The End of Final Causes in Biology
This book provides a straightforward introduction to teleology in biology, the work it did and the work it can do. Informed by history and philosophy, it focuses on scientific concerns. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century biologists proposed a menagerie of biological “actors” to explain power without appealing to Aristotelian vegetable souls and final causes. Three constraints on te...
This book provides a straightforward introduction to teleology in biology, the work it did and the work it can do. Informed by history and philosophy, it focuses on scientific concerns. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century biologists proposed a menagerie of biological “actors” to explain power without appealing to Aristotelian vegetable souls and final causes. Three constraints on te...
