The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts
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- Full Title: The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts
- Author(s): Harry Binswanger
- Year Published: 1990
- Publisher: The Ayn Rand Institute Press
- Publication Type: Specialty
- ISBN: 0-9625336-0-2 (paperback)
- Description: Binswanger defends the view that living things are teleological, which is to say that "there is a is a fundamental mode of causation common to all types of living action, whether conscious of non-conscious: living action is goal-directed."
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- Types of Processes
- The origin of teleological concepts
- Living action vs. inanimate processes
- Vegetative vs. conscious action
- Goal-directed action vs. purposeful action
- Alternative Positions on Vegetative Action
- The mechanists
- The teleologists
- Other schools
- Methodology
- The Analysis of Purposeful Action
- Anticipated vs. accidental consequences of action
- The role of desire
- The order of cause and effect
- Self-Generation
- Cellular respiration
- Plant tropisms
- The heartbeat
- Self-generated action
- Summary
- Value-Significance
- The apparent purposefulness of vegetative action
- "Plasticity"
- Needs, benefits, and value-significance
- "To whom?" and "for what"
- The alternative of life vs. death
- Psychological and biological value-significance
- Goals and inanimate processes
- Goal-Causation
- The teleological vs. the accidental
- Future ends as based on similar past ends
- In purposeful action
- In vegetative action
- Goal-Causation and Natural Selection
- Cellular respiration
- Phototropism
- The heartbeat
- The nature of natural selection
- Genetic selection and ontogenetic selection
- Summary: selection as the basis of goal-directed action
- Objections I
- Causation by similar past goals: is it true goal-causation
- Psychological and biological value-significance
- Alleged counterexamples
- Rainfall and the water cycle
- The pendulum and similar mechanisms
- Pseudo-needs: avoiding destruction vs. gaining values
- Fire
- "External" teleology
- Objections II
- Is reproductive fitness, not survival, selection's goal?
- Individual vs. group survival
- Biological reproduction vs. man's reproduction of artifacts
- Maladaptive purposeful actions
- Epistemological Issues
- Philosophic vs. scientific issues
- Definitions as capturing fundamentals
- Reduction vs. elimination
- Deciding between alternative conceptual hierarchies
- Attempts to base epistemology on evolution
- Wider Implications
- Implications for vegetative action
- The economy of the teleological approach
- The theoretic power of the teleological approach
- Implications for man's purposeful action
- Appendix
- Larry Wright
- Andrew Woodfield
- Notes
- Index of Authors
The following perspectives on this book are available online:
- Commentary on individual chapters by participants in the MDOP mailing list: Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are covered.
- Log of an online chat session discussing Chapter 1 on the #geekspeak IRC channel.
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