Kant's Teleology

Teleology

Autopoiesis , adaptivity , teleology , agency

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organism...

Teleology and biocentrism

In this paper I examine the connection between accounts of biological teleology and the biocentrist claim that all living beings have a good of their own. I first present the background for biocentrists’ appeal to biological teleology. Then I raise a problem of scope for teleology-based biocentrism and, drawing in part on recent work by Basl and Sandler, I discuss Taylor and Varner’s responses ...

KANTS: Artifical Ant System for Classification

This paper investigates a new model that takes advantage of the cooperative self-organization of Ant Algorithms to evolve a naturally inspired pattern recognition (and also clustering) method. The approach considers each data item as an ant that changes the environment as it moves through it. The algorithm is successfully applied to well-known classification problems and yields better results t...

Teleology, Consequentialism, and the Past

Peter Vallentyne