Teleological Terms Research Articles

A Concept of Complementarity Between Complexity and Redundancy can Account for Kant's Biological Teleology and Unify Mechanistic and Finalistic Biology.

Over 160years after Darwin and 70years after the discovery of DNA, two fundamental questions of biology remain unanswered: What differentiates the living from the nonliving? How can mechanistic and finalistic or holistic biology be unified? Niels Bohr introduced a concept of complementarity in quantum physics and based on the paradox of light as a simultaneous wave and particle, conjectured that a similar concept might exist in biology that would solve the paradox of life originating from the nonliving. Bohr proposed that two mutually exclusive-independent observations may be necessary to explain a phenomenon and provided support to Immanuel Kant's idea that the "purposive" behaviour of organisms could only be explained in teleological terms and that mechanical and teleological approaches were necessary and complementary to explain biology. We present a concept of complementarity whereby biochemical pathways or cellular channels for the flow of information are simultaneously complex and redundant and complexity and redundancy complement each other. The postulates of biological complementarity are that (1) it was an essential condition in the origin of life; (2) it provided physiological flexibility that allowed organisms to mount self-protection response and complexity to evolve in the face of deleterious mutations before the evolution of bi-parental sex; (3) it laid the foundation for the evolution of a choice of response when confronted with threat; and (4) it applies to all levels of biological organizations and, thus, can serve as a basis for the unification of mechanistic and holistic biology. It is proposed that teleology is simultaneously constitutive and heuristic: constitutive because organisms' "purposive" behaviours are adaptive and are grounded in mechanism (complexity and redundancy), and heuristic because with our finite cognition and our goal-oriented (humans alone are aware of "tomorrow") and anthropomorphic pre-disposition, teleology will remain useful as a guide to our making sense of the world, even how to ask a meaningful question.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL FUNCTION OF LABOR LAW

The organizational function of labor law in terms of law and teleology consists in the operation of the norms of this law in a way that ensures the proper and uninterrupted course of broadly understood labor processes. Natura rerum legal norms do not organize anything at the employer, but some of them serve the proper organization of work and maintaining order in work processes, thus respecting the employers interests in labor relations. This remark applies to both individual and collective labor law. In the study, I will present in a synthetic approach the institutions and legal mechanisms that perform this function.

Çevrecilik ve Siyasal Ekoloji Üzerine Ontolojik ve Epistemolojik Bir Mukayese

The subject of this study is to make a critical evaluation of the usages of environmentalism and political ecology, which are similarized or identified with each other, generally in social sciences and particularly in political science and political philosophy on environmentalism and political ecology in Turkey. In this context, the aim of the study is to analyze the ontological, epistemological and paradigmatic differences of the environmentalism and political ecology concepts; to make a distinction in terms of causality, teleology, discourse and praxis and to prove that they have different contents from each other. The nature understanding of environmentalism and political ecology, whose intersection set is the concept of nature, is different from each other epistemologically and ontologically. While environmentalism is a product of anthropocentric ontology and epistemology of Newtonian physics; political ecology is a product of ecocentric ontology and the epistemology of quantum physics. Accordingly, environmentalism sees nature, which it defines as “environment”, as a sustainable industrial resource where environmental problems can be solved with technical and managerial reforms; political ecology sees nature, which it defines as an “ecosystem”, as a holistic whole where ecological problems can be solved by changing the social structure and human beings are a part of it.

Moralischer Konstitutivismus und die Ethik grundlegender G\xfcter

ZusammenfassungIn this article, I defend a version of moral constitutivism that is based on a theory of goods. It is inspired by ancient philosophy both in claiming that action theory should be formulated in teleological terms (not as a causalism) and in the idea that a sound theory of goods should be a eudaemonist one. Additionally I argue that morality can be understood on the basis of such an approach.

Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959–1965

In this solidly researched and well-written monograph, Elizabeth Henson offers the first English-language work about the radical agrarian movement in Chihuahua's Sierra Tarahumara in the 1960s, an episode that produced the first socialist guerrilla movement in Mexican history. The originality of Henson's work lies in her primary sources. She consulted archives in Chihuahua state and was one of the first historians to explore the declassified archives of the Secretariat of the Interior at the General Archive of Mexico. Also, while oral history was not her focus because of bureaucratic constraints, Henson used published interviews, testimonies, and memoirs.Until the turn of the century, the scholarly production on Cold War Mexico had minimized the so-called socialist armed movement, describing it as a byproduct of the Cuban Revolution or the radical Left's overreaction after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. The assault on the military barracks in Madera on September 23, 1965, by the Popular Guerrilla Group (GPG), was not a part of collective memory beyond the town where it took place. However, Madera marked the beginning of the socialist armed struggle and also inaugurated the dirty war, a period of focalized state terror and human rights violations that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party concealed through psychological warfare and media censorship.In the late 1990s, the Mexican novelist Carlos Montemayor became the first public intellectual to write about the socialist armed movement, breaking a veil of silence about the Madera events. However, Montemayor's emphasis on the armed character of Chihuahua's popular insurgency downplayed the role of the radical agrarian movement and its alliance with the student movement. The first scholarly works on this topic (by Marco Bellingeri, Alberto López Limón, and Jesús Vargas Valdés) explained peasant unrest in teleological terms, assuming the preeminence of the guerrilla movement. Only Aleida García Aguirre's 2015 book considered the radical agrarianism and the guerrilla foco to be equally important. Henson provides a new approach to this historiography. She claims that her primary interest is the public, direct action aspect of the agrarian movement, which was more heterogenous, massive, and inclusive of women than the armed component (p. 5). Henson rejects the idea that direct action was less revolutionary than armed struggle, and she shows that both strategies entailed similar risks: prison, torture, assassination, and displacement.Henson demonstrates that political violence in postrevolutionary Chihuahua was a continuation of a long-standing tradition of elite violence followed by armed self-defense, from the nineteenth-century Tomochic rebellion to the 1910 revolution. Notwithstanding that the latter began in Chihuahua due to the extreme concentration of land in few latifundia, landowners who survived the upheaval, new caciques, and even thugs like the infamous José Ibarra encroached on land that was intended for ejidos or new population centers. The agrarian movement, which emerged as a response to landowners' violence and the government's corruption, resorted to radical means to enforce the constitution.Henson argues that unlike the primarily student-based armed vanguards that emerged across Latin America in the Cuban Revolution's aftermath without a social base, the GPG grew from this endemic agrarian movement. The GPG's leader, Arturo Gámiz, had previously led thousands of landless peasants who participated in the General Union of Workers and Peasants of Mexico. Henson's sources reveal that peasants failed to follow the GPG because they had grown weary of violence, which explains the paradox of the guerrillas' isolation despite their popularity.Henson departs from previous interpretations of the GPG by portraying it as a product of ideologization, voluntarism, and faith in Che Guevara's foquismo; she concludes that the formation of a revolutionary vanguard was a political mistake. However, Henson's analysis of the short-lived guerrilla movement's outcomes is ambiguous. On the one hand she claims that the GPG's activities thwarted the dynamics of the radical agrarian movement, but on the other hand she suggests that the federal government solved long-lasting agrarian petitions after the Madera assault as a way to curtail further violence. Although the guerrilla foco proved to be a failure, the GPG forced the government to change its strategy and set limits to elite power; therefore, it is problematic to imply that Gámiz's group should not have followed the armed path.While Henson focuses on the history of the eastern highlands of the Sierra Tarahumara—including detailed biographies and vignettes of every relevant actor and a tracing of the complex map of the Left—she also describes the context of Chihuahua and Mexico, underscoring the connections between the landed and industrial elites and the state and federal authorities as well as the broader impact and legacy of the agrarian revolt. In sum, this book provides both a useful introduction to Cold War Mexico for students and an in-depth case study of postrevolutionary violence for specialists in social and armed movements.

Regulative Principles and Kinds of the Unconditioned

AbstractIn his Kant on Laws, Eric Watkins presents an account of reason on which the principles of specification and continuity are regulative instructions to search for different kinds of the unconditioned. I suggest that we correct Watkins’ account in two ways. First, we need to complete Watkins’ claim to the plurality of the unconditioned: reason aims for three kinds of the unconditioned, associated with the lowest, next and highest concepts. Second, we need to look beyond reason’s search for the unconditioned in order to properly understand the nature of the aim of reason. I argue that we construe reason’s aim as the systematic unity of cognition considered as a whole or, in Kant’s teleological terms, as the realization of an ‘idea’, or a ‘purposive unity’.

Teleological Essentialism: Generalized.

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view-teleological essentialism-is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking-involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), and inferences about offspring (study 3)-we find support for the view that a broad range of categories-living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds, and artifactual kinds-are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments.

