Keyword: teleology

If you look up the characteristics of life in any standard Biology textbook, you’ll likely find some list like this: reproduction, heredity, cellular organization, growth and development, response to stimuli, adaptation through evolution, homeostasis, and metabolism. What you won’t find is agency. The fact that living organisms can do things is arguably the most important […]

Issue 11 of Sponeaneous Generations the Journal of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. It includes essays by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Alan Love, Dan Brooks, Jan Baedke, Tobias Uller, Mathilde Tahar and others. All essays available open access here.

New issue of Topoi addressing new perspectives and challenges to philosophical naturalism. From the introductory essay: “The purpose of this special issue is to contribute to the ongoing critical discourse on naturalism at this critical junction where liberal naturalism must meet the demands of scientific naturalism in order to part ways with it. Accordingly, the […]

Published open access in Synthese Abstract. The paper proposes a dialectical approach to our understanding of the relation between teleology and mechanism. This approach is dialectical both in form and content. In form, it proposes a contemporary interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysical account of teleology. This account is grounded in a dialectical methodology, which consists in scrutinizing […]

Published open access in Synthese Abstract. Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goaldirected entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions […]

From the Symbolic Species to Incomplete Nature Auguste Nahas  So it’s only in your first book, The Symbolic Species, that you came back to Peirce.  Terrence Deacon Yes. I was thinking about the evolutionary origins of human language. It was very clear to me that you just couldn’t talk about ‘pre-language’. Animals aren’t speaking in […]

Published open access on Topoi Abstract: The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall […]

Undergraduate & Graduate Days: Peirce, Cybernetics, Neuroscience Terrence Deacon is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches the co-evolution of language and the human brain. His recent work has touched on diverse questions at the intersection of philosophy and biology, such as the nature of complexity and the place […]

Published open access in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Abstract: We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary […]