Teleological Notion Research Articles

Teleology Revived? Cooperation and the Ends of Nature

Modern natural science and philosophies of nature are often hostile to the notion of teleology in nature. Nevertheless, teleological orientation is ascribed to human behaviour because such behaviour is deliberative and intentional. This establishes a dualism between nature and culture, but also between intentional mind and inert matter. This essay argues that such dualisms are overcome by resisting a distinction between ‘extrinsic’ teleology and ‘intrinsic’ teleology, and by recovering Aristotle’s connection between teleology and form. Recent work on autopoiesis in the philosophy of mind indicates overlap with Aristotelian form. Finally, the new category of cooperation applied first to human behaviour in the realm of game theory, and latterly to evolution, indicates ways in which normative descriptions of nature understood teleologically are once again possible.

Ethics and ontology: Hans Jonas’ looking for the imperative of responsibility in the age of technology

The article deals with the problem of relationship between ethics and ontology in Hans Jonas’ search for the imperative of responsibility in the age of technology. One can see the relationship between ontology and ethics as problematical not only because of the traditional distinction between the theoretical and practical reason, but also because of the Martin Heidegger’s attempt to return to fundamental ontology in terms of the henomenological Dasein analysis which differently incorporates the practical dimension. Jonas follows Heidegger when he notices that the nature of human action has changed in the technological age. The author of the article maintainsthat the phenomenon of technology is constitutive for Jonas’ formula of the responsibility imperative. Furthermore, the relationship between ontology and ethics is confirmed by Jonas’ orientation towards the real or genuine ethics (wirkliche Ethik), as well as towards the ontological grounding of ethics. However, Jonas’ stand against anonymity of Heidegger’s being, which can annul the ethical dimension and make one to resign facing necessity is also stressed. The article concludes that avoiding this anonymity Jonas declares the teleological notion of being as a kind of neo-Aristotelianism. The article questions whether the Aristotelian teleology can offer an adequate counterbalance for the dominant anonymity of modern technology. Maybe ethics should remain as an alternative to ontology instead of seeking for its ontological grounding.

Service Learning as a Pedagogy of Interruption

As a teacher, educator, and strong advocate for service learning, I became very interested in both the opportunities and the limitations of current approaches to service learning. This article begins to sketch an as yet unrealized relational approach to service learning, drawing on ideas about encounters with Others in the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The first part of the article offers a brief introduction to the field of service learning and explores problematic aspects related to traditional and critical approaches in service learning initiatives, where ideas of objective knowledge of self and Other, teleological notions of progress, and server–served relationships limit possibilities of engagement and transcendence. The second part of the article draws on post-structuralist ideas in education to propose a distinction between the desire 'to learn from the Other' and the risky and difficult disposition to be open 'to being taught by the Other' (Biesta, 2012). I propose a strategic step beyond the limitations of traditional and critical approaches to service learning, where difference is seen as a productive and indispensable force, and where education is about encountering the world/the Other and being altered by it.

Deleuze’s children

Children, the image of the child, and the gendered figures of the girl and the boy are thematics that run through the work of Deleuze and feature prominently in his joint writing with Guattari. However, there are many different children in Deleuze’s writings. Various child figures do distinct things in Deleuze’s work. In this article, I argue that his work on children can be utilized to rethink popular, teleological notions of childhood and ‘growing up’.

‘The freshman malady’: rethinking the ontology of the ‘crush’

This article explores the difference that a focus on emotion makes to the writing of history. Using as a case study the widespread phenomenon of the ‘College crush’, it makes a case for considering the crush as an example of a distinctively modern emotional style, produced within the specific emotional communities of single-sex educational institutions rather than as ‘evidence’ of lesbian identity or of a phase on a developmental path to normative heterosexuality. The shift to considering the ontology of the ‘crush’ is enabled by the more flexible framework of the history of emotions. This contrasts with research on sexuality, which is underpinned by teleological notions of identity, biography and history.

Avoiding the Pitfall of Progress and Associated Perils of Evolutionary Education

AbstractPeople reflexively see all change as implying inevitably increasing progress and complexity. This expected directionality is especially observed in students’ views of living things, with some species envisioned as “higher” or more evolved. Students tend naturally to see all evolutionary change as adaptive, progressive, optimal, and teleological, with improvement achieved as needed or desired by organisms (if not as planned in advance). Following an extended outline of many interrelated ways, this basic yet unfortunately widespread and deep-seated misconception of evolutionary thinking ensnares students and hinders proper understanding of the actual pattern and process of evolution, a more useful pedagogical approach is presented. A strategy that involves eliciting preconceptions, engaging in numerous counterexamples, and continually reinforcing an alternative view is generally effective. This is best achieved by tackling the misconception of progress head-on, with an active learning model that forces students to come up with substitute explanations. Several examples of exercises and activities to combat the universal and automatically intuitive inclination toward teleological notions of progress are given, including analyses of paleontology, ecology, biochemistry, development, and systematics.