No-ball! When transformation, indigenization and politicking overstepped into Zimbabwean cricket

Starting in the 1990s, calls for ‘transformation’ in Zimbabwean cricket gained momentum, reaching a crescendo in the period between 1999 and 2005. While racial representativeness was a rallying call among advocates of transformation, the coalitions formed were in some cases very fluid. The major reason for this is that numerous struggles played out among and between groups resulting in continuous reconfigurations among key players. Using Zimbabwean cricket’s experience in the post-2000 period as well as drawing similarities with the indigenization lobby, this article highlights the flaws within the transformation agenda. In short, it argues that transformation falls short where it is framed in teleological terms instead of being structured as a process.

The Tension Between the Mathematical and Metaphysical Strands of Maupertuis’ Principle of Least Action

Without doubt, the principle of least action is a fundamental principle in classical mechanics. Contemporary physicists, however, consider the PLA as a purely mathematical principle – even an axiom which they cannot completely justify. Such an account stands in sharp contrast with the historical meaning of the PLA. When the principle was introduced in the 1740s, by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, its meaning was much more versatile. For Maupertuis the principle of least action signified that nature is thrifty or economical in all its actions, i.e., that nature avoids to do anything unnecessary. Maupertuis understood the principle in teleological terms and even considered the principle as an expression of God’s wisdom. It has been correctly pointed out by historians that Maupertuis in his later years moved towards a more speculative and metaphysical approach, whereas his contemporary Euler and later Lagrange, wanted to avoid such theological and metaphysical implications and frame the PLA (in line with contemporary standards) in purely mathematical terms. Such readings, however, have had the unintended side-effect that they lose out of sight the question how the mathematical and metaphysical aspect of the principle of least action fit together within Maupertuis’ own work. Investigating if and how the mathematical and metaphysical aspects of the PLA are compatible within Maupertuis’ thought will be the main goal of this paper. Keywords : mathematics, metaphysics, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis , principle of least action, theology DOI : 10.14640/NoctuaIV3

HISTORICAL TELEOLOGY: THE GRAND ILLUSION

ABSTRACTThe sixteen essays in this volume treat a broad array of topics related to the idea of teleology in history. The majority are not concerned with evaluating or even analyzing arguments for or against the teleological view of history. Their purpose is more to display the wide variety of teleological views. In their introduction, the editors speak of the Enlightenment origins of the teleological view of history, but the volume “seeks to explore that enlightened project … across its fragmentation and multiplication in the nineteenth century” (13). In fact, they believe that “the very idea that a single, however powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity is cast in doubt. Our volume intends to expand on this doubt” (14). Thus, in addition to discussions of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and so on, we learn about the Canudos revolt in Brazil, the Taiping rebellion in China, missionary writings in colonial India, John Brown, Scholem on Zionism, and much more. But this often fascinating profusion of microhistorical research suffers from considerable conceptual confusion. Terms like teleology, eschatology, providence, and messianism are not adequately distinguished. In my essay I point out that the teleological view of history does not date from the Enlightenment but is part of the religious tradition of the West. Many nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century versions discussed here simply continue or adapt these religious views. The puzzling question is why those modern thinkers who question or reject the idea of divine providence continue to think in teleological terms about history. This question, which could have served as an organizing principle for these essays, is for the most part not even addressed.

Freedom, Power and the Crisis of Politics in Revolutionary Yemen

In the study of revolutionary events, it is often assumed that ‘political crisis’ attests to the failure of revolutionary ideals. Accordingly, revolution is understood as the pursuit of political consensus and the institutionalization of freedom and equality at the level of the state. In contrast, this article describes how, during the recent revolution in Yemen, revolutionaries actively negated proposals for a ‘political solution.’ It explores how the desire to contain power within the imaginary of ‘the people’ and safeguard revolutionary freedom produced instead an ethical charter for perpetuating a crisis of politics. As such, it argues that revolution should be understood less in terms of a seamless teleology of political development and more according to the immediate ethics of living a revolutionary life.

YOUTH IDENTITY FROM ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE BETWEEN EDUCATION AND PREVENTION

Socialisation is one of the key processes that shapes the identity of youth. This construct, which over the last century has undergone significant transformation, became a pattern for determining the purposes of upbringing (Nature vs. Nurture), or interpretative model that is used to explain character of this process from a socio-cultural perspective. On the basis of ecological framework, the concept of resilience and positive psychology, in recent years it has been developed a new approach towards socialisation - Positive Youth Development (PYD). Because of its relevance, pragmatic assumptions, this model is worth examining in terms of teleology, epistemology and methodical context.According to the Ecological Systems Theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner the youth socialisation process is included in the micro, meso, exo and macro systems. While the socialisation process, youth experiences the interactions between these systems, which in consequence shapes its identity. An element that fits into a methodical context is the characteristic of chosen supportive, educational and preventive actions undertaken towards youth in the northeastern Poland.

