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 (...) in natural selection processes. An important prerequisite for the explanation is the ability to understand development in a teleological way. Here, the concept of Umwelt plays a crucial role: if organisms are responsible for generating adaptive variation in specific environments, we need a theory that explains the context-dependent nature of adaptively oriented processes. The Umwelt is thus a central element in determining the goal that an adaptive process pursues. The second path in my analysis also has a historical dimension. I will present Karl Ernst von Baer’s reflections on teleological development and his influence on von Uexküll's thinking. I will present various ideas developed by von Baer, such as the distinction between Ziel and Zweck and the use of musical metaphors, which can help to understand development teleologically and give von Uexküll’s theory a central place in this framework. (shrink)

This study examined how sales managers react to ethical and unethical acts by their salespeople. Deontological considerations and, to a much lesser extent, teleological considerations predicted sales managers' ethical judgments. Sales managers' intentions to reward or discipline ethical or unethical sales force behavior were primarily determined by their ethical judgments. An organization's perceived ethical work climate was not a significant predictor of sales managers' intentions to intervene when ethical and unethical sales force behavior was encountered.

This book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible. Taking Gadamer’s comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns to (...) Kant’s Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis. At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique. This text contends that Kant’s broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant’s dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Here I advance a unified account of the structure of the epistemic normativity of assertion, action, and belief. According to my Teleological Account, all of these are epistemically successful just in case they fulfill the primary aim of knowledgeability, an aim which in turn generates a host of secondary epistemic norms. The central features of the Teleological Account are these: it is compact in its reliance on a single central explanatory posit, knowledge-centered in its insistence that knowledge sets (...) the fundamental epistemic norm, and yet fiercely pluralistic in its acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of a rich range of epistemic norms distinct from knowledge. Largely in virtue of this pluralist character, I argue, the Teleological Account is far superior to extant knowledge-centered accounts. (shrink)

The author of the acclaimed Gay Fiction Speaks brings us new interviews with twelve prominent gay writers who have emerged in the last decade. Hear Us Out demonstrates how in recent decades the canon of gay fiction has developed, diversified, and expanded its audience into the mainstream. Readers will recognize names like Michael Cunningham, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours inspired the hit movie; and others like Christopher Bram, Bernard Cooper, Stephen McCauley, and Matthew Stadler. These accounts explore the vicissitudes (...) of writing on gay male themes in fiction over the last thirty years--prejudices of the literary marketplace; social and political questions; the impact of AIDS; commonalities between gay male and lesbian fiction... and even some delectable bits of gossip. (shrink)

Saba Mahmood’s anthropological work studies the gain in skills, agency and capacity building by the women’s dawa movement in Egypt. These women increase their virtue toward the goal of piety by following dominant, often patriarchal norms. Mahmood argues that “teleological feminism” ignores this gain in agency because this kind of feminism only focuses on opposition or resistance to these norms. In this paper I defend Mahmood’s “anti-teleological” feminist work from criticisms that her project valorizes oppression and has no (...) vision for a nonoppressive feminist future. I argue the future envisioned by teleological feminists gets caught in “the Hegelian” trap of replicating past oppression in their feminist future. I find in Mahmood’s work the tools to escape this trap. I argue, rather than a movement of overcoming oppression, Mahmood’s work suggests an immanent and creative movement that emphasizes difference for a truly new future. I turn to a Bergsonian metaphor and argue that this movement can be seen as akin to the movement of biological evolution. I conclude using the work of Eve Sedgwick that the Egyptian women that Mahmood studies are being read in a “paranoid” fashion and demonstrate using Leila Ahmed a better “reparative” reading of these women. (shrink)

RESUMEN La teleosemántica es el intento de naturalizar el contenido mental mediante el recurso al concepto de función biológica. En el presente artículo se argumenta que la teleosemántica carece de los recursos necesarios para hacer frente a tres problemas: la indeterminación del contenido, el carácter abstracto de este y la inutilidad biológica de algunas de las representaciones que pueden albergar organismos como los humanos. ABSTRACT Teleosemantics is the attempt to naturalize mental content by resorting to the concept of biological function. (...) The article argues that teleosemantics lacks the necessary resources to solve three problems: the indeterminacy of content, its abstract nature, and the biological uselessness of some of the representations of certain organisms such as human beings. (shrink)

