Teleology: A History

by Jeffrey K. McDonough

Teleology is the belief that some things happen, or exist for the sake of other things. It is the belief that, for example, salmon swim upstream in order to spawn, and that bears have claws for the sake of catching fish. This volume takes up the intuitive yet puzzling concept of teleology as it has been treated by philosophers from ancient times to the present day. It includes nine main chapters centered on the treatment of teleology in Plato, Aristotle, the Islamic medieval tradition, the Jewish medieval tradition, the Latin medieval tradition, the early modern era, Kant, Hegel, and contemporary philosophy. Each chapter probes central questions such as: is teleology inherent in its subjects or is it imposed on them from the outside? Does teleology necessarily involve intentionality, that is, a subject's cognizing some end, goal, or purpose? What is the scope of teleology? Is it, for example, applicable to elements and animals, or only to rational beings? Finally, is teleology
explanatory? When we say that salmon swim upstream in order to spawn, have we explained why they swim upstream? When we say that bears have claws for catching fish, have we explained why bears have claws? The philosophical discussions of the main chapters are enlivened and contextualized by four reflection pieces exploring the implications of teleology in medicine, art, poetry, and music.

Genres: Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2020

Reviews

[Mateusz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful resource on how humans attempted to seek meaning and aim in the world. The telos that appears is - I think - primarily, that what is pertaining to the limits of our cognition is our need to project an ordered sense of the world, as if inbuilt in our structural hard-wiring, biopsychology of perception translated into purpose, a vessel of intellect and soul receiving an impression, an intution from the whole.

How to separate those two in a seamless, unified world? Teleology is a drive of understanding: "What is our purpose, what is the world's purpose"? This intellectual history, a marking is exploring the threads of speculative reflections based upon the patterns captured in aims.

Whether there is any or none, I tend to naturalize teleology prefering to believe - in a Hindi way - that co-arising co-dependent cosmos is full of diversity, yet it is welded in a cosmic symphony of threads. The symphony has a purpose when heard, but a string of the violin may not be useful on its own, it is a category extracted as an abstract, if we don't understand it - we won't see the grand effect.

Yet, there are things scattered that add to chaos, disorder, un-purpose, randomness - here the world between generation, sameness, otherness, and change remains unabashed. They have no purpose, they are derived from inclinations of movement, and that inclination of time, space, motion, change is in itself teleological. Even transience may be teleological - motion runs out of force and rests, the telos is the process itself, to round it, fulfill it.

Whether we add the Divine dimension to it, or not, is a question of perspective, we need not seek purpose in the Divine, it coincides with it and does not contradict nature, like Porphirius Malchus once wrote.

We don't need to be creationists seeking an intelligent agent, the deep laws of the universe has - as I believe - eternal forms manifested therein, the ideas that inhabit them are types manifold and pregnant in forces continuous, gargantuan, the tokens belong to transience and generation as we witness on Earth.