于生物体类型及其功能部分之间的牢固的模态联系。相比之下，林奈的自然经济中的关系是相对偶然的。康德的框架避免了强有力的形而上学假设，对经验证据做出了回应，