Taxonomy is our response to the proliferating variety of the natural world on the one hand, and the principle of unrelieved universality on the other. From Aristotle, through Porphyry to Linneaus, Kant and others, thinkers have struggled to develop taxonomies that could order what we know and also what we do not yet know, and this essay is a reflection on the existential desire that propels this effort. Porphyry’s tree of logic is an exhaustive account of the things we can say about the sort of beings we are; Linneaus’s system of nature reaches completion in the classification of humans; Kant discovers a way to have natural and logical forms coincide in the thought of natural purpose and purposiveness. The stakes are high. When we order the world, we order ourselves: when we enter the taxonomy, it enters us and confronts us with our judgments of kind, race and kin.

中文翻译：

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分类学及其乐趣

一方面，分类学是我们对自然世界不断增加的多样性的回应，另一方面是未解除的普遍性原则。从亚里士多德，到斑岩，再到林诺、康德和其他人，思想家一直在努力发展分类法，可以对我们知道的和我们还不知道的事物进行排序，这篇文章反映了推动这种努力的存在欲望。Porphyry 的逻辑树详尽地描述了我们可以说的关于我们是怎样的人的事情；林诺的自然系统在人类的分类上达到了完备；康德在自然目的和目的性思想中发现了一种使自然形式和逻辑形式一致的方法。赌注很高。当我们对世界进行排序时，我们也在对自己进行排序：当我们进入分类法时，