Implicit and Explicit Goal-Directedness

In this paper, I develop and defend a theory of what I call ‘implicit goal-directedness’, which is a purely causal or dynamical notion, and can be separated from the notion of ‘explicit goal-directedness’, which implies the representation of a goal-state. I describe the problems that plagued earlier attempts at analyzing goal-directedness in causal/dynamical terms, and then present my own novel solution. I argue that implicit goal-directedness, in the sense presented, plays an important conceptual role in biology and cognitive science, and is distinct, not only from explicit goal-directedness, but also from the other major teleological notion familiar to philosophers of biology: evolutionary function. Indeed, an appreciation of this tripartite distinction is critical for understanding the structure of explanations of behavior in many scientific contexts.

Kant's Account of Moral Education

While Kant's pedagogical lectures present an account of moral education, his theory of freedom and morality seems to leave no room for the possibility of an education for freedom and morality. In this paper, it is first shown that Kant's moral philosophy and his educational philosophy are developed within different theoretical paradigms: whereas the former is situated within a transcendentalist framework, the latter relies on a teleological notion of human nature. The second part of this paper demonstrates that the core ideas of Kant's moral philosophy are also present in his pedagogy. This means that the problem of moral education must be solved within the transcendentalist framework. It is finally claimed that Kant himself outlines a solution to this problem in his pedagogical lectures.

Teleology and Final Causation in Aristotle and in Contemporary Science

ABSTRACT: With a view to suggesting the possible relevance of Aristotelian thought to current notions of complexity and self-organization, studies Aristotle’s notions of teleology and final causation. After a sketch of the historical process by which such notions were finally rejected in the science of Galileo and Newton, attention is drawn to some contemporary trends in philosophy of science that argue for a return to some (modified) versions of the notion of final causation (I. Prigogine, R. Thom, S. Rosen). These arguments are illustrated by the example of Bénard cells, and the theories of Schneider, Kay, and D. Sagan.

How to Be a Man: Malory and the Moral Paradox

How to Be a Man:Malory and the Moral Paradox Marie Wallin One of the most vexed questions in Malory scholarship in the twentieth century has been the so-called moral paradox. Critics have tried to come to terms with the perceived differences in morality between, on the one hand, the chivalric and pious nature of Le Morte Darthur and on the other, the doubtful life ethics of its probable author, Sir Thomas Malory of Warwickshire, who stood accused of burglary, kidnapping and repeated rape. How could such a "scoundrel," as R. S. Loomis puts it, have composed one of the world's greatest chivalric romances?1 The apparent discrepancy between life-records and literary work has generated attempted solutions ranging from alternative candidates for authorship to speculation about the raped woman's truthfulness as well as the accuracy of the historical documents recording the charges against the Warwickshire man. Catherine Batt has criticised this line of inquiry and the attempts made by several male critics, primarily Edward Hicks and C. S. Lewis, to explain away the rape charges, as "an artefact of the humanist approach," arguing that "the latter has created both this problem situation and its concomitant alarm over the unlikelihood of being able to solve it."2 While I agree that a teleological notion of authorship is partly what leads critics to strive for concordance between the two images of Malory (and I agree with the general argument of Batt's article in itself), I would nevertheless suggest that reasons for the critics' intense interest in Malory's life records are more complex than simply an outdated mode of authorship. The exceptional instability of the textual situation of Le Morte Darthur leaves the critical tradition with little other choice than the drawing of textual and creative boundaries based on a concept of Malory as the one unifying and stabilizing factor in terms of morality or ethics. Read as varying versions of masculinity, Malory's ethics become a means of establishing authority in a bewildering array of textual witnesses, a guide to the correct versions of both life and creative work. [End Page 105] A brief recapitulation of the textual history of Le Morte illuminates just how peculiar the situation is. For five hundred years, only the Caxton version of Malory's text was known; this was printed in 1485 under the title Le Morte Darthur. In 1934, a manuscript version was discovered at Winchester College, referred to as the Malory Manuscript or the Winchester Manuscript (now London, BL, Additional MS 59678). Although at the most a mere fifteen years apart in age, the two textual witnesses stand on different sides of a number of fundamental cultural changes. By conventional periodization, the manuscript is a product of the Middle Ages while the printed book overleaps the Great Vowel Shift into the early-modern era; the two witnesses also stand on different sides of the introduction of printing in England.3 In her discussion about the uncertain and complex relation between the two witnesses and about their seeming place in scribal versus print traditions, Felicity Riddy notes, "Other fifteenth century manuscripts have survived which have been marked up as printers' copy-texts (which the Winchester manuscript was not), and we know of prints being used as copy-texts for hand-written books, but the Morte Darthur belongs to the transition in a way that none of these does."4 The manuscript revealed the extent to which Caxton had altered the language of the text in his printed edition of Le Morte Darthur in 1485; in his preface to the book, Caxton himself claims he has printed it according to "a copye unto me delyverd,"5 something which has led to endless speculation about what this copy may have looked like or to what extent the alterations may have been Caxton's own. This has led critics to ponder questions of authorship, of originality, and even whether Le Morte Darthur should be viewed as Malory at all or as a different book altogether. Beyond modes of production and dialect, the manuscript also differs from the print in other ways. Of particular interest to critics has been the so-called Roman...

