Luca Illetterati and Francesca Michelini, eds. Purposiveness: Teleology Between Nature and Mind (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008), 223 Pps., $39.95.
This volume arose from an interaction of two research programs: one financed by the University of Padua, entitled ‘Natural Items and Artifacts: an Historical-Philosophical Analysis’, directed by Illetterati, and a second one financed by the Bruno Kessler Foundation – Center for Religious Studies of Trento, entitled ‘The Future of Human Nature’, directed by Paolo Costa, Tristana Dini, and Francesca Michelini. Since the rise of Darwinian biology, teleological discourses have been banished and made bankrupt as explanatory tools in biological investigations. The various contributions to this volume set out whether it is possible to talk of purposes in nature, without requiring some intentional agent for those purported purposes. The editors note that teleonomy is meant to be an alternative to an argument for an intelligent designer, as well as to the contention of those who aim to eliminate teleology from biological inquiry altogether; they find such a re-terming of teleology to be useless, and prefer to call it what is in truth. In practice, they note, biology frequently refers to teleological terminology, so it is wise to simply call it what is: purposes.
Virtually every essay in this volume (eight of nine) approaches the notion of teleology from a Kantian perspective, and even dialogues with Kant in the course of their argumentation. The legitimacy of the Kantian notion known as ‘internal teleology’ is addressed throughout, together with the idea of teleonomy. The essays corporately argue that there needs to be a recovery of the Kantian distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ purposiveness, and assert that (post)modern critiques of teleology are effective at refuting ‘external’ purposiveness only. In what remains, several aspects of individual contributions shall be commented upon.
Notably, Costa, Predrag Sustar, and Cord Friebe address the Kantian framework regarding purposiveness, either highlighting it potentiality or critiquing its legitimacy for biology. Illetterati and Georg Toepfer take the Kantian distinction between internal and external purposiveness as the starting point for explaining the difference between products of nature and products of human intention, arguing that the two categories of purposiveness can differentiate between the two. Andreas Weber and Francisco Varela contribute an essay that identifies the anticipation of the idea of autopoiesis in Kant.