TELEOLOGY AND ITS LIMITS IN ARISTOTLE AND KANT by Thomas C. Marré BA in Philosophy

327 Pages·2017·2.37 MB·English

by  Thomas Marre

TELEOLOGY AND ITS LIMITS IN ARISTOTLE AND KANT
by
Thomas C. Marré
BA in Philosophy and Classics, University of Dallas 2005
MA in Classics, Tufts University 2007
MA in Philosophy, Tufts University 2010
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
2018
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
This dissertation was presented
by
Thomas C. Marré
It was defended on
July 10, 2018
and approved by
Andrew Chignell, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Religion, Princeton University
James V. Allen, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto
Jessica Gelber, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
John McDowell, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
Dissertation Co-Director: Stephen Engstrom, Professor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
Dissertation Co-Director: James G. Lennox, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh
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Copyright © by Thomas C. Marré
2018
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TELEOLOGY AND ITS LIMITS IN ARISTOTLE AND KANT
Thomas C. Marré, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2018
Aristotle was a realist about natural teleology, Kant an anti-realist. My dissertation explains why
each accorded it the epistemic and ontological status that he did. I articulate and defend novel
conceptions of the problems they were addressing and their solutions to them.
Aristotle’s natural teleology constitutes an essential part of his solution to a larger
problem: how is motion or change possible? Motion had been thought by some to be unlimited
and, therefore, unknowable. If there is to be a science of natural motion, then, motion must have
limits. The telos was one such limit. Aristotle often glosses telos with limit, and this association
is consistent with prior usage. It was, in fact, one of the three standardly recognized limits,
together with beginning and middle—archē and meson. All three figure in Aristotle’s account of
natural motion. The archē is the efficient cause, and the meson is that by which the archē brings
about some telos. So understood, the telos has a natural relation to the possibility of motion: it
serves as a limit in virtue of which motion is intelligible.
Kant’s teleology is intimately related to disputes about universals and our empirical
classifications of things. Central to my account is the category of community. Our discursive
intellects require that we approach nature as if it were ordered into a system of genera and
species. In such a system, the species are parts of the genus and stand together in community
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under it, thereby constituting a whole. Similarly, an organism or natural end possesses the form
of a system and its parts stand together in community under a common or communal ground.
They too constitute a whole. But as with nature’s kinds, we can only approach an organism as if
its parts formed a real whole: their communal ground is simple and so not to be met with in
space. They possess, in other words, a noumenal ground. Consequently, organisms can be
explained neither teleologically nor mechanistically, and teleology itself can never be accorded
genuinely scientific status. Natural ends can be understood only on analogy with ourselves.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE….………..………………………………………………..……………………………………x
NOTE ON SOURCES AND ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………xii
1. INTRODUCTION……………………………..…………………………..……………………………1
1.1 ARISTOTLE…………………………………………………….…………………………….5
1.2 KANT………………………………………………………………………………………….8
1.3 CONCLUSION….…………………………………………………….…………………….13
2. TELOS KAI PERAS………………………………..………………………..………………………..15
2.1 IN THE BEGINNING: TELOS AND PERAS IN THE PRESOCRATICS……………..24

2.2 ARISTOTLE’S CRITICISM OF HIS PREDECESSORS……………….……….………39

2.3 KINĒSIS…………………………………………………………………….…….………….44

2.4 SOME DIFFICULTIES CONCERNING GENERATION………………….……………53

2.5 DEATH AND THE DIRECTION OF MOTION……………………….…………………56

2.6 CONCLUSION……………………………………….…………………..…………………67
3. FUNCTIONS AND EFFICIENT CAUSES………………..……………………..………….………71
3.1 THE PROBLEM……………………..…………………………………..………………….76
3.2. REDUCTIONISM…………………………………………………………………………..79
3.3 ELIMINATIVISM…………………………………………………………………………..85
3.4 AN IMPASSE AND A WAY THROUGH……………………………………………..……89

3.5 NOT ANY CHANCE THING………………………………………………………………97
3.6 ARCHĒ KAI TELOS……………………………………………………………………….101
3.7 CAUSES AND ANALOGICAL TERMS…………………………………………………105
3.8 TO HOU HENEKA…………………………………………………………………………109
3.9 FUNCTIONS AND GENERICS…………………………………………………..………112
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3.10 WHY IS IT THERE?……………………………………………………………………..121

3.11 PARTS, TOOLS, AND TA METAXU…………………………………………………….125

3.12 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………..…………….134
APPENDIX: TELOS AND LIMIT AFTER ARISTOTLE…………………………………………..136
4. TELEOLOGY, COMMUNITY, AND NATURAL FORM IN KANT………………………..…..144