Theories of Technical Functions: Function Ascriptions Versus Function Assignments, Part 1

Introduction The notion of function plays a central role in the engineer’s way of thinking. It is hard to imagine how engineers could do without function talk.2 They assume that the technical artifacts they design, make, and maintain and their components all have technical functions. But what does it mean to say that a technical artifact “has” a technical function (or a functional property or feature)? This question has been troubling engineers as well as philosophers. Engineers address this problem mainly for pragmatic reasons; they are interested in knowing how to represent formally or computationally the functional properties of technical artifacts in software tools intended to support engineers in their daily work. One of the main reasons why philosophers have been interested in the notion of function is its connection with the notion of teleology, which itself raises all kinds of conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological problems. A problem that both engineers and philosophers run into when analyzing the notion of technical function is its relation to physical structures and human intentions. They run into this problem from, so to speak, opposite directions. From an engineering point of view, that the function of a technical artifact, such as a television set, is closely related to its physical structure is obvious, because it is the physical structure that realizes or performs the function. One of the main tasks of engineers is to design, develop, and produce physical structures that can perform all kinds of technical functions. Nevertheless, the function of a television appears to be related also to what people use it for—that is, to the intentions of human beings. A television is a means to a certain end, and that end is an end of human beings. It is in relation to human ends only that the television appears to be a means, and to have a function. In engineering practice this close relation of technical functions to human ends comes to the fore in, for instance, the early stages of design projects, in which human needs and desires have to be translated into functions and functional requirements. Within philosophical circles the dominant starting point for analyzing technical functions is the idea that these functions are mind dependent; technical artifacts are taken to have their functions only in

Proust's Recherche and Hegelian Teleology

The final volume of Marcel Proust's novel À la Recherche du Temps perdu (Recherche) presents a striking puzzle. In this volume, the narrator Marcel proposes a literary theory which is supposed to provide the theoretical basis for the whole book, such that the Recherche can be considered a novel which contains its own theory. However, the Recherche as a whole does not seem to comply with this literary theory. I suggest in this paper that this puzzle can be solved by appreciating that Marcel's theory of literature, and his understanding of the way literature relates to his own life, is based on a Hegelian notion of teleology.

Good King Henry and the Genealogy of Shakespeare's First History Plays

While recent arguments for the saint play as a formal influence on the Shakespearean history play rely on a teleological notion of “secularization,” they may encourage us to rethink the genealogy of Shakespeare's earliest history plays, plays about the reign of Henry VI, who was venerated as a saint. In contrast to Tudor promotion of Henry as a saintly king, the popular cult–which preceded and outlived its political appropriation–celebrated Henry VI for his likeness to ordinary English men and women. This essay explores the resonance between the cult and the plays, especially how the physical and affective lives of English citizens attend the king's failure to symbolize the body politic. Religion can thus be understood as a mediating rather than a rejected term when studying the development of the history plays as a form for thinking about English community.

