This article takes a phenomenological approach to thinking about ways in which the future comes to pass without being derived from the present, i.e. without being based on our current and past objective engagements. In the first part, I look at Husserl’s idea of “protention” in order to discuss how phenomenology has conceptualized the indeterminacy of the present moment. In the second part, the Heideggerian notion of “projection” is discussed as a modification of protention. In the third part, I argue (...) for an empty teleology of time in which our temporal engagement in the world is distinguished from our existential concern with temporal things. The basic idea of the paper is that for the future to arrive “as future” (instead of as another present), it has to happen in spite of the present, i.e. in spite of the interested stance that defines our present engagement in the world. (shrink)

This article discusses Hans Jonas’ argument for teleology in living organisms, in light of recently raised concerns over enactivism’s “Jonasian turn.” Drawing on textual resources rarely discussed in contemporary enactivist literature on Jonas’ philosophy, we reconstruct five core ideas of his thinking: 1) That natural science’s rejection of teleology is methodological rather than ontological, and thus not a proof of its non-existence; 2) that denial of the reality of teleology amounts to a performative self-contradiction; 3) that the fact of evolution (...) makes it implausible that only humans actualize purpose; 4) that the concept of metabolism delimits and gestures towards beings performing purposive activity; and 5) that concrete encounters with living organisms are indispensable for the judgment that they are purposive. Lastly, we draw attention to how Jonas’ understanding of teleology and inwardness in nonhuman life in terms of degrees of identity with human life poses a problem for his view. In this way, we hope to clarify what Jonas, as an important source of inspiration for the enactivist project, is proposing. (shrink)

Several scholars align Nietzsche’s philosophy with Stoicism because of their naturalist approaches to ethics and doctrines of eternal recurrence. Yet this alignment is difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche’s criticisms of Stoicism’s ethical ideal of living according to nature by dispassionately accepting fate—so much so that some conclude that Nietzsche’s rebuke of Stoicism undermines his own philosophical project. I argue that affinities between Nietzsche and Stoicism belie deeper disagreement about teleology, which, in turn, yields different understandings of nature and human flourishing, (...) so that Nietzsche’s objections to Stoicism support his commitments to ethical naturalism and to affirming life’s eternal recurrence. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This paper revisits debates on a tension in Cassirer's philosophy of culture. On the one hand, Cassirer describes a plurality of symbolic forms and claims that each needs to be assessed by its own internal standards of validity. On the other hand, he ranks the symbolic forms in terms of a developmental hierarchy and states that one form, mathematical natural science, constitutes the highest achievement of culture. In my paper, I do not seek to resolve this tension. Rather, I aim (...) to arrive at a better understanding of how it arises, and of the different options that it presents for understanding the development of culture. I discuss three recent attempts at resolving the tension, put forward by Sebastian Luft, Samatha Matherne, and Simon Truwant, respectively. Based on a reconstruction of Cassirer's system of symbolic forms that centralizes the concept of function, I show that the most promising of these attempts, formulated by Truwant, is not successful. I then turn to Cassirer's philosophy of the cultural sciences, the implications of which for the present problem have not yet been sufficiently explored. I argue that in this context, Cassirer develops the contours of an alternative to the function-based view of cultural development. I conclude that this alternative does not resolve the tension either, but that it allows for a reconceptualization of the teleology of culture as open. (shrink)

Many objects in the world have functions. Typewriters are for typing. Can-openers are for opening cans. Lawnmowers are for cutting grass. That is what these things are for. Every day around the world people attribute functions to objects. Some of the objects with functions are organs or parts of living organisms. Hearts are for pumping blood. Eyes are for seeing. Countless works in biology explain the “Form, Function, and Evolution of... ” everything from bee dances to elephant tusks to pandas’ (...) ‘thumbs’. Many scientific explanations, in areas as diverse as psychology, sociology, economics, medical research, and neuroscience, rest on appeals to the function and/or malfunction of things or systems. They talk of how humans and other organisms or their parts work, what their functions are, why they are present, and how different situations will affect them and how they will react. Philosophers, going back to Aristotle, used to make generous use of functions in describing objects, organisms, their interactions, and even as the basis of ethics and metaphysics. And yet, since the Enlightenment, talk of the function of natural objects, teleological function, began to be viewed with suspicion, as the mechanical model of the world replaced the old Aristotelian model. From a religious standpoint, it used to be easy to see how objects in the natural world could have natural functions, for God was said to instill functions by design throughout Creation. But philosophers became increasingly reluctant to invoke God to solve every difficult philosophical problem, and became unwilling to indulge in such religious explanations of teleology. (shrink)

