Teleological Process Research Articles

Taking the Teleology of History Seriously: Lessons from Hegel's Logic

AbstractTo oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic, in which teleology is introduced to solve a problem in the individuation of entities. It will turn out that the fullest actualization of the end is in the durable means, which is also thereby individuated. And it will turn out that the paradigmatic historical means—the state—is tensed, as it were, between the end and its realization that makes it synchronically historical. This synchronic historicity is missing in the usual progressive and thus diachronic accounts of the teleological process of history. But first we step back even farther (at least historically). We begin by taking up the two most important philosophical accounts of teleology for Hegel, namely those of Aristotle and Kant. Then we go to Hegel's Logic for his reconstruction of teleological processes against the background of the explanatory need for individuation. We focus on four aspects of Hegel's account: that teleology is a structure of reciprocal interaction, that the purpose is an immanent governing principle, that change is the price of immanence, and that the durable means is the teleological object par excellence. Finally, we trace these features through Hegel's account of world history and conclude with some brief remarks on the historicity of the state described in the Philosophy of Right.

Small Worlds with Cosmic Powers

The wave function of quantum mechanics can be understood in terms of the dispositional role it plays in the dynamics of a distribution of matter in three-dimensional space (or four-dimensional spacetime). There is more than one way, however, of specifying its dispositional role. This paper considers Suárez’s theory of ‘Bohmian dispositionalism’, in which the particles are endowed with their own ‘Bohmian dispositions’, and Simpson’s theory of ‘Cosmic Hylomorphism’, in which the particle configuration comprises a hylomorphic substance which has an intrinsic power. I argue that Bohmian dispositionalism fails to capture intuitively correct counterfactuals about what would happen in Small Worlds which have only a small number of particles, but that this problem is avoided by Cosmic Hylomorphism, in which the cosmic power manifests a teleological process.

Emancipation and Constitutional Patriotism: The Centralverein and the Weimar Republican Order

Abstract The article explores the conceptualization of Jewish emancipation and the republican order of state by activists of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, CV) in the Weimar years. It argues that activists adopted a liberal conception of constitutional patriotism and involved themselves in a republican nation-building project that went substantially beyond its traditional tasks of defence (Abwehr) and enlightenment (Aufklärung) against antisemitism. This entailed rallying fellow republicans to the defence of the order of state, advocating for the spirit of the constitution and rule of law and actively participating in the development of the republican society. In doing so, the CV rethought what it meant to be ‘German’ and came to understand it in a distinctively republican form, arguing that identification with the constitution and the republican ideals were the truest expression of Germanness. As ‘German’ came to be understood as the free expression of the people’s spirit and will, Jews’ belonging to Germany was seen as the result of a teleological process of the materialization of the ‘German spirit’, manifested in the republic. The article therefore reads the history of the Centralverein during the Weimar Republic not only in regard to its role for the Jewish community but crucially as one of the liberal movements that aimed to develop and defend the German republic.

World heritage as authentic fake: Paradisic Reef and Wild Tasmania

This paper explores how the imagined landscapes that act as a catalyst for World Heritage listing, are unable to be reconciled with formal heritage assessments. We explore this tension through two Australian World Heritage landscapes: the Great Barrier Reef and the Tasmanian Wilderness. The history of these listings suggests a teleological process driven by a desire to create authentic utopias. While utopias are imagined spaces, Paradise at the Reef and the Tasmanian Wilderness are realised through hyperreal landscapes (fakes). However, these wholistic landscapes dissolve into a series of inventories of species and numbers in official listing. We suggest the failure to recognise the hyperreal is a form of false consciousness that creates a tension between managing for formally recognised values and managing the unmanageable utopia, and that a broader use of cultural landscapes might be useful in addressing this divide.

Rotational Principle as Teleological Genesis in the “Annunciation of Death” Scene from Wagner’s Die Walküre

Structured as a dialog, the “Annunciation of Death,” a duet in Act 2, Scene 4 of Wagner’s Die Walküre, centers on the changing dramatic relationship between Brünnhilde and Siegmund. A hardhearted, obedient warrior at the beginning of their first encounter, Brünnhilde learns sympathy and compassion from Siegmund’s profound love for Sieglinde; this knowledge transforms her into the woman who eventually sacrifices herself through love to redeem the divine world at the end of the cycle. The article examines how this narrative dynamic is reflected in the musical architecture. It reads the scene’s overarching form as a three-stage process in which the characters struggle for narrative control, from Brünnhilde’s declaration of Siegmund’s fate to his rewriting of that fate in his favor. The rotational principle is the primary formal function clarifying the transformations and interactions of leitmotifs in the playing-out of the dramatic narrative. The article thereby demonstrates the effectiveness of the rotational principle for understanding the scene’s teleological process as embedded in the music and drama.

Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsromanby Daniel Aureliano Newman

<i>Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman</i>by Daniel Aureliano Newman

A Vision of Modernity: Narratives of Historical (Dis)continuity in Oman

Be it in academic publications, official speeches or ordinary narratives, the history of Oman and the foundations of its modern nation-state usually appear as a continuous teleological process. The dichotomies such as tradition vis-à-vis modernity and darkness versus enlightenment (or nahḍa) are articulated into a narrative of progression and transformation. This article aims to understand the conception and experience of these notions by looking at how the construction of history and its temporality follows an ethos of continuity. It examines if the vision of modernity selected and incorporated in the national narrative of building a peaceful Oman and creating an Omani identity anchored on Ibadi values is sustainable in the long term. In this process, the Omani citizen emerged, part of the modern citizenship process that requires creating bonds of aggregation through national identity and the relationship between people and state. Finally, the article focuses on the tensions that arise from the way modernisation is framed in the historical trajectory of the state-building, nowadays going through leadership changes and transitioning to a post-oil era.

Denying and Accepting a Family Member’s Illness: Uncertainty Management as a Process

ABSTRACT Doubt is a common, yet challenging form of uncertainty to have about another’s illness. Although navigating illness uncertainty is a process of continual (re)appraisal and management, existing research narrowly examines windows of uncertainty experience. To illustrate how uncertainty management in the context of doubt is recursive, nonlinear, and ongoing, we apply a process approach to communication to uncertainty management theory. Drawing on interviews with 33 U.S. adults, our findings explicate a prominently teleological (i.e., goal-driven) process wherein participants’ uncertainty management served to accept or deny illness, depending on the extent individuals valued their own and the other’s identity and the relationship. Participants generally moved through this process along one of three trajectories: growth, stagnation, or resentment. We also observed dialectical, evolutionary, and life cycle processes in the data. Findings demonstrate the heuristic value of studying uncertainty management as a multiple motor process.

Charity in Interpretation: Principle or Virtue? A Return to Gregory the Great

I defend the view that charity in interpretation is both an epistemic and a moral virtue. In the first part, I examine Donald Davidson’s version of his principle of charity and question his ascription of beliefs by raising a phenomenological objection: beliefs themselves, before being ascribed, need to be interpreted when interpreters and the subjects they try to understand do not share the same cultural and historical background. In the second section, I examine the notion of epistemic virtue as discussed in virtue epistemology and question whether an epistemic virtue can be completely separated from a moral virtue. In the third section, I show how Gregory the Great, Father of the Church and Pope in the 6th century, understands the virtue of charity in interpretation not as a motivation (in a causal process of interpretation, as in virtue epistemology) but as an attraction to the good (in a teleological process) so that the interpreter is not only a technician producing an interpretation (following a “principle” of charity, as in Davidson) but a moral agent acting in a community.

Божественные законы и чудеса природы: естественная теология русского спиритуализма конца XIX – начала XX в.

Russian spiritualism movement of the 19th – early 20th century remains an understudied area of current scientific research. Its philosophical and theological aspects deserve more attention due to its marginal role on the epistemological borders between science and religion. The article aims to reveal the Russian spiritualists’ vision of the relationship between God and nature and for the first time overviews and analyses debates in Russian spiritualism about the problems of the philosophy of religion. The article considers spiritualists’ insight in the essence of “miracle” and “law”, interpretation of evolution as a teleological process; evaluation of different Divine Attributes and their role in theological criticism, and also spiritualists’ solution to the Problem of Evil and Suffering. The natural theology of modern spiritualism constitutes part of the general intellectual movement aimed to bring into harmony both scientific and religious worldviews in the second half of the 19th century. Works of both foreign and Russian spiritualists demonstrate that the sacralization of laws and “naturalization” of miracles were used by spiritualists to preserve the religious worldview at the time when monism and evolutionism established itself as the central ontological and main historical programmes in natural science. Still, the detailed analysis of philosophical aspects of Russian spiritualism challenges its widely-known characteristic as “synthesis” of science and religion and its simplistic characterization as being pantheistic in its nature. The article for the first time puts emphasis on the theistic current in Russian spiritualism and also highlights the key theme of its interaction with Russian philosophical thought – the survival of human personality. It encourages discussions on the role of engagement between spiritualistic movement and Russian religious philosophy at the turn of the 19th сentury.

