The Image of the Universe and Its Purpose: Kant on Hypotyposis and Functional Cosmology

This contribution focuses on Kant’s doctrine of hypotyposis as de- ployed in the Critique of Judgment and explores its implications for his view of what I call “functional cosmology”. Despite the number of metaphors used by Kant in the pre-critical works, it is only in the early 1790s that his system could account for the use and function of metaphors and symbolic representa- tion in the natural sciences connecting them to aesthetics and ethics. This ac- count was also stimulated by the debates surrounding Plato’s dialogues and Ne- oplatonic texts at the end of the 18th century. Therefore, this paper suggests that Kant offered his own solution to the problem of thinking of the universe as an organism within the limits of transcendental philosophy.