Results for 'Science and Teleology'

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  1. Optimality and Teleology in Aristotle's Natural Science.Devin Henry - manuscript
    In this paper I examine the role of optimality reasoning in Aristotle’s natural science. By “optimality reasoning” I mean reasoning that appeals to some conception of “what is best” in order to explain why things are the way they are. We are first introduced to this pattern of reasoning in the famous passage at Phaedo 97b8-98a2, where (Plato’s) Socrates invokes “what is best” as a cause (aitia) of things in nature. This passage can be seen as the intellectual ancestor (...)
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  2. Wolff’s Science of Teleology and Kant’s Critique.Nabeel Hamid - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.
    This essay examines Wolff’s science of teleology, which has historically been dismissed as a crude physico-theology resting on a simple confusion between uses and purposes. Focusing especially on his two German volumes (German Teleology, 1723, and German Physiology, 1725), I argue that, first, Wolff never intended teleology to be a self-standing theology; and second, that teleology, as a part of physics, is primarily an applied or practical discipline. In its theological function, teleology presupposes the (...)
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  3. Function and Teleology.Justin Garson - 2008 - In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Blackwell. pp. 525-549.
    This is a short overview of the biological functions debate in philosophy. While it was fairly comprehensive when it was written, my short book ​A Critical Overview of Biological Functions has largely supplanted it as a definitive and up-to-date overview of the debate, both because the book takes into account new developments since then, and because the length of the book allowed me to go into substantially more detail about existing views.
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  4. Politics and Teleology in Kant.Paul Formosa, Avery Goldman & Tatiana Patrone (eds.) - 2014 - University of Wales Press.
    The fourteen essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field, explore the relationship between teleology and politics in Kant’s corpus. Among the topics discussed are Kant’s normative political theory and legal philosophy; his cosmopolitanism and views on international relations; his theory of history; his theory of natural teleology; and the broader relationship between morality, history, nature, and politics. _Politics and Teleology in Kant_ will be of interest to a wide audience, including Kant scholars; scholars and (...)
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  5. Robust processes and teleological language.Jonathan Birch - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (3):299-312.
    I consider some hitherto unexplored examples of teleological language in the sciences. In explicating these examples, I aim to show (a) that such language is not the sole preserve of the biological sciences, and (b) that not all such talk is reducible to the ascription of functions. In chemistry and biochemistry, scientists explaining molecular rearrangements and protein folding talk informally of molecules rearranging “in order to” maximize stability. Evolutionary biologists, meanwhile, often speak of traits evolving “in order to” optimize some (...)
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  6. Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks.Silvia Manzo - 2019 - In Rodolfo Garau & Pietro Omodeo (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science. Springer Verlag. pp. 61-92.
    In the period of emergence of early modern science, ‘monsters’ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived nature’s (...)
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  7. (1 other version)Mechanistic Explanations and Teleological Functions.Andrew Rubner - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    This paper defines and defends a notion of teleological function which is fit to figure in explanations concerning how organic systems, and the items which compose them, are able to perform certain activities, such as surviving and reproducing or pumping blood. According to this notion, a teleological function of an item (such as the heart) is a typical way in which items of that type contribute to some containing system's ability to do some activity. An account of what it is (...)
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  8. Teleology and Realism in Leibniz's Philosophy of Science.Nabeel Hamid - 2019 - In Vincenzo De Risi (ed.), Leibniz and the Structure of Sciences: Modern Perspectives on the History of Logic, Mathematics, Epistemology. Springer. pp. 271-298.
    This paper argues for an interpretation of Leibniz’s claim that physics requires both mechanical and teleological principles as a view regarding the interpretation of physical theories. Granting that Leibniz’s fundamental ontology remains non-physical, or mentalistic, it argues that teleological principles nevertheless ground a realist commitment about mechanical descriptions of phenomena. The empirical results of the new sciences, according to Leibniz, have genuine truth conditions: there is a fact of the matter about the regularities observed in experience. Taking this stance, however, (...)
