Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
U.T.Place
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Teleonomy

To understand the modern term <ι>teleonomy, we need to understand the ancient Greek τέλος, which meant simply goal or purpose or "end." I think Bergson's goal was to add purpose, in some form of teleology and beyond the teleonomy found in all living things. (Bolded terms need careful definitions))https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/bergson/

Creative Evolution was a great influence on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's idea that evolution is purposeful and directed toward an end state he called the noosphere.Under the influence of Henri Bergson, Teilhard synthesized his scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge to create a view of evolution as purposeful (teleological) and directed at a future state he called the noösphere (mind-sphere), similar to Immanuel Kant's noumenal realm. Both are named for Greek nous (νους), the mind. Teilhard introduced the term noösphere in a 1922 publication on his theory of cosmogony that he called "Cosmogenesis."

My mentor David Layzer chose Teilhard's word as the principal title of his 1990 book Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe.

Teilhard's most important book, The Phenomenon of Man, was banned by the Catholic church in the 1940's and Teilhard was forbidden to teach his radical and increasingly influential ideas.

In this book, Teilhard described a cosmic evolution that includes the evolution of primordial particles to explain the development of life, the development of human beings and then of the noosphere. Teilhard's noosphere includes an "omega point" in the future, which he sees "pulling" all creation towards it, ultimately to a theological reunion with Christ, which another Teilhard coinage described as "Christogenesis."

Aristotle's notion of a fourth cause (after material, efficient, and formal causes), which we translate "final cause," Aristotle called the telos (τελος). It is the root of teleology, the idea that the purpose of life can be found in a final cause that existed before life itself began.

The idea of teleology is not taken seriously by biological scientists today, but biologist Colin Pittendrigh proposed the term "teleonomy" to distinguish the appearance of purpose in biological evolution, specifically Darwinian natural selection, from the ancient idea of "teleology," from Aristotle's "telos" or "final cause," a cosmic purpose supposedly pre-existing the appearance of life.

Jacques Monod made use of the term teleonomy in his great 1971 work, Chance and Necessity. without mentioning Pittendrigh.

Ernst Mayr provided the Pittendrigh reference in a 1974 article in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. But Mayr thought the uses of "teleology" needed clearer definitions.

The teleological dilemma, then consists in the fact that numerous and seemingly weighty objections against the use of teleological language have been raised by various critics, and yet biologists have insisted that they would lose a great deal, methodologically and heuristically, if they were prevent from using such language. It is my endeavor to resolve this dilemma by a new analysis, and particularly by a new classification of the various phenomena that have been traditionally designated as 'teleological'.Teleological and Teleonomic: A New Analysis, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume XIV, pages 91 -117.Pittendrigh wrote to Mayr explaining his concept of teleonomy. Mayr reported Pittendrigh's view:

I wanted a word that would allow me (all of us biologists) to describe, stress or simply to allude to – without offense – this end-directedness of a perfectly respectable mechanistic system. Teleology would not do, carrying with it that implication that the end is causally effective in the current operation of the machine. Teleonomic, it is hoped, escapes that plain falsity which is anyhow unnecessary. Haldane was, in this sense wrong (surely a rare event): we can live without teleology.The crux of the problem lies of course in unconfounding the mechanism of evolutionary change and the physiological mechanism of the organism abstracted from the evolutionary time scale. The most general of all biological 'ends', or 'purposes' is of course perpetuation by reproduction. That end [and all its subsidiary 'ends' of feeding, defense and survival generally] is in some sense effective in causing natural selection; in causing evolutionary change; but not in causing itself. In brief, we have failed in the past to unconfound causation in the historical origins of a system and causation in the contemporary working of the system…

You ask in your letter whether or not one of the 'information' people didn't introduce it. They did not, unless you wish to call me an information bloke. It is, however, true that my own thinking about the whole thing was very significantly affected by a paper which was published by Wiener and Bigelow with the intriguing title 'Purposeful machines'. This pointed out that in the then newly-emerging computer period it was possible to design and build machines that had ends or purposes without implying that the purposes were the cause of the immediate operation of the machine.

ibid.In his Metaphysics, Aristotle himself introduced the idea of an entity that has developed an internal purpose. He called it "entelechy," which has confused many modern thinkers. But it is very close to the idea of teleonomy.

Aristotle combined three Greek words - εν (in), τελος, and εχειν (to have), so εντελεχεια has the meaning of "having the telos/purpose within." This is what Pittendrigh and many later biologists see going on in all living things, clearly their "'ends' of feeding, defense, and survival generally."

So Blanche, all the above is material that I should add to a new I-Phi page on Teleonomy itself.

And I can also start a web page on Assembly Theory, if I can understand what exactly the authors think they are adding to physics or biology.

I will read your reference more closely and get back to you. First off, in the right sidebar there is a reference to George F. R. Ellis. I have written a page on Ellis, who I found also hoped to add intentionality and purpose back into physics.

https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/ellis/

Ellis has written extensively on science and religion and was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2004.

His deep knowledge of physics has influenced major Christian theologians who integrate the indeterminism of quantum physics into their concept of a divine being. Traditional theologians have argued that randomness in the universe is in direct conflict with a God who is omnipotent and omniscient.

As has been argued since Anselm in the eleventh century, God cannot be both omnipotent and omniscient. Moreover, random events invalidate the idea of God's foreknowledge.

The Christian concept of a benevolent and providential God is in further conflict with both classical deterministic physics and indeterministic quantum physics.

Ellis was a major contributor to a multi-year collaborative research program on the role of randomness in nature sponsored in part by the Vatican Observatory and the John Templeton Foundation.

In an important article in Nature, Ellis argued that complexity of hierarchical systems can explain the intentionality of human purpose, goal-directed action. He wrote

It is possible that what actually happened was the contextual emergence of complexity: the existence of human beings and their creations was not uniquely implied by the initial data in the early Universe; rather the underlying physics together with that initial data created a context that made the existence of human beings possible. Conditions at the time of the decoupling of matter and radiation 14 billion years ago were such as to lead to the eventual development of minds that are autonomously effective...With this view, the higher levels in the hierarchy of complexity have autonomous causal powers that are functionally independent of lower-level processes. Top-down causation takes place as well as bottom-up action, with higher-level contexts determining the outcome of lower-level functioning, and even modifying the nature of lower-level constituents.

Stored information plays a key role, resulting in non-linear dynamics that are non-local in space and time...Consequently physics per se cannot causally determine the outcome of human creativity; rather it creates the ‘possibility space’ to allow human intelligence to function autonomously...

So far, attempts to relate physics to complexity... take us only a small step on this road.

Physics, Complexity.Causality. Nature, v.435, p.743, 2005

Normal | Teacher | Scholar