In this insightful study, Bockja Kim evaluates J.N. Findlay's philosophy of religion in order to determine whether it provides a basis for the positive construction of moral philosophy. In this effort, Kim relies heavily on Hegel's distinction between bad and true infinity to interpret Findlay's philosophical thought. Kim argues that the significance of Findlay's moral philosophy lies in its attempt to construct a method for positive moral reflection by redressing the extreme negative philosophies of transcendentalism and existentialism. Findlay's philosophy thus (...) effectively counters the negativity of moral skepticism and mysticism, both of which tend to neglect moral philosophy and ethics. In addition, Kim explores how Findlay's philosophy may promote inter-faith dialogue between religious traditions of the East and West. Philosophers and religious scholars with interests in Christianity and Buddhism will find this thought-provoking work enlightening. (shrink)

Confabulation is typically understood to be dysfunctional. But this understanding neglects the phenomenon’s potential benefits. In fact, we think that the benefits of non-clinical confabulation provide a better foundation for a general account of confabulation. In this paper, we start from these benefits to develop a social teleological account of confabulation. Central to our account is the idea that confabulation manifests a kind of willful ignorance. By understanding confabulation in this way, we can provide principled explanations for the difference (...) between clinical and non-clinical cases of confabulation and the extent to which confabulation is rational. (shrink)

The notions of purpose, goal, end and function are used in descriptions of a very wide range of human, animal and machine behaviour. Andrew Woodfield provides here a unified account of such teleological descriptions and explanations, their varieties, their logical structure and their proper uses. He concentrates his argument on the concepts of 'goal-directed behaviour' and 'natural function', and combines original philosophical criticism with a meticulous, detailed survey of the main competing theories in this diffuse and difficult field.

This essay investigates consequentialist reasoning in law. It begins with a brief exposition of the structure of consequentialist reasoning. It then turns to the role of consequentialist reasoning in two aspects of legal decision-making. Legal officials must reason both about ends and about the choice of means to achieve those ends. Legal instrumentalism, however, takes many forms, and different forms identify different officials to engage in the task of reasoning consequentially to choose means. The essay then considers the difficulties posed (...) by the fact that legal decision-makers choose policies or institutions that structure the outcomes they hope to achieve. Finally, the essay considers the role that consequentialist reasoning may play in choosing ends. (shrink)

I explain what teleological reasons are, distinguish between direct and indirect teleological reasons, and discuss both whether all practical reasons are teleological and whether all teleological reasons are direct.

I argue for a teleological account of events in progress. Details aside, the proposal is that events in progress are teleological processes. It follows from this proposal that final causes are ubiquitous: anything happening at any time is an event with a telos.

This brief paper presents an Aristotelian-inspired approach to end-of-life decision making. The account focuses on the importance of teleology, in particular, the telos of eudaimonia understood as the goal of human flourishing as well as the telos of medicine when a person’s eudaimonia is threatened by serious illness and death. We argue that an Aristotelian bioethics offers a better alternative to a “fundamentalist bioethics” since the telos of eudaimonia offers a more realistic conception of the self and the realities of (...) frailty and mortality, provides a more objective basis for making decisions regarding end-of-life treatment and care, and is better able to resist the pull of the Technological Imperative. In addition, this teleological concept is flexible enough for it to be employed in multicultural and pluralistic societies. (shrink)

The principle of least action (PLA) has often been cited as a counterexample to the dominant mode of causal explanation in physics. In particular, PLA seems to involve an appeal to final causes or some other teleological ideology. However, Ben-Menahem (Causation in science, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2018) argues that such implications no longer apply given that PLA can be recovered as limiting case from quantum theory. In this paper, I argue that the metaphysical implications of PLA-based explanations are (...) not undermined by its status as derivative. However, I contend that PLA functions as a diachronic constraint that licenses explanations by constraint (Lange, Because without cause: non-casual explanations in science and mathematics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). PLA-based explanations, on this account, are non-causal but also differ from familiar cases of teleological explanations in several respects. (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)