EVENTS

STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»

Abstracts of the Lectures:

Vittorio Hösle, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Why Teleological Principles Are Inevitable For Reason

No reasonable person can deny that Darwin's and Wallace's discovery of the principle of natural selection is one of the most important events in the history of science and that it has further discredited the traditional form of the argument from design, which had already been criticized by Hume and Kant. However, from Kant's "Critique of Judgment" one can learn why it is not easy to get rid of teleological representations. I will discuss four forms of it: a.) the simplicity of natural laws and their intelligibility, b.) the teleonomy of organisms, c.) the peculiar position of humans as beings that have both cognitive and moral purposes, d.) the anthropic principle, i.e. the assumption that nature had to bring forth beings able to understand it.