Kant e l’interesse metafisico per la biologia: l’apriori categoriale tra sviluppo epigenetico e preformismo del limite

The essay investigates the metaphysical motivations that oriented Kant’s interest in the biological debate between epigeneticists and preformationists. In the first two parts, I reconstruct several key stages of Kant’s reflection on this issue, highlighting the metaphy-sical reasons that guided his theoretical choices at different moments. The analysis then focuses on selected passages from Kant’s review of Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity in order to identify conceptual tools useful for framing the critical conception of the categorical a priori. On this basis, the essay advances an interpretative hypothesis concerning the epigenetic conclusion of the Transcendental Deduction, arguing that it integrates elements of a preformationist nature. To account for this structure, the notion of a “preformationism of the limit” is introduced to describe the structural prin-ciple that grounds and orients conceptual epigenesis