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  9. Jung in Dialogue with Freud and Patañjali: Instinct, Affective Neuroscience, and the Reconciliation of Science and Religious Experience.Leanne Whitney - 2017 - Cosmos and History 13 (2):298-312.
    For both Jung and Patañjali our human desire to understand “God” is as real as any other instinct. Jung’s and Patañjali’s models further align in their emphasis on the teleological directedness of the psyche, and their aim at reconciling science and religious experience. As an atheist, Freud was in disagreement, but all three scholars align in their emphasis on the study of affect as an empirical means of entering into the psyche. For Patañjali, the nadir of affect lays in (...)
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  10. Hume, Teleology, and the 'Science of Man'.Lorenzo Greco & Dan O'Brien - 2019 - In William Gibson, Dan O'Brien & Marius Turda (eds.), Teleology and Modernity. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 147-64.
    There are various forms of teleological thinking central to debates in the early modern and modern periods, debates in which David Hume (1711–1776) is a key figure. In the first section, we shall introduce three levels at which teleological considerations have been incorporated into philosophical accounts of man and nature, and sketch Hume’s criticisms of these approaches. In the second section, we turn to Hume’s non-teleological ‘science of man’. In the third section, we show how Hume has an account (...)
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  11. Explanation, teleology, and analogy in natural history and comparative anatomy around 1800: Kant and Cuvier.Hein van den Berg - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 105 (C):109-119.
    This paper investigates conceptions of explanation, teleology, and analogy in the works of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Richards (2000, 2002) and Zammito (2006, 2012, 2018) have argued that Kant’s philosophy provided an obstacle for the project of establishing biology as a proper science around 1800. By contrast, Russell (1916), Outram (1986), and Huneman (2006, 2008) have argued, similar to suggestions from Lenoir (1989), that Kant’s philosophy influenced the influential naturalist Georges Cuvier. In this article, I (...)
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  12. (1 other version)Cause, the Persistence of Teleology, and the Origins of the Philosophy of Social Science.Stephen Turner - 2003 - In Stephen P. Turner and Paul Roth (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. pp. 21-42.
    The subject of this chapter is the complex and confusing course of the discussion of cause and teleology before and during the period of Mill and Comte, and its aftermath up to the early years of the twentieth century in the thinking of several of the major founding figures of disciplinary social science. The discussion focused on the problem of the sufficiency of causal explanations, and particularly the question of whether some particular fact could be explained without appeal (...)
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  13. Authors’ Response: Enactivism, Cognitive Science, and the Jonasian Inference.D. Ward & M. Villalobos - 2016 - Constructivist Foundations 11 (2):228-233.
    Upshot: In our target article we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela, enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the “Jonasian inference,” i.e., the (...)
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  14. Animism and Natural Teleology from Avicenna to Boyle.Jeff Kochan - 2021 - Science in Context 34 (1):1-23.
    Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization. As Neoplatonic theology gained influence over Aristotelian natural philosophy, the meaning of animism likewise grew obscure. Boyle, as some historians have (...)
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  15. Teleology and generics.David Rose, Siying Zhang, Qi Han & Tobias Gerstenberg - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 45Th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
    Generic statements, such as "Bees are striped" are thought to be a central vehicle by which essentialist beliefs are transmitted. But work on generics and essentialism almost never focuses on the type of properties mentioned in generic statements. We test the hypothesis that teleological properties, what something is for, affect categorization judgments more strongly than behavioral, biological, or social properties. In Experiment 1, participants categorized properties as being either behavioral, biological, social, or teleological. In Experiment 2, we used the top (...)
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  16. An externalist teleology.Gunnar Babcock & Daniel W. McShea - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8755-8780.
    Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological (...)