La mutación de la formación profesional a la educación terciaria en Colombia: Caso SENA

El siguiente artículo es una reflexión que surge como producto de un proceso de investigación sobre las prácticas pedagógicas del SENA y que pretende plantear interrogantes y discusiones sobre el paso de la institución hacia la educación terciaria. Este proceso ha motivado una serie de discusiones no solamente en el SENA sino también en las universidades sobre la naturaleza de la formación profesional y cómo esta se desarrolla en la educación terciaria y las implicaciones que trae tanto en términos curriculares como teleológicos y administrativos.

Kant and the nature of matter: Mechanics, chemistry, and the life sciences

Kant believed that the ultimate processes that regulate the behavior of material bodies can be characterized exclusively in terms of mechanics. In 1790, turning his attention to the life sciences, he raised a potential problem for his mechanically-based account, namely that many of the operations described in the life sciences seemed to operate teleologically. He argued that the life sciences do indeed require us to think in teleological terms, but that this is a fact about us, not about the processes themselves. Nevertheless, even were we to concede his account of the life sciences, this would not secure the credentials of mechanics as a general theory of matter. Hardly any material properties studied in the second half of the eighteenth century were, or could have been, conceived in mechanical terms. Kant's concern with teleology is tangential to the problems facing a general matter theory grounded in mechanics, for the most pressing issues have nothing to do with teleology. They derive rather from a lack of any connection between mechanical forces and material properties. This is evident in chemistry, which Kant dismisses as being unscientific on the grounds that it cannot be formulated in mechanical terms.

How the West came to rule

Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Global Capitalism, Pluto, London, 2015; 400 pp: 0745336159, 24.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Introduction Eight hundred years of global history explained! Anievas and Nijancioglu's book is an ambitious attempt to amalgamate discussions in the fields of international relations, global history, Marxism, world-systems theory and historical sociology into a great machine of explanation, the side of which is stamped with the newly repainted letters 'Uneven and Combined Development'. The Trotskyist theory, re-outlined by IR theorists and displayed for discussion and reassemblage, now provides the screen across which the past of the global proletariat can unscroll, and on which to better project the future that awaits it. Through post-colonial and political theory, the Introduction argues persuasively for an ever more complex understanding of capitalism (p. 9), but also firmly attempts to swat away two erroneous and yet arguably dominant Marxist stories of capitalism's development. In order to battle these theories, the authors draw on the work of a wide breadth of global scholars, slowing down the centripetal force of Europe on world history to understand the dynamics of other agents instead--whether of control or rebellion--in the expansive universe of capitalism's ascendency. Leon Trotsky's theory of 'combined and uneven development' is given a robust defence in Chapter 2. Terms such as 'the whip of external necessity', 'substitutionalism' and 'privilege of backwardness' are put back into a history of party politics and the Bolshevik general's marshaling of his terminology, along with his troops and coterie. The authors do not shrink from providing some obvious criticisms. This includes explaining the theory's reliance on the teleological terms of 'advanced' and 'backward' societies (p. 56), reinterpreting these instead as 'asymmetries and 'imbalances' between societies, rather a directional flow. These opening chapters thus make clear that this is an autocritical work in which the authors wish to correct the racist and patriarchal mistakes of Marxist theory, incorporating not only the histories of production beyond the European frontier, but also the analyses by feminist and non-European scholars. This is an extraordinary ambition: surely few contemporary projects of historical writing have quite so audacious a mission or scope. Chapter 3 begins the historical journey with the nomadic mode of production on the Mongol grasslands, moving across the trade routes, with the Black Death upon them, into feudal Europe and the demographic crisis which, the authors claim, catapulted Europe into capitalism. Chapter 4 argues for the distinction between tributary and feudal modes of production. The authors then claim that that it was the superior army of the Ottoman tributary mode that halted European expansionism, forcing European powers to look elsewhere--the East and West Indies--for necessary feudal agricultural expansion and merchant trade. In both chapters, Europe reaps the 'privileges of backwardness' in relation to other modes of production. Chapter 5 moves overseas with the merchant adventurers, first through the Spanish legal theories of Amerindians and the influence of New World map-making on European's conceptions of their home territory, and then the twin rise of New World slavery and industrial capitalism, these last as combined and mutually intertwined systems of production and circulation. Chapter 6 works as a moment of repose in the global whirlwind, turning back to the conflicts within Europe which had begun to be outlined in Chapter 4, and arguing that it was the preoccupation of the majority of European powers either with New World expansionism or battling the Ottoman Empire that allowed Holland and England the geopolitical space' (p. 184) for the political primacy of merchant capital and the early appearance of bourgeois revolutions. …

