Auguste Nahas

This article examines Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s 1943 article “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, which is widely remembered both as the foundational text of cybernetics and a major contribution to 20th-century debates on teleology. Despite the article’s fame, philosophical discussions have tended to abstract it from its argumentative and historical context, treating it as one mechanistic proposal among others for explaining purposive behavior. This article contends that such readings obscure a set of philosophically significant issues that "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" raises but have received insufficient attention. Chief among these is the question of the appropriate level of description at which purpose and teleology should be located and explained.

Teleological explanations are those that explain a phenomenon in virtue of a consequence it brings about. This has long been challenged on the grounds that it invokes backward causation. The classic resolution to this is to show that these consequences explain as causes which occurred in the past. An alternative characterizes teleology as a form of non-causal explanation. Against the widespread assumption that teleological explanations are univocal, I argue that causal and non-causal variants are compatible insofar as they explain different aspects of the same purposive phenomena. I conclude that we ought to be pluralists about teleological explanation.

The paper proposes a novel reading of Schelling’s speculative physics in light of debates concerning the notion of emergence in philosophy of science. We begin by highlighting Schelling’s disruptive potential with regard to the contemporary philosophical landscape, currently polarized over a false dichotomy between reductionist Humeanism and liberal Kantianism. We then argue that a broadly Schellingian approach to nature is unwittingly being revived by a group of scholars promoting a non-mainstream process account of emergence based on the notion of constraint and grounded in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. Such an account, we argue, represents an effective theoretical platform to re-read Schelling’s philosophy of nature today. This reading provides a picture of life and mind as emerging out of self-organizing processes that take place through the self-inhibition of nature’s inherent tendency to disorder.

We outline an alternative to both scientific and liberal naturalism which attempts to reconcile Sellars’ apparently conflicting commitments to the scientific accountability of human nature and the autonomy of the space of reasons. Scientific naturalism holds that agency and associated concepts are a mechanical product of the realm of laws, while liberal naturalism contends that the autonomy of the space of reason requires that we leave nature behind. The third way we present follows in the footsteps of German Idealism, which attempted to overcome the Kantian chasm between nature and agency, and is thus dubbed ‘post-Kantian.’ We point to an overlooked group of scholars in the naturalism debate who, along with recent work in biology and cognitive science, offer a path to overcome the reductive tendencies of empiricism while avoiding the dichotomy of logical spaces. We then bring together these different streams of research, by foregrounding and expanding on what they share: the idea of organisms as living agents and that of a continuity without identity between life and mind. We qualify this as a bottom-up transformative approach to rational agency, which grounds cognition in the intrinsically purposive nature of organisms, while emphasizing the distinction between biological agency and full-fledged mindedness.

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 would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. The neglect of this metatheoretic distinction has made it difficult to understand the criteria we should use for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology. We argue that a clearer distinction between scientific and philosophical contexts shows that we need more than one set of criteria for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology, and that taking these into account might advance or dissolve recurring debates in the literature.