How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence and their plasticity? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeking, and the evolutionary process itself—share a common organization. Specifically, they consist of an entity that moves within a larger containing structure, one that directs its behavior in a general way without precisely determining it. If so, then teleology lies within the domain of the theory (...) of compositional hierarchies. (shrink)

This article is an investigation into Hegel's claim that teleology is the truth of mechanism, which Hegel puts forward in the objectivity section in the Science of Logic. Contrary to most accounts of this section of the Logic, I make a case for a reading of Hegel's conception of external purposiveness according to which the latter makes a positive contribution to the structural development of the concepts of the Logic. I argue that external purposiveness plays a major role in understanding (...) the Hegelian claim of teleology as the truth of mechanism. More specifically, I argue that structures of external purposiveness provide the conditions for the individuation of mechanical objects. (shrink)

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 regularity and (...) teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science –as exception-less regularities—transferred to nature’s regularity the ‘strong’ character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature. (shrink)

This article explores an important metaphysical issue raised by Donald Crosby in his Nature as Sacred Ground1—namely, the reality and nature of teleology and the explanatory relevance of teleology for understanding human mentality. Crosby, in his endeavor to construct a metaphysical system on which to base religious naturalism, acknowledges the importance of positively accounting for teleology. Teleology is crucial for accounting for human freedom, and if teleology falls prey to reductionism, then a dangerous dissonance is created between naturalism and the (...) necessary presupposition regarding ourselves as experiencing and causally effective creatures. To leave such a dissonance... (shrink)

The paper examines Husserl’s notion of teleology through the lens of necessity and argues that there are two senses of teleology—historical and transcendental—at work in the task of phenomenology, especially as Husserl comes to conceive it in theCrisis. To understand not only how these two senses are related but also how their relationship shapes Husserl’s notions of normativity, reason, and progress, I argue that we must look closely at phenomenology as a distinctive form of critique, namely critique ‘from within’. What (...) emerges is a philosophical stance that is fundamentally ambiguous: at once historical and transcendental-eidetic. This productive notion of ambiguity, I contend, differentiates Husserl’s conceptions of normativity, reason and progress from their Enlightenment guises. (shrink)

Hegel defends the reality and the priority of immanent teleology. He does so by accepting Kant’s analysis of immanent teleology, but arguing against Kant’s subjectivist position. Key to Hegel’s argument is the idea that a general kind—in Hegel’s terms, a “concept” of a form of life—can be the substance or nature of the individual organism, or determine what it is to be that organism. In some ways Hegel here follows his own interpretation of Aristotle, while also trying to turn modern (...) arguments against immanent teleology to his own opposing purposes. And we can approach in these terms the way in which Hegel tries to build his broader metaphysics around teleology. (shrink)

Three major ways in which temporal asymmetries enter into scientific induction are discussed as follows: 1. An account is given of the physical basis for the temporal asymmetry of recordability, which obtains in the following sense: except for humanly recorded predictions and one other class of advance indicators to be discussed, interacting systems can contain reliable indicators of only their past and not of their future interactions. To deal with the exceptional cases of non-spontaneous "pre-records," a clarification is offered of (...) the essential differences in the conditions requisite to the production of an indicator having retrodictive significance ("post-record"), on the one hand, and of one having predictive significance ("prerecord" or recorded prediction), on the other. Purported counter-examples to the asymmetry of spontaneous recordability are refuted. 2. It is shown how in cases of asymmetric recordability, the associated retrodiction-prediction asymmetry makes for an asymmetry of assertibility as between an explanandum (or an explanans) referring to a future event and one referring to a past one. But it is argued that this epistemological asymmetry in the assertibility per se must be clearly distinguished from a logical asymmetry between the past and the future in regard to the inferability (deductive or inductive) of the explanandum from the explanans. And it is then contended that the failure to distinguish between an epistemological and a logical asymmetry vitiates the critiques that recent writers have offered of the Popper-Hempel thesis, which affirms symmetry of inferability as between predictive and post-explanatory arguments. In reply to Scriven, it is maintained that predictions based on mere indicators (rather than causes) do not establish an asymmetry in scientific understanding as between predictive arguments and post-explanatory ones. 3. As a further philosophical ramification of the retrodiction-prediction asymmetry, a set of sufficient conditions are stated for the correctness of philosophical mechanism as opposed to teleology. (shrink)