The teleological stance: Past, present, and future.

We review the support for, and criticisms of, the teleological stance theory, often described as a foundation for goal-directed action understanding early in life. A major point of contention in the literature has been how teleological processes and assumptions of rationality are represented and understood in infancy, and this debate has been largely centered on three paradigms. Visual habituation studies assess infant's abilities to retrospectively assess teleological processes; the presence of such processes is supported by the literature. Rational imitation is a phenomenon that has been questioned both theoretically and empirically, and there is currently little support for this concept in the literature. The involvement of teleological processes in action prediction is unclear. To date, the ontology of teleological processes remains unspecified. To remedy this, we present a new action-based theory of teleological processes (here referred to as the embodied account of teleological processes), based on the development of goal-directed reaching with its origin during the fetal period and continuous development over the first few months of life.

An embodied account of teleological processes.

We emphasize a need for more research and propose our own theoretical framework, the embodied account of teleological processes, to try to explain the inconsistencies in the teleological stance literature and fill the gap in the teleological framework.

Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 by Elizabeth Renker

Reviewed by: Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 by Elizabeth Renker Martin Griffin Elizabeth Renker Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 New York: Oxford UP, 2018. 207 pp. Elizabeth Renker begins her study of late nineteenth-century American poetry by energetically discussing how the motif of the "twilight" of poetry moved through the cultural discourse of the late 1880s and 1890s, beginning as an individual judgment and coming to dominate the collective assessment of that era's poetic production. Edmund Clarence Stedman's rhetorical turn in an 1885 essay published in Century illustrated, "twilight" quickly became, as Renker notes, "an instant catchphrase" (17). The trope, suggesting a poetic culture that has almost run its course, became all the more tenacious when allied with George Santayana's languid put-down of the genteel tradition twenty-five years later. Renker suggests in the introduction that Santayana essentially inherited the glib dismissal of poetry in those decades from Stedman's earlier commentary. Renker argues forcefully that more recent generations of critics and scholars have either fully bought into the gentility-and-twilight proposition, or worse, have challenged it by simply moving the Overton window of acceptable literary periodization backward so that selected poets are seen as harbingers of modernism, or at least transitional figures in a teleological process toward poetic liberation from Victorian constraints. Her broader mission in the book is to investigate the arguments over realism in American letters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, or, more accurately, the multiple approaches that poets took to opening up the available poetic modes and forms in order to represent precisely the struggle over realism and idealism in national literary culture; this struggle also impacted the work of female poets and black poets in specific ways. She closes the study with a chapter on Melville's relationship to realist poetics. Renker is particularly interested in the ways in which the ideological meta-discourse of realism can be used to exclude or include particular voices, and she draws on the British critic Raymond Williams as someone who treated ostensibly consensual literary history as a convenient story rather than an incontestable truth. Elaborating on the complex relationship between cultural [End Page 93] forms and social conflict in which Williams played a major role during the 1960s and 1970s, Renker presents what she calls "reality categories," a cluster of the four terms real, reality, realistic, and realism (10–11). Williams utilized these terms to reveal anew a literary and intellectual struggle that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century and is, in many ways, still under way. Now and then, however, it seems that Renker has perhaps not taken Raymond Williams fully to heart, in that he was trying to explore the interaction of culture and society in literature and drama while also nudging people to move on from a fruitless debate over rigid choices between fixed concepts (for example, either the aesthetic investments of British Romanticism or the reformist program of realist fiction) shaped by almost-invisible political agendas. Renker sometimes gives the impression of falling into the trap that she sees others as already in—to fight a terminological war is to endorse the power of terminology, in some obvious way—and she has to redirect Realist Poetics in American Culture toward its true objective: an investigation of the social dynamics underlying literary forms. The achievement of the book is to make a consistent and expert case for a reading of late nineteenth-century American poetry that neither sees it as the last wave of a dying lake of sentimental versifying nor selectively designs an inspirational narrative of earlier-than-thou modernist sensibility to make us feel comfortable with the notion of poets who have the right ideas but are hobbled only by an outdated set of literary fashion choices. As the title suggests, the phrase "realist poetics" is a determining factor in describing the kind of work done between the covers. Renker sets this out as her mission statement, so to speak, but leaves an interesting question hanging in the air. That question, of how to assess the realist poetics of the era, is bound to be focused on...

ЭСХАТОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ АНТРОПОЛОГИЯ РУССКИХ СПИРИТУАЛИСТОВ КОНЦА XIX – НАЧАЛА XX В.

The article analyzes the correlation between eschatological and anthropological perspectives of Russian spiritualists on the example of their views on corporeity. According to spiritualists, the core eschatological event should come with the transfiguration of the human nature that was supposed to manifest itself through a complete replacement of ‘material’ body by the ‘subtle’ one. They regarded such development as an element of teleological evolutionary process that was attributed an eschatological significance. Spiritualists had dual attitude towards the body: on the one hand, the category of the ‘material’ had explicitly negative connotations in the spiritualistic discourse, but, on the other hand, ‘subtle’ bodies were not absolutely immaterial. The human body served as a scheme by which the cosmos was modelled, and this made itself evident in the use of organic metaphors by spiritualists. The outcome of the eschatological process was seen in the reunification of a cosmic organism. The human was pictured as able to transform itself by its own effort and thus to predetermine the outcome of the eschatological process, which was understood as an anthropocosmic process.

O TRABALHO COMO CATEGORIA ONTOLÓGICA: UMA ANÁLISE A PARTIR DA OBRA CINEMATOGRÁFICA “EU, DANIEL BLAKE”

This paper thematizework as an essential category in the human ontological process using as a figurative element of this theme the film "I, Daniel Blake", which is analyzed in the light of dialectical historical materialist theory. Throughout the text we address the relationship between biological and cultural aspects in human formation and development; the role of work as essential in the teleological process of building something not immediately given by nature; the liberating character of this activity which, unlike animals, prey to necessity, enables us to evolve beyond the immediate; the conditions of alienated labor as a threat to this freedom and the impacts of this form of expropriation on subjectivity. We discuss the current precariousness of the living conditions of the working classes. Strangeness as a causative element of conflict and suffering. The film “I Daniel Blake” demonstrates in an artistic way the situation of conflict and suffering experienced by many workers today.

The Dejudicialization of International Politics?

AbstractFor many, the growing judicialization of international relations is the next step in the process toward the complete legalization of international politics. We draw on the literature in comparative judicial politics to examine the limits of the phenomenon. The domestic literature on judicialization portrays the process as something of a one-way ratchet. In an increasingly juridified world, judges have been asked to take on greater roles in global governance, and they seem to be doing so with aplomb. This in turn incentivizes individuals and interest groups to frame their policy claims in legal terms, providing ever-more fuel for judicial governance. Yet many courts and other legal institutions, both domestic and international, have had their jurisdiction constrained, with some areas of law removed from judicial purview. Might the dynamics of constraint and backlash lead to the dejuridification of an area that has been judicialized? We conceptualize the possibility of what we call dejudicialization, situate it in the context of the literature on backlash, and delimit its potential scope and implications. While dejudicialization is empirically rare, we argue that its very possibility suggests that judicialization should not be considered a teleological process.

Legein to What End?

ABSTRACT M.M. McCabe’s rich paper makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of the Euthydemus. However, the account of saying [legein] that McCabe attributes to Socrates requires modification. Although McCabe insists that saying—like the learning process, on which her account of saying is based—is a teleological process, she claims that truth is the end of saying because Socrates aims at truth while speaking. I argue that careful attention to Socrates’ discussion of the technai reveals that teleological processes have ends distinct from the psychological goals of those who employ them. If saying is indeed a teleological process and not merely a process used teleologically, it must have a unique end independent of Socrates’ own idiosyncratic goals. By overlooking this fact, McCabe overlooks a source of normativity prominent in the Ethuydemus and important for Plato’s philosophy more generally. Her account of saying can, however, be modified so as to preserve the central insights of her thoughtful paper. I end by making the speculative suggestion that there is a teleological process superordinate to saying which uses saying in the pursuit of truth.

