  First, clarification is needed about Kant’s claim that organisms cannot be explained ‘mechanically.’ In the Enlightenment, ‘mechanical’ was used in at least two senses: broadly, to denote explanation by physico-chemical laws of efficient causation; and narrowly, restricted to the theory of ‘compound machines,’ or assemblies of movable parts used to displace loads or transfer momentum, e.g. engines and watches. McLaughlin (1990) takes Kant to mean ‘mechanical’ in this latter sense. In artificial machines, parts precede the whole temporally, and determine it: the machine’s configuration results from summation over the parts; and its laws of operation are the same as those governing the parts. But organisms are different: the whole precedes its parts, or organs; and it has functions and aim-directed behaviors not present in them. Hence, organisms are mechanically inexplicable. Ginsborg (2004) construes Kant’s claim along different lines, in two senses. According to one, to explain something mechanically is to show that its production results, or would result, from the “unaided powers of matter as such,” i.e. Newtonian forces of attraction and repulsion, and “crude unorganized matter,” or arbitrary initial conditions such as masses, charges, configurations and motions. Organisms are inexplicable in this sense because their arising would be “in the highest degree contingent.” This is the notion operative in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, Ginsborg contends. But, she has argued, there is a second, stronger sense. Not only are organisms inexplicable by reduction to the structure and powers of their organs—rather, their symmetries and regularities and powers are not explicable from the “moving forces” of their inorganic particles either. Organism-level powers are not vector sums or integrals of physico-chemical forces that accelerate or reconfigure sub-visible particles. 