By highlighting the logico-metaphysical undergirding of Hegel's discussion of the market, this article brings to light certain proto-Marxist or proto-socialist tendencies in Hegel as well as key disagreements with Adam Smith, which have been missed by recent studies like Herzog's Inventing the Market (2013). For Smith, market laws function like an impartial arbiter that rewards honest effort; his main worry is that individuals may fail to display virtues like honesty, probity and frugality, thereby hindering the smooth functioning of the market (...) mechanism. For Hegel, by contrast, the market is a de-personalized player in its own right that imposes its arbitrary rule, a rule that does not reflect in any way the virtues and efforts of market participants. This assessment is easily overlooked, unless one realizes that Hegel believes the market to be functioning according to the structures that he discusses in the ‘Objectivity’ section in his Science of Logic. As a consequence of this assessment Hegel attributes a different role to the state than Smith does: Rather than aiding and shaping individuals, by means of institutions, education and health care, the state needs to address the structural functioning of market laws and, to some extent, inhibit its free-flowing functioning. Individuals need to re-appropriate their own social relations by organizing them along the lines of the logical organism or internal teleology. After outlining Hegel's interpretation and assessment of the market structures with the help of the Logic, I will discuss Hegel's demand for an organic state, that sublates and oversees the market, thereby safeguarding the important personal freedoms enjoyed by market participants. (shrink)

Based on their critical analysis of Kant's "Critique of Judgment", the authors of this book show from different perspectives in what way the Kantian concept of the sublime is still a main stream of inspiration for contemporary thinking.

Confucian Concord: Reform, Utopia and Global Teleology in Kang Youwei's Datong Shu analyses the thought of the late Qing reformer Kang Youwei 康有為. His well-known Datongshu 大同書, conceived in 1884 and finally published in 1935, functions as a prism. The research interest of Federico Brusadelli, Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of Naples L'Orientale, reaches beyond Kang’s thought to the production of histories and their political relevance in the two last centuries. The author presents the Great Concord as an (...) early “global history” in which Kang developed his vision of the whole world’s past, present and future. That future would ultimately lead to the Age of Great Concord... (shrink)

Wischik presents an extensive reply to our paper on conscientious objection, which explores the implications of distinguishing ‘medical acts’ from ‘socioclinical acts’. He provides an extensive legal analysis of the issues surrounding conscientious objection, drawing on the concepts of professional practice and consequentialism. Invoking some of these concepts, we respond and demonstrate that Wischik does not seriously engage with our argument. Instead, he merely proffers his preference for legal positivism, which – when viewed as the fount of justice (as Wischik (...) seems to hold) instead of a tool in its service – necessarily bases rightness on might rather than truth. We also argue that in several important areas, Wischik is factually mistaken. (shrink)

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World tracks the fragmentation and proliferation of teleological understandings of history--the notion that history had to be explained as a goal-directed process--in Europe and beyond throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Historical teleologies have profoundly informed a variety of other disciplines, including modern philosophy, natural history, literature, humanitarian and religious philanthropism, the political thought and practice of revolution, emancipation, imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, the conceptualization of universal humankind, and the understanding of modernity in (...) general. By exploring the extension and plurality of historical teleology, the essays in this volume revise the history of historicity in the modern period. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World casts doubt on the idea that a single, if powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity, instead pursuing an investigation of the plurality of modern historicities and its underlying structures. By bringing together Western and non-Western histories, this book provides the first extended treatment of the idea of historical teleology. It will be of great value to students and scholars of modern global and intellectual history"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

Neste trabalho apresentamos uma discussão sobre o modo como a necessidade e a teleologia se encontram presentes na teoria da natureza em Empédocles e Aristóteles. Para realização desta tarefa percorremos os fragmentos referentes ao pensamento de Empédocles do poema Da natureza, tendo como referencia central a obra Os filósofos pré-socráticos, de Kirk e Raven, e a obra Física I e II de Aristóteles.: This paper presents a discussion about how the necessity and teleology are present in the theory of nature (...) in Empedocles and Aristotle. For this task we go through the fragments relate to the thought of Empedocles in the Poem From Nature as a central reference to the work The presocratic philosophers of Kirk and Raven, and the work Physics I and II of Aristotle. Keywords: Necessity. Teleology. Empedocles. Aristotle. (shrink)

Hegel's philosophy of biology is one of the strongest chapters of Hegel'sPhilosophy of Nature. It can be argued that Hegel's understanding of organicity underscores the explanatory power of ‘dialectical thinking’, as Hegel himself claims. Hegel's interpretation of organicity is based upon the logical development of categories in his chapter on Objectivity of his Logic. If we compare Hegel's treatment of teleology in the Logic with his interpretation of organicity in his Philosophy of Nature, a mismatch can be found. In the (...) Logic, Hegel introduces the notion of life (Leben) after the chapter on Objectivity, i.e. after elaborating on external teleology. In his Philosophy of Nature, the notion of the inner purposiveness of organicity belongs to the externality of nature. This article compares Hegel's treatment of teleology in his Logic and his Philosophy of Nature, reconstructs possible explanations for mismatches and offers a possible solution to the question whether the notion of life should be regarded as the last part of the chapter on teleology or the first part of the chapter on the Idea. (shrink)