Creating Pathways to Personal Resilience Through Classroom Simulations

Background. College or university classroom simulations have the potential to create valuable educational outcomes that are difficult to achieve by other means. Personal resilience is one outcome that has achieved significant attention in the literature. Personal resilience is the ability to bounce back, learn from, and move forward after adverse experiences. Aim. This study posits that student personal resilience will increase following participation in university undergraduate management courses that use simulations that are grounded in a proposed teleological process model that includes six causal relationships. Method. Eighty-four students participated in either a Capstone strategy course using the Capsim simulation or a semester-long classroom as organization open simulation called XB that involved student management of all course aspects. The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC 10) survey instrument was used to measure personal resilience at both the beginning and end of each course. Results. In several cases, student personal resilience was significantly increased after courses utilizing simulations involving specific features. Conclusions. Participation in these kinds of experiences (with faculty support) may significantly increase levels of personal resilience among students. Recommendations. Simulations with the specified causal attributes might be used to foster student outcomes such as personal resilience, which typically are not a part of traditional course objectives.

The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction

The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction Annika Gonnermann At the beginning of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama caused quite a sensation. Framing the history of the world as teleological process with liberal democracy as its climax in his The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama claimed to have identified the universal denominator for civilisation: "liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe." (Fukuyama xiii) Diagnosing a growing global uniformity, Fukuyama declares democratic liberal capitalism to be the telos of human development (cf. Sagar). Although Fukuyama's claims have by now been debunked prominently (many commentators have shown for instance, that capitalism and autocracies go equally well together), they still linger in the ideological memory of (most notably) leftist critics and movements, subconsciously accepted as unalterable truth about the current political status quo. Scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have lamented the lack of imagination exhibited by the left, claiming that the (intellectual) left has long abandoned the ideological arena: the envisaged revolution by those who Žižek calls "left Fukuyamaists" aims at erecting a more human scaffolding around the construction of neoliberal capitalism by insisting on universal health care, LGBTQ-rights, or anti-racist programmes. These cosmetic improvements, however, cannot disguise the late-Thatcherite understanding of politics and economy dominating the discourse around neoliberalism. To describe this cognitive paralysis, Mark Fisher introduces the concept of "capitalist realism," thereby capturing the perceived inevitability of the current socio-political system, i.e. "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it." (2) Expanding Fredric Jameson's insights on postmodernism, Fisher conceptualises capitalism as "realism in itself" (4), which has succeeded in colonialising the Blochian New, "seamlessly occup[ying] the horizons of the thinkable" (8). Having sustained itself through the financial crisis of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement, capitalism is here to stay—despite the cries of naysayers in the tradition of historical materialism, predicting an imminent end for capitalism. On the contrary, the mood of crisis does not [End Page 26] challenge capitalism to its core, but rather strengthens its position by re-asserting the "insistence that there is no alternative" (78). This mode of thinking leaves its sediments on a tradition of writing that is usually connected to the optimistic/pessimistic projection of the future: utopia. Following Darko Suvin, this essay defines utopia as "the construction of a particular community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships between people are organized according to a radically different principle than in the author's community" (Suvin, 188, emphasis in original), thus reserving "utopia" as a categorial denominator that includes both eutopian and dystopian writing. Suvin then goes on to differentiate between "eutopia," "organized according to a radically more perfect principle than in the author's community" and "dystopia," "organized according to a radically less perfect principle" (both Suvin, 189).1 Functioning as a prophetic vehicle, as the "canary in the cage" (Baccolini and Moylan 1), utopia's means of prognosis oscillate between the cognitive limits of the present and the transformative potential of the future. In the words of Fredric Jameson, utopias are written "to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present" (Progress, 151, emphasis in original) cognitively exploring alternative futures. Especially dystopias seem to express most aptly the zeitgeist of the 21st century, a way of life conditioned by existential fears such as the global financial crisis of 2008 or the impending disaster of climate change, resulting in a pessmisitic outlook to the future. This article is therefore going to focus more narrowly on more recent dystopias and the kind of pessimism displayed within their narrative frameworks: written in an era of Fisher's "capitalist realism," contemporary dystopias like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and M. T. Anderson's Feed (2002) are informed by the late-Fukuyamaist notion of non-alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, most notable by the absence of a subplot or resistance. As Mark Fisher writes, "once, dystopian films and novels were...

Dos conceptos de la modernidad: religión y secularización

Contemporary debates on religion and secularization rest partially on the polysemy of these terms. This paper provides a short history of both and make the following claims: 1. Religion and secularization are modern concepts; 2. Secularization is a complex, diverse, plural, non teleological process; 3. Religion is a highly problematic concept, arosen in a very specific stage (XV-XIX centuries in Europe), so it is difficult to apply to other cultures and periods of time. For that reason, “religion” should be understood as an analytical tool for studying social life. Keywords: religion, secularization, modernity, secularity, history of religions, world religions.