metonymy4u

Kant proposed that we think about teleology as part of a wired in heuristic of reason. Even a theory like Darwin’s, whose advance was ostensibly to eliminate teleology from biological mechanism, contains the idea of competition as a driving tendency. Competition, gravity, electromagnetism – all of these are force based models which have a teleological flavor. But this sort of thinking is merely an historical accident. I say this because I know it is not logically impossible to suppose we could think another way – even if we can’t actually think it.