This work argues that teleological motives lie at the heart of Kant's critical philosophy and that a precise analysis of teleological structures can both illuminate the basic strategy of its fundamental arguments and provide a key to understanding its unity. It thus aims, through an examination of each of Kant's major writings, to provide a detailed interpretation of his claim that philosophy in the true sense must consist of a teleologia rationis humanae. The author argues that Kant's critical philosophy forged (...) a new link between traditional teleological concepts and the basic structure of rationality, one that would later inform the dynamic conception of reason at the heart of German Idealism. The process by which this was accomplished began with Kant's development of a uniquely teleological conception of systematic unity already in the precritical period. The individual chapters of this work attempt to show how Kant adapted and refined this conception of systematic unity so that it came to form the structural basis for the critical philosophy. (shrink)

Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. (...) The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan’s teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience—for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan’s account, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl’s account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls “meaning rationalism,” I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality that Husserl does not share. Husserl’s position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit—contra Millikan—of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it—of life. (shrink)

Agnes Arber (1879–1960) was a British plant morphologist, historian of botany, and philosopher of biology. Though now largely forgotten, her work offers valuable insights into morphological as well as philosophical issues. This paper focuses on Arber’s work on teleology in plants. After providing a brief overview of her life and distinct style of work, two notions of teleology are presented, which become apparent in Arber’s morphological and philosophical work. The first notion, labeled _final teleology_, is based on Aristotle’s final cause (...) and deals with adaptation-based explanations in biology. The second is labeled _formal teleology_. It is grounded in the Aristotelian formal cause and deals with the inherent directiveness of developing structures and the actualization of potentialities in organisms and their parts. Whereas Arber showed a reserved and skeptical attitude towards final teleology, she was very sympathetic to formal teleology, building her general morphological framework on it. Two examples from Arber’s work are then given, which illustrate how formal teleology informed her theorizing: the partial-shoot theory of the leaf, and parallelism in evolution as a counter-proposal to natural selection. Finally, Arber’s teleological interpretation of plant morphology is historically contextualized and connected to recent research developments in evolutionary biology and plant morphology. (shrink)

Gilbert Meilaender has been an important contributor to the field of bioethics for decades. His insistence that there is a natural teleology of the body that should constrain ambitions of the will in bioethics deserves careful attention. This article examines the idea of a natural teleology of the body as it applies to human oocytes. It argues that approaching human eggs in terms of their telos rather than their moral status is useful. The article examines how Meilaender deploys the idea (...) of a natural teleology to reject John Robertson’s work on assisted reproduction, particularly his preoccupation with procreative liberty. Finally, the article raises questions about the sharp contrast Meilaender draws between teleology and intentionality. (shrink)

This article offers a constructive reading of the ‘Teleology’ chapter in Hegel'sScience of Logic. I argue that it contains an apparently conclusive case for the abstract concepts of means and end (in the sense of ‘purpose’), which has remained unrecognized in the literature. I then show some implications of the fact that the argument is entirely abstract in Hegel's system.

In recent years the account of natural law that has come to be known as the “new natural law theory” has come under criticism. Rebekah Johnston has engaged quite seriously with the NNL account of marriage and sexuality and has deemed it insufficient and internally inconsistent, going so far as to argue for the legitimacy of homosexual “marriage” based on the NNL’s own system. The author argues in this essay that the NNL does not fully realize the implications of its (...) position in this regard, and that Rebekah Johnston’s critique fails similarly in providing an account of marriage and sexuality. To remedy these errors, the role of normative, natural teleology must be investigated thoroughly. (shrink)

Life is a relationship among various kinds of agents interacting at different scales in ways that are multifarious, complex, and emergent. Life is always a part of an ecological embedding in communities of interaction, which in turn structure and influence how life evolves. Evolution is essential for understanding life and biodiversity. Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution suggests a way of examining “tendencies” without “teleology.” In this paper I reexamine that work in light of recent concepts in evolutionary ecology, and explore how (...) agential aspects of life are essential for understanding how emergence provides a basis for a process-based metaphysics of life. In support of this project, I will explore how the major transitions of life on Earth have proceeded through increasing levels of cooperation among agents (e.g., mitochondria in animal cells forming a mutualistic relationship), which have allowed further emergences and complexity to evolve. This complexity always, however, emerges in the context of ecological relationships and a nonteleological evolutionary process. Yet, while nonteleological, the progression of life thus far on this planet seems to hold the promise of certain tendencies that seem inherent in life itself. (shrink)

