Anthropocentric biases in teleological thinking: How nature seems designed for humans.

Animals and Humans, Thinking and Nature

ion. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger would not even dream of decoupling an animal from its environment, or decoupling humans from one another, but in their analyses they seem to decouple animals from their congeners, and take the individual animal-environment couple as their unit of analysis. While sensitive to other prejudices

Kant on Teleological Thinking and Its Failures

Relations Between Intuitive Biological Thought and Scientific Misconceptions

Students enter educational settings with complex and well-established intuitive conceptual understandings of the world, which have important educational consequences. In biology, intuitive thinking can be characterized in terms of cognitive construals (anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, Coley & Tanner, 2015). We examined relations between intuitive thinking and biological...

Teleological Reasoning about Nature: Intentional or Relational

According to the theory of ‘promiscuous teleology’, we are naturally biased to (mistakenly) construe natural kinds as if they (like artifacts) were intentionally designed ‘for a purpose’. However, this theory introduces two paradoxes. First, if infants readily distinguish natural kinds from artifacts, as evidence suggests, why do school-aged children erroneously conflate this distinction? Secon...

Thinking about End of Life in Teleological Terms

This brief paper presents an Aristotelian-inspired approach to end-of-life decision making. The account focuses on the importance of teleology, in particular, the telos of eudaimonia understood as the goal of human flourishing as well as the telos of medicine when a person’s eudaimonia is threatened by serious illness and death. We argue that an Aristotelian bioethics offers a better alternativ...