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Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351141864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.
Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351141864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.
Author: Alison M. Moore
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498530737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian “superego” in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.
Author: G. F. Schueler
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191530530
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
People do things for reasons. But philosophers have disagreed sharply about how 'reasons explanations' of actions actually work and hence about their implications for human freedom and autonomy. The dominant view in contemporary philosophy is the (Humean) idea that the beliefs and desires that constitute our reasons for acting simply cause us to act as we do. Fred Schueler seeks to replace such causal views, arguing that they leave out two essential elements of these explanations. Reasons explanations are inherently teleological in the sense that the agent's reasons always explain the purpose for which he acted. They are also inherently normative since it is always possible that an agent's reasons for doing something are not good reasons. Schueler argues that causal accounts of reasons explanations make no sense of either of these features; he argues instead for an account based on practical deliberation, our ability to evaluate the reasons we accept.
Author: Jeffrey K. McDonough
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190845732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
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.
Author: Henning Trüper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474221084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Historical Teleologies in the Modern World tracks the fragmentation and proliferation of teleological understandings of history – the notion that history had to be explained as a goal-directed process – in Europe and beyond throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Historical teleologies have profoundly informed a variety of other disciplines, including modern philosophy, natural history, literature, humanitarian and religious philanthropism, the political thought and practice of revolution, emancipation, imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, the conceptualization of universal humankind, and the understanding of modernity in general. By exploring the extension and plurality of historical teleology, the essays in this volume revise the history of historicity in the modern period. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World casts doubt on the idea that a single, if powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity, instead pursuing an investigation of the plurality of modern historicities and its underlying structures. By bringing together Western and non-Western histories, this book provides the first extended treatment of the idea of historical teleology. It will be of great value to students and scholars of modern global and intellectual history.
Author: Michael Rohlf
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813230055
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
What is the modern turn in philosophy? In other words, what are the features that make modern philosophy distinctively “modern” in contrast with the pre-modern philosophy from which it emerged – for example, medieval scholasticism, Renaissance philosophy, and ancient Greek and Roman thought? How did the modern turn in philosophy transpire? That is, what did specific philosophers contribute that shaped the distinctive character of modern philosophy? The twelve essays in this volume seek to address these questions, and in doing so they exemplify and contribute to a rich debate about the nature and value of modern philosophy. This volume approaches the modern turn not as an event that occurred all at once, but rather as a series of shifts in different areas of philosophy at different times. The essays are arranged broadly in chronological order of the topics they treat. Among the themes that recur most often in these essays are, first, that modern philosophy is characteristically preoccupied with questions about foundations and, second, that it ultimately prioritizes practice over theory. But the virtues of this text is in presenting a wide range or perspectives on modern philosophy – what constitutes it as modern, when it arose, and what its shortcomings may be.
Author: Mariska Leunissen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139490419
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
In Aristotle's teleological view of the world, natural things come to be and are present for the sake of some function or end (for example, wings are present in birds for the sake of flying). Whereas much of recent scholarship has focused on uncovering the (meta-)physical underpinnings of Aristotle's teleology and its contrasts with his notions of chance and necessity, this book examines Aristotle's use of the theory of natural teleology in producing explanations of natural phenomena. Close analyses of Aristotle's natural treatises and his Posterior Analytics show what methods are used for the discovery of functions or ends that figure in teleological explanations, how these explanations are structured, and how well they work in making sense of phenomena. The book will be valuable for all who are interested in Aristotle's natural science, his philosophy of science, and his biology.
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110717645X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.
Author: Monte Ransome Johnson
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191536504
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Monte Johnson examines one of the most controversial aspects of Aristiotle's natural philosophy: his teleology. Is teleology about causation or explanation? Does it exclude or obviate mechanism, determinism, or materialism? Is it focused on the good of individual organisms, or is god or man the ultimate end of all processes and entities? Is teleology restricted to living things, or does it apply to the cosmos as a whole? Does it identify objectively existent causes in the world, or is it merely a heuristic for our understanding of other causal processes? Johnson argues that Aristotle's aporetic approach drives a middle course between these traditional oppositions, and avoids the dilemma, frequently urged against teleology, between backwards causation and anthropomorphism. Although these issues have been debated with extraordinary depth by Aristotle scholars, and touched upon by many in the wider philosophical and scientific community as well, there has been no comprehensive historical treatment of the issue. Aristotle is commonly considered the inventor of teleology, although the precise term originated in the eighteenth century. But if teleology means the use of ends and goals in natural science, then Aristotle was rather a critical innovator of teleological explanation. Teleological notions were widespread among his predecessors, but Aristotle rejected their conception of extrinsic causes such as mind or god as the primary causes for natural things. Aristotle's radical alternative was to assert nature itself as an internal principle of change and an end, and his teleological explanations focus on the intrinsic ends of natural substances - those ends that benefit the natural thing itself. Aristotle's use of ends was subsequently conflated with incompatible 'teleological' notions, including proofs for the existence of a providential or designer god, vitalism and animism, opposition to mechanism and non-teleological causation, and anthropocentrism. Johnson addresses these misconceptions through an elaboration of Aristotle's methodological statements, as well as an examination of the explanations actually offered in the scientific works.
Author: Andrea Gambarotto
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319654152
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive account of vitalism and the Romantic philosophy of nature. The author explores the rise of biology as a unified science in Germany by reconstructing the history of the notion of “vital force,” starting from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Further, he argues that Romantic Naturphilosophie played a crucial role in the rise of biology in Germany, especially thanks to its treatment of teleology. In fact, both post-Kantian philosophers and naturalists were guided by teleological principles in defining the object of biological research. The book begins by considering the problem of generation, focusing on the debate over the notion of “formative force.” Readers are invited to engage with the epistemological status of this formative force, i.e. the question of the principle behind organization. The second chapter provides a reconstruction of the physiology of vital forces as it was elaborated in the mid- to late-eighteenth century by the group of physicians and naturalists known as the “Göttingen School.” Readers are shown how these authors developed an understanding of the animal kingdom as a graded series of organisms with increasing functional complexity. Chapter three tracks the development of such framework in Romantic Naturphilosophie. The author introduces the reader to the problem of classification, showing how Romantic philosophers of nature regarded classification as articulated by a unified plan that connects all living forms with one another, relying on the idea of living nature as a universal organism. In the closing chapter, this analysis shows how the three instances of pre-biological discourse on living beings – theory of generation, physiology and natural history – converged to form the consolidated disciplinary matrix of a general biology. The book offers an insightful read for all scholars interested in classical German philosophy, especially those researching the philosophy of nature, as well as the history and philosophy of biology.