According to the standard history, Aristotelian teleology and final causes were discarded in the scientific revolution in favor of the mechanical philosophy. In fact, the term teleology was invented in the eighteenth century to designate the search for evidence of god in purposes, goals, intelligence, and design manifest in nature. The background natural theology is the adaptation of Aristotelian philosophy by Greek commentators and Neoplatonists, and by Arabic and Latin commentators. But already with the scholastics, there was a move to (...) consider final causes applicable only to cases of intentional agency, or as a heuristic for material and moving causes. Kant attempted to resolve the impasse between the natural theology and heuristic perspectives in his third Critique. Kant’s view of teleology has had a profound and arguably distorting influence on the later interpretation of Aristotle’s use of ends and goods in natural science. A better starting point for the examination of Aristotle’s teleology is a treatise by Aristotle’s associate and successor, Theophratus, who in his Metaphysics presents a critical view of teleological explanations. (shrink)

In this paper, I use the comparison between human beings and intelligent machines to shed light on the concept of teleology. What characterizes human beings and distinguishes them from a robot capable of achieving complex objectives? In the first place, by stipulating that what characterizes human beings are mental states, I consider the mark of the mental. A smart robot probably has no consciousness but we might have reason for doubt while interacting with it. And a smart robot shows intentionality. (...) I focus on the type of naturalized intentionality that is at stake here. Then I go back to the traditional idea of teleology, and to the scientific criticism of it, through the question of the kind of purposes that artificial intelligence (AI) may set itself. Husserl's basic idea of teleology therefore serves to have an authoritative term of comparison and to introduce the intuitive difference between human beings and intelligent machines based on the homo pictor thought experiment proposed by Jonas. My conclusion is that a specific finalism, understood in a non-criterial sense, is what qualifies the human being and differentiates the latter (for now) from smart robots. (shrink)

AS IS WELL KNOWN, one of Kant's major concerns was the reconciliation of Newtonian science and metaphysics, a preoccupation made particularly acute by the need to provide a satisfactory explanation of organisms. It is in light of his claim that only the mechanistic principles of Newton's physics can provide scientific knowledge that the role to be played by purposiveness becomes problematic. Purpose appears to resist mechanistic explanation and is therefore a major impediment to unifying science under one set of principles. (...) Kant concludes that although organisms cannot be explained mechanistically, the impossibility is due to a limitation of reason. By appealing to the critical turn Kant thus avoids an antinomy between mechanism and finality while allowing that it is possible for mechanism and finality to be reconciled in the supersensible. This reconciliation, unfortunately, we will never know. (shrink)

이 글에서 나는 스피노자가 목적론 일반을 거부한 것이 아니라 신에 대해서만 목적론을 거부하고 있으며 인간에 대해서는 목적론적 설명의 일종인 숙고적 목적론을 옹호하고 있 다는 것을 논증했다. 또한 인간에 대한 목적론적 설명이 일관되게 적용될 수 없다는 베넷 의 주장과는 반대로, 목적론적 설명은 기계론이나 인과적 결정론과 양립가능하며 그의 욕 망 개념은 목적론적으로 해석될 수 있음을 보여주었다. 뿐만 아니라 표상적 내용이 인과적 으로 무력하기 때문에 행위의 동기가 될 수 없다는 베넷의 주장은 스피노자의 철학에 대한 오해에 기반한 것임을 보여주었다.

This article interprets Hegel's hierarchical theory of race as an application of his general views about the metaphysics of classification and explanation. We begin by offering a reconstruction of Hegel's hierarchical theory of race based on the critical edition of relevant lecture transcripts: we argue that Hegel's position on race is appropriately classified as racist, that it postulates innate mental deficits of some races, and that it turns racism from an anthropological into a metaphysical doctrine by claiming that the division (...) of humankind into races (at least in the Old World) is not a brute fact, but follows a ‘higher necessity’. We then summarize our interpretation of the relevant metaphysical background to this theory. On our reading, Hegel postulates an essentialist form of explanation that explains given kinds as stages in a teleological, non-temporal process through which the nature of a superordinate kind is realized. We argue that Hegel's views about a hierarchical and necessary division of humankind into races are an application of this model to the case of human diversity, motivated by explanatory considerations and subject to confirmation bias. By way of conclusion, we address two possible attempts to ‘save’ Hegelian philosophy from its racist baggage. (shrink)