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  17. Causal, teleological and evolutionary explanation.David L. Thompson - manuscript
    Explanation is a human activity. Teleological, causal, and evolutionary explanations are all valid forms of responding to particular puzzlements. Reductionism incorrectly assumes there is one absolute explanation. While causal explanation appeals primarily to necessity, evolutionary explanation is based largely on contingency.
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  18. Resolving teleology's false dilemma.Gunnar Babcock & Dan McShea - 2023 - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139 (4):415-432.
    This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, (...)
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  19. Teleology Beyond Metaphysics: Husserlian Phenomenology and the Historical Consciousness of Modernity.Timo Miettinen - 2014 - Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28 (3):273-283.
    Throughout its history, the relationship of phenomenology to historical reflection has appeared ambiguous. On the one hand, phenomenology—with the help of its founding figures—gave a promise to return from the world-historical speculations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the phenomenon of lived historicity, that is, to the question of how historical time is experienced within the life of the individual. On the other hand, phenomenology could not resist the temptation to critically reconsider some of the fundamental historical narratives that (...)
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  20. Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism and the Evolutionary Objection: Rethinking the Relevance of Empirical Science.Parisa Moosavi - 2018 - In John Hacker-Wright (ed.), Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue. Springer Verlag. pp. 277-307.
    Neo-Aristotelian metaethical naturalism is a modern attempt at naturalizing ethics using ideas from Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics. Proponents of this view argue that moral virtue in human beings is an instance of natural goodness, a kind of goodness supposedly also found in the realm of non-human living things. Many critics question whether neo-Aristotelian naturalism is tenable in light of modern evolutionary biology. Two influential lines of objection have appealed to an evolutionary understanding of human nature and natural teleology to argue (...)
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  21. Metaphors in arts and science.Walter Veit & Ney Milan - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-24.
    Metaphors abound in both the arts and in science. Due to the traditional division between these enterprises as one concerned with aesthetic values and the other with epistemic values there has unfortunately been very little work on the relation between metaphors in the arts and sciences. In this paper, we aim to remedy this omission by defending a continuity thesis regarding the function of metaphor across both domains, that is, metaphors fulfill any of the same functions in science (...)
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  22. Teleological Essentialism.David Rose & Shaun Nichols - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (4):e12725.
    Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. On our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments (...)
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  23. Teleological Essentialism: Generalized.David Rose & Shaun Nichols - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (3):e12818.
    Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2) and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we (...)
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  24. Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose.Carl Sachs - 2023 - Topoi 42 (3):781-791.
    The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the twentieth century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly “self-controlled” systems. Against cybernetics, Hans (...)
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  25. Modal science.Timothy Williamson - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (4-5):453-492.
    This paper explains and defends the idea that metaphysical necessity is the strongest kind of objective necessity. Plausible closure conditions on the family of objective modalities are shown to entail that the logic of metaphysical necessity is S5. Evidence is provided that some objective modalities are studied in the natural sciences. In particular, the modal assumptions implicit in physical applications of dynamical systems theory are made explicit by using such systems to define models of a modal temporal logic. Those assumptions (...)
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  26. Teleological essentialism across development.Rose David, Sara Jaramillo, Shaun Nichols & Zachary Horne - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
    Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member (...)
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  27. Autonomous Systems and the Place of Biology Among Sciences. Perspectives for an Epistemology of Complex Systems.Leonardo Bich - 2021 - In Gianfranco Minati (ed.), Multiplicity and Interdisciplinarity. Essays in Honor of Eliano Pessa. Springer. pp. 41-57.
    This paper discusses the epistemic status of biology from the standpoint of the systemic approach to living systems based on the notion of biological autonomy. This approach aims to provide an understanding of the distinctive character of biological systems and this paper analyses its theoretical and epistemological dimensions. The paper argues that, considered from this perspective, biological systems are examples of emergent phenomena, that the biological domain exhibits special features with respect to other domains, and that biology as a discipline (...)
