García-Valdecasas, Miguel Deacon, Terrence W
Published in
Studies in history and philosophy of science
The theory of Selected Effects (SE) is currently the most widely accepted etiological account of function in biology. It argues that the function of any trait is the effect that past traits of that type produced that contributed to its current existence. Its proper or etiological function is whatever effect was favoured by natural selection irrespe...
Gonzalez, Juan Carlos
My dissertation defends a non-mechanistic interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of nature. Inspired by the picture of nature in the Critique of Pure Reason and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, most readers align Kant with Early Modern mechanists, who claim that we can know that the internally purposive form of causality characteristic of ...
Clayton, Eugene Allen
Breaking with Aristotle’s Physics, Kant effects a theoretical reconception of teleology. It is this paper’s contention that the truth of the Kantian conception of teleology as ‘a purposiveness of nature in behalf of our faculty for cognizing it’ is not that of being a solution to Hume’s problem of induction or the condition for the possibility of s...
Picard, Nicolas
Revenant sur l’hypothèse formulée par Jean-Claude Farcy d’une origine révolutionnaire au « retard » français en matière d’évolution, cette contribution discute d’une part la pertinence même du terme de « retard » dans le cas de la France, et formule d’autre part d’autres éléments afin d’expliquer la temporalité de l’abolition dans notre pays.
McCarthy, Amanda M Keil, Frank C
Published in
Cognition
People generally prefer functional explanations over mechanistic ones. This preference might arise from attributing greater value to functional information. However, instead of an overall preference for functional explanations, people might simply expect functional information to precede mechanistic information. Here, we ask whether people have suc...
Cofnas, Nathan
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Alexander Bird, Richard Robb, Elliott Sober, Kim Sterelny, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. / According to the standard formulation, natural selection requires variation, differential fitness, and heritability. I argue that this formulation is inadequate because it fails to distingu...
Clark, Tim
This thesis considers the nature and use of purposive legal reasoning in international law, and the particular role it plays in the law of international organisations (IOs). I begin by examining the concept of purpose, the multiple levels of abstraction at which it is identifiable, and the different ways it is operationalised in international legal...
Keymeulen, Kobe Bollaert, Iben
Clayton, Eugene
Breaking with Aristotle’s Physics, Kant effects a theoretical reconception of teleology. It is this paper’s contention that the truth of the Kantian conception of teleology as ‘a purposiveness of nature in behalf of our faculty for cognizing it’ is not that of being a solution to Hume’s problem of induction or the condition for the possibility of s...
Tahar, Mathilde
Ce travail interroge l’usage du mode de pensée téléologique, que cet usage soit implicite ou explicite, dans la biologie de l’évolution. Il s’agit d’en comprendre les raisons, d’en identifier les limites, et de proposer une conception qui permette de sortir d’un tel modèle. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuyons sur la philosophie de Bergson, un des pre...