4.1. PARTS AND WHOLES, AGGREGATES AND SYSTEMS……………………………152

4.2 SYSTEMATICITY, LOGICAL DIVISION, AND DISJUNCTION………………….…157
4.3 AN HISTORICAL INTERLUDE IN TWO PARTS
4.3.1 Unity and Community in Some Scholastics……………………….….………..164
4.3.2 Locke, Leibniz, and the Quest for Community………………..………………169

4.4 LOGICAL PURPOSIVENESS AND PROJECTED COMMUNITIES…….………….175
4.5. THE GENERATIVE CRITERION OF SPECIES AND THE COMMUNAL

CAUSE.………………………………………………………………………………..180

4.6 NATURAL ENDS: NUTRITION, GENERATION, AND SUBSTANTIAL
FORM……..…………………………………………………………………………..187
4.7 BIOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALITY……………………………………………………….193

4.8 KANT’S USE OF ZWECK………………………………………………………………..201

4.9 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………204
5. PERSONS, PURPOSES, AND PARALOGISMS…………………………………………………207

5.1. INDIVIDUUM EST INEFFABILE………………………………………………………216
5.2 SAMENESS, SELF, AND SUBSTANCE…………………………………………………218
5.3 PERSONS AND PARALOGISMS………………………………………………………..230
5.4 PERSONS AND PRACTICAL REASON………………………………………………..235
5.5 THE FEELING OF LIFE…………………………………………………………………240

5.6 FROM PERSONS TO PURPOSES…………………..…………………………………..246
5.7 SAMENESS, SELF, AND SUBSTANCE (RENEWED)…………………..……………..256

5.8 CONCLUSION……………..…………………………………………….………………..258
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6. TO HOU HENEKA……………………………………………………………….…………………262
6.1 TELOS AND ZWECK…….………………………………………………………………..264
6.2 FUNCTIONS AND NATURAL KINDS………………………..…………………………268
6.3 PROBLEM CONTEXTS………………………………………………………………….279
6.4 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………….284
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………287
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How is it possible that someone with knowledge of the
beginning should be ignorant of the end?
—Lady Philosophy
Boethius, Consolatione 1.vi.27ff
Miraculously, a plant twists itself out of a rock’s cleft; clinging to
the harsh bluffs, living organization maintains itself in the midst of
desolation; the formative drive [Trieb der Bildung] leaps from it
like the spark hidden in the stone.1
—W. von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, v. 3, p.115
1 in Reill (2005).
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PREFACE
This dissertation would not have been possible without a great many people. I would like to thank
my committee—Stephen Engstrom, James Lennox, John McDowell, Jessica Gelber, James Allen, and
Andrew Chignell—for their support and interest in the project from the start, which now seems so long
ago. I would also like to thank Jim, Steve, and Jessica in particular for reading so many drafts and for so
many conversations over the past several years about the philosophical issues involved. I shudder to
imagine what the result would have been without their very generous help, for which I am very grateful.
I should also like to thank the late Allan Gotthelf, requiescat in pace. Though I had always
expected my dissertation would involve Aristotle (and indeed Kant) in no small measure, it was Allan
who encouraged me to write on Aristotle’s teleology in particular. My thoughts on the issue first took
shape in a course he co-taught with Jim Lennox in my early years in the graduate program. In response to
a paper I had written, Allan said after pledging to help develop the ideas presented therein that ‘I'm not
averse in the least to helping—if I can—to improve the presentation of a view I think so wrong, when it's
so well-conceived as yours is.’ I hope he would think that the presentation of the view has improved, and
that the quality of its conception has not diminished—even if, as I suspect, he would still think it quite
wrong.
I owe in addition great thanks to the friends I have made in my time at Pittsburgh. I have profited
tremendously from conversations with them on any number of topics, but they are most to be thanked for
their friendship, and thus for the gift of a true human good. I should mention in particular Steve Makin,
Casey Doyle, Preston Stovall, Laura Tomlinson, David de Bruijn, Eric Palmer, Ben Schulz, and Brooke
McLane-Higginson, without whom I can scarcely imagine my time in Pittsburgh. But I would also like to
thank in a very special way Jon Buttaci, whose friendship has been invaluable. Not only have I learned
from him a great deal about Aristotle, but his energy, enthusiasm, and philosophical optimism always
balanced what might otherwise have been an excessive skepticism and pessimism. He has been a true
friend and gadfly, a lover of justice and, in many ways, an image of it.
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