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  28. Is intuitive teleological reasoning promiscuous?Johan de Smedt & Helen de Cruz - 2019 - In William Gibson, Dan O'Brien & Marius Turda (eds.), Teleology and Modernity. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 185-202.
    Humans have a tendency to reason teleologically. This tendency is more pronounced under time pressure, in people with little formal schooling and in patients with Alzheimer’s. This has led some cognitive scientists of religion, notably Kelemen, to call intuitive teleological reasoning promiscuous, by which they mean teleology is applied to domains where it is unwarranted. We examine these claims using Kant’s idea of the transcendental illusion in the first Critique and his views on the regulative function of teleological reasoning (...)
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  29. Decline or Renewal: Husserl’s Confrontation with Spengler and the Possibility of Soteriological Teleology.Benjamin Ogden - 2024 - The Apricot 4:22-43.
    In the Weimar period, Oswald Spengler and Edmund Husserl each published distinct philosophies of history which can be construed as teleological: The Decline of The West (1918) and The Crisis of European Sciences (1936) respectively. These texts arose out of a common historical-cultural climate in Germany and share common diagnoses of Europe’s condition. Yet the two models of teleology and the normative imperatives which characterize their respective methods could not be more distinct. This paper examines the two models and (...)
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  30. On Nature and Normativity: Normativity, Teleology, and Mechanism in Biological Explanation.Lenny Moss & Daniel J. Nicholson - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):88-91.
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  31. Against Teleological Essentialism.Eleonore Neufeld - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (4):e12961.
    In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey-making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. In this paper, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence, and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences.
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  32. How to Be a Realist About Sui Generis Teleology Yet Feel at Home in the 21St Century.Richard Cameron - 2004 - The Monist 87 (1):72-95.
    Contemporary discussion of biological teleology has been dominated by a complacent orthodoxy. Responsibility for this shortcoming rests primarily, I think, with those who ought to have been challenging dogma but have remained silent, leaving the orthodox to grow soft, if happily. In this silence, champions of orthodoxy have declared a signal victory, proclaiming the dominance of their view as one of philosophy’s historic successes. But this declaration is premature at best—this would be neither the first nor probably the last (...)
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  33. Origins of Biological Teleology: How Constraints Represent Ends.Miguel García-Valdecasas & Terrence W. Deacon - 2024 - Synthese 204 (75):1-28.
    To naturalize the concept of teleological causality in biology it is not enough to avoid assuming backward causation or positing the existence of an inscrutable te- leological essence like the élan vital. We must also specify how the causality of or- ganisms is distinct from the causality of designed artifacts like thermostats or asym- metrically oriented processes like the ubiquitous increase of entropy. Historically, the concept of teleological causality in biology has been based on an analogy to the familiar experience (...)
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  34. From Aristotle’s Teleology to Darwin’s Genealogy: The Stamp of Inutility, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (pdf: Contents, Introduction).Marco Solinas - 2015 - Palgrave-Macmillan.
    Starting with Aristotle and moving on to Darwin, Marco Solinas outlines the basic steps from the birth, establishment and later rebirth of the traditional view of living beings, and its overturning by evolutionary revolution. The classic framework devised by Aristotle was still dominant in the 17th Century world of Galileo, Harvey and Ray, and remained hegemonic until the time of Lamarck and Cuvier in the 19th Century. Darwin's breakthrough thus takes on the dimensions of an abandonment of the traditional finalistic (...)
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  35. Cognitive Science for the Revisionary Metaphysician.David Rose - 2019 - In Alvin I. Goldman & Brian P. McLaughlin (eds.), Metaphysics and Cognitive Science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    Many philosophers insist that the revisionary metaphysician—i.e., the metaphysician who offers a metaphysical theory which conflicts with folk intuitions—bears a special burden to explain why certain folk intuitions are mistaken. I show how evidence from cognitive science can help revisionist discharge this explanatory burden. Focusing on composition and persistence, I argue that empirical evidence indicates that the folk operate with a promiscuous teleomentalist view of composition and persistence. The folk view, I argue, deserves to be debunked. In this way, (...)