Functions and mental representation: the theoretical role of representations and its real nature

Representations are not only used in our folk-psychological explanations of behaviour, but are also fruitfully postulated, for example, in cognitive science. The mainstream view in cognitive science maintains that our mind is a representational system. This popular view requires an understanding of the nature of the entities they are postulating. Teleosemantic theories face this challenge, unpacking the normativity in the relation of representation by appealing to the teleological function of the representing state. It has been argued that, if intentionality is to be explained in teleological terms, then the function of a state cannot depend on its phylogenetical history, given the metaphysical possibility of a duplicate of an intentional being that lacks an evolutionary history (Swampman). In this paper, I present a method to produce, according to our current knowledge in genetic engineering, human-like individuals who are not the product of natural selection in the required sense. This variation will be used to shed light on the main replies that have been offered in the literature to the Swampman thought experiment. I argue that these replies are not satisfactory: representations should better not depend on natural selection. I conclude that a non-etiological notion of function is to be preferred for characterizing the relation of representation.

Failures that Connect; or, Colonial Friendships in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

This article reexamines the role of friendship in A Passage to India that previous scholarship has analyzed as an event in terms of function, teleology, and political efficacy. Examining friendship in terms of its continuing flows and affects, this essay explores the moments and spaces in which friendship, in bringing together bodies and social worlds, fails to adhere itself to recognition and representation. What is the point of being friends with someone in a colonial outpost like Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in Forster’s novel? What happens—or does not happen—when Dr. Aziz and Adela Quested are having afternoon tea together or venturing into the unknowns of the Marabar Cave? These questions, among others, serve as the starting point from which to trace the potentiality of colonial friendship, as well as its relation to structures of power and knowledge. This article, in short, offers friendship as an analytic tool and subject matter to situate A Passage to India away from an identitarian logic that often takes the study of colonial relations to a host of ideological impasses.

Thinking About End of Life in Teleological Terms

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 (i) offers a more realistic conception of the self and the realities of frailty and mortality, (ii) provides a more objective basis for making decisions regarding end-of-life treatment and care, and (iii) 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.

Aristotle's ΚΙΝΗΣΙΣ-ΕΝΕΡΓΕΙΑ Distinction and the Ends of Human Action

A key passage in the development of Aristotle’s argument in book Θ of the Metaphysics is the distinction between the concepts of κίνησις and ἐνέργεια (1048b18-35). The distinction is made initially on the basis of particular grammatical features of verbs denoting human actions/states: some verbs in the present tense necessarily imply the contemporaneous achievement of the same verb in the Greek perfect tense (e.g. If x is seeing y, then it is the case that, at the same time, x is in a state of having seen y), whereas other verbs in the present tense are necessarily followed by (i.e. do not occur simultaneously with) the same verb in the Greek perfect tense (e.g. If x is building y, then it is not the case that, at the same time, x is in the state of having built y). Aristotle concludes that the former type of verbs (ἐνέργεια-actions) are actions which contain their proximate (i.e. most immediate) end, whereas the latter type (κίνησις-actions) are actions whose proximate ends are separate, the attainment of which yields the termination of the action. The argument in the passage, therefore, circulates around the place of proximate ends within action. This paper applies the key features of the κίνησις-ἐνέργεια distinction to Aristotle’s discussion of the δύναμις-ἐνέργεια analogy (1048a35-b9), and argues that, if Aristotle’s κίνησις-ἐνέργεια distinction is to be taken seriously, the analogy must be thought of primarily in terms of teleology. This result is finally applied to the problem of unattainable ultimate (i.e. remote) ends, or ends which human actions strive for but never reach. The problem (unsurprisingly) finds its solution in Aristotle’s natural theology presented in book Λ.

Æstetiske forudsætninger for Oplysningen hos Kant

<p>Immanuel Kant's ‘Critique of Judgment’ is often read either in terms of art appreciation or teleology. In this paper however, the object is to examine the ‘Critique of Judgment’, especially the concepts of the Beautiful and the Sublime, in relation to the Kantian version of the Enlightenment. The main theses in the paper are as following: That Beauty can provide us with the sensuous experience of the possibility of the moral law and that the Sublime can provide us with the sensuous experience of the possibility that we as rational beings can effectuate the actual existence of the moral law.</p>