ARS en Políticas para la Innovación Tecnológica: un enfoque teleológico

This paper presents a novel approach of application for Social Nertwork Analysis (SNA) into the field of Innovation Studies from a Complex Systems view, with the aim to intervene in the design and implementation of learning for innovation policy, in less innovative countries. Two terms are introduced, learning system for innovation and micro-network of activities intra-dyad, in order to integrate the teleological notion into the SNA. It is illustrated with a micro-level exercise (institutional performance evaluation of a R&D Centre) for a public university strategic problem: the lack of links of their research organizations with the productive sector. A conceptual framework is presented for the design of an institutional evaluation tool to catch the linkage aptitude and vision in this type of organizations (strengths and weaknesses), with the aim to intervene for the change, in order to increase the linkage potentiality, and so, eventually increase the potentiality to articulate a Learning for Innovation Transition System. The congruence in the design of the evaluation tool (questionnaire) to tie in the who with the how and the what for (the strategic objectives of the organization), is illustrated

Leibniz on Natural Teleology and the Laws of Optics

This essay examines one of the cornerstones of Leibniz’s defense of teleology within the order of nature. The first section explores Leibniz’s contributions to the study of geometrical optics, and argues that his “Most Determined Path Principle” or “MDPP” allows him to bring to the fore philosophical issues concerning the legitimacy of teleological explanations by addressing two technical objections raised by Cartesians to non‐mechanistic derivations of the laws of optics. The second section argues that, by drawing on laws such as the MDPP, Leibniz is able to introduce a thin notion of teleology that gives him the resources to respond to the most pressing charges of his day against teleological explanations within natural philosophy. Finally, the third section argues that contemporary philosophers have been overly hasty in their dismissal of Leibniz’s account of natural teleology, and indeed that their own generally thin conceptions of teleology have left them with few well‐motivated resources for resisting his elegant position.

Unity in the Concept of Function

SummaryThis essay argues that neither the etiological nor the dispositional account of functions conforms to the actual practice by which functions are ascribed in biology. Philip Kitcher’s account, which unifies what is common to both accounts, is assessed against what biologists are actually doing when they ascribe functions. Two problems of Kitcher’s account are identified: it is too liberal and it tends to circularity, insofar as it presupposes teleological notions. Finally, an alternative account of functions is provided by characterizing the system of sentences that report natural history.

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Teleology and its Use and Misuse in Theories of Public Administration: The Case of Economic Policy

Modern social science supposedly eschews any notion of purposefulness when assessing social phenomenon. There may be causes and effects, and in the case of individual actors or groups of actors there are certainly intentions. But the Aristotelian notion of teleology, that things which social scientists study have some sort of predetermined goal, seems decidedly unscientific to modern minds. It may seem strange to hear mention of such an archaic term. Few writers nowadays refer explicitly to teleogy when analyzing the state, or anything else for that matter. The term is derived from the Greek telos (meaning end or goal) and logos (meaning theory or account) and refers simultaneously to a belief that a particular phenomenon under study has a purpose and the attempt to explain how the characteristics of the phenomenon in question lead to fulfillment of that purpose (W.T. Jones 1969, 222). Yet, conservative political philosophers have used teleogy to great effect. They often assume that the State and its actors are self-interested and self-aggrandizing. Many in this cynical age see such a premise as self-evident and regard as naive any more generous-minded deviation from it. Nonetheless, this premise posits a fundamental tendency in the State which makes certain courses of action, in this case a tyrannical government, more likely than others, and hence makes certain types of events, such as a switch to debt finance, more dangerous than others. There are, however, many other frameworks of the State and they are usually linked with a teleology of some sort. Writers who are not so conservative use teleology as well, just a different one, namely that the natural end of the state and humanity is to do good, not evil, or to help others, not themselves. This paper will review the theoretical debate about statecraft (which often comes down to a debate about the natural tendency of the state, and its ability in a given historical circumstance to fulfill that tendency). The argument will be made that despite some strong advantages of other approaches, the grand theoretical and teleological way of analyzing policy has been fraught with difficulty.

Nietzsche Was No Darwinian

John Richardson (2002, 2004) argues that Nietzsche’s use of teleological notions, such as the “will to power” and psychological “drives,” can be naturalized within the Darwinian framework of natural selection. Although this ambitious project has merit, the Darwinian framework does not provide the strong teleology necessary to interpret Nietzsche’s explanatory project. Examining the logic of selection, the conceptual limitations on biological functions, and the evidential demands that must be met to deploy evolutionary theory show that Nietzsche’s explanatory project does not cohere with the Darwinian framework. Thus, coherence with currently accepted evolutionary theory should not constrain the philosophical project of interpretation in this case.