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  36. The Future of Science.Hossein Shirkhani - manuscript
    This article has been written about the explanation of the scientific affair. There are the philosophical circles that a philosopher must consider their approaches. Postmodern thinkers generally refuse the universality of the rational affair. They believe that the experience cannot reach general knowledge. They emphasize on the partial and plural knowledge. Any human being has his knowledge and interpretation. The world is always becoming. Diversity is an inclusive epistemological principle. Naturally, in such a state, the scientific activity is a non-sense (...)
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  37. Plato’s Timaeus and the Limits of Natural Science.Ian MacFarlane - 2023 - Apeiron 56 (3):495-517.
    The relationship between mind and necessity is one of the major points of difficulty for the interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus. At times Timaeus seems to say the demiurge is omnipotent in his creation, and at other times seems to say he is limited by pre-existing matter. Most interpretations take one of the two sides, but this paper proposes a novel approach to interpreting this issue which resolves the difficulty. This paper suggests that in his speech Timaeus presents two hypothetical models (...)
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  38. From Craft to Nature: The Emergence of Natural Teleology.Thomas Johansen - 2020 - In Liba Taub (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Science. Cambridge University Press. pp. 102-120.
    A teleological explanation is an explanation in terms of an end or a purpose. So saying that ‘X came about for the sake of Y’ is a teleological account of X. It is a striking feature of ancient Greek philosophy that many thinkers accepted that the world should be explained in this way. However, before Aristotle, teleological explanations of the cosmos were generally based on the idea that it had been created by a divine intelligence. If an intelligent power made (...)
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  39. The Explanatory Role of Umwelt in Evolutionary Theory: Introducing von Baer's Reflections on Teleological Development.Tiago Rama - 2024 - Biosemiotics 1:1-26.
    Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved (...)
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  40. From Extrinsic Design to Intrinsic Teleology.Ignacio Silva - 2019 - European Journal of Science and Theology 15 (3):61-78.
    In this paper I offer a distinction between design and teleology, referring mostly to thehistory of these two terms, in order to suggest an alternative strategy for arguments thatintend to demonstrate the existence of the divine. I do not deal with the soundness ofeither design or teleological arguments. I rather emphasise the differences between thesetwo terms, and how these differences involve radically different arguments for the existence of the divine. I argue that the term „design‟ refers to an extrinsic (...)
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  41. The Wolffian roots of Kant’s teleology.Hein van den Berg - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):724-734.
    Kant’s teleology as presented in the Critique of Judgment is commonly interpreted in relation to the late eighteenth-century biological research of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In the present paper, I show that this interpretative perspective is incomplete. Understanding Kant’s views on teleology and biology requires a consideration of the teleological and biological views of Christian Wolff and his rationalist successors. By reconstructing the Wolffian roots of Kant’s teleology, I identify several little known sources of Kant’s views on biology. (...)
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  42. The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet. [REVIEW]Graham Oppy - 2015 - Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 2 (2):247.
    Review of Michael Ruse (2015) *The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet*.
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  43. Psychotherapy and the Restoration of Meaning: Existential Philosophy in Clinical Practice.Keith Markman, Peter Zafirides, Travis Proulx & Matthew Lindberg - 2013 - In Keith Douglas Markman, Travis Proulx & Matthew J. Lindberg (eds.), The Psychology of Meaning. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. pp. 465-477.
    In this chapter, we explore how themes of existential philosophy have been used to develop a formal orientation of psychotherapy, and we discuss the main principles of existential psychotherapy and their application in practice. We also draw upon case examples to specifically illustrate how the approach of existential psychotherapy is utilized in clinical practice. In the case examples, each patient's identify has been disguised to maintain confidentiality. The new science of meaning, represented by the chapters in this volume, not (...)
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  44. Life and Mind: The Common Tetradic Structure of Organism and Consciousness – a Phenomenological Approach.Christoph Hueck - 2024 - Dialectical Systems: A Forum in Biology, Ecology, and Cognitive Science.
    The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years. Organisms have recently been described as complex systems that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis, autonomy, agency and teleological structure. This perspective marks a significant advancement from the 20th-century viewpoint, which predominantly saw organisms as genetically programmed, randomly generated and blindly selected (...)
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  45. Há um sentido no universo? A fundamentação do argumento teleológico a partir da obra de Mariano Artigas.João Pedro da Luz Neto - 2018 - Revista Brasileira de Filosofia da Religião 5:97-118.
    The present article intends to discuss the basis of the teleological argument from the work of the Spanish physicist and philosopher Mariano Artigas. After observing the prolific production of many scientists on the subject, we notice that the concept of “finality” must be nuanced. This nuance of the concepct allows to investigate in what ways the empirical sciences and philosophical thought can sustain the “finality” be understood. Then, it demonstrates that the notions of “chance” and “finality” aren’t incompatible, because there (...)
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  46. Can Science Explain Consciousness?Bruiger Dan - manuscript
    For diverse reasons, the problem of phenomenal consciousness is persistently challenging. Mental terms are characteristically ambiguous, researchers have philosophical biases, secondary qualities are excluded from objective description, and philosophers love to argue. Adhering to a regime of efficient causes and third-person descriptions, science as it has been defined has no place for subjectivity or teleology. A solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness will require a radical approach: to take the point of view of the cognitive system itself. (...)
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  47. Aristotle and the search of a rational framework for biology.Armando Aranda-Anzaldo - 2019 - Organisms 3 (2):54-64.
    Chance and necessity are mainstays of explanation in current biology, dominated by the neo-Darwinian outlook, a blend of the theory of evolution by natural selection with the basic tenets of population genetics. In such a framework the form of living organisms is somehow a side effect of highly contingent, historical accidents. Thus, at a difference of other sciences, biology apparently lacks theoretical principles that in a law-like fashion may explain the emergence and persistence of the characteristic forms of living organisms (...)
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  48. An Historic Defence of William Paley's Teleological Argument.Mavaddat Javid - manuscript
    While it may remain difficult for the student of modernity to understand the weight of Paley’s teleological arguments for nineteenth century British scientists, the idea of a design in nature and the implication of a designer nevertheless provided lasting explanatory power amongst competing hypotheses until up to Darwin. As Richard Dawkins points out, it was reasonable for English scientists to maintain telic 'causes' in the explanation of biological origins until the observations of Paley were ascribed to a natural mechanism as (...)
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  49. Descartes on the Theory of Life and Methodology in the Life Sciences.Karen Detlefsen - 2015 - In Peter Distelzweig, Evan Ragland & Benjamin Goldberg (eds.), Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 141-72.
    As a practicing life scientist, Descartes must have a theory of what it means to be a living being. In this paper, I provide an account of what his theoretical conception of living bodies must be. I then show that this conception might well run afoul of his rejection of final causal explanations in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, I show how Descartes might have made use of such explanations as merely hypothetical, even though he explicitly blocks this move. I conclude by (...)
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  50. Review of Johnson. Aristotle on Teleology[REVIEW]Thornton Lockwood - 2006 - Bryn Mawr Classical Review 8:37.
    Few ideas are more central to Aristotle’s thought than that of the causal purposiveness of natural things. Few ideas in the Aristotelian corpus are more controverted—whether historically, by early modern natural philosophers seeking to break with Aristotelian science or currently, by modern scholars of ancient philosophy seeking to interpret Aristotle’s physics—than what has come to be called Aristotle’s “teleology” (a term coined in the 18th century, apparently by the German philosopher Christian Wolff). In this ambitious study (derived from (...)
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