Papers by Auguste Nahas
Synthese, 2023
Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goal-directed en... more Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goal-directed entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. The neglect of this metatheoretic distinction has made it difficult to understand the criteria we should use for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology. We argue that a clearer distinction between scientific and philosophical contexts shows that we need more than one set of criteria for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology, and that taking these into account might advance or dissolve recurring debates in the literature.
Topoi, 2023
We outline an alternative to both scientific and liberal naturalism which attempts to reconcile S... more We outline an alternative to both scientific and liberal naturalism which attempts to reconcile Sellars' apparently conflicting commitments to the scientific accountability of human nature and the autonomy of the space of reasons. Scientific naturalism holds that agency and associated concepts are a mechanical product of the realm of laws, while liberal naturalism contends that the autonomy of the space of reason requires that we leave nature behind. The third way we present follows in the footsteps of German Idealism, which attempted to overcome the Kantian chasm between nature and agency, and is thus dubbed 'post-Kantian.' We point to an overlooked group of scholars in the naturalism debate who, along with recent work in biology and cognitive science, offer a path to overcome the reductive tendencies of empiricism while avoiding the dichotomy of logical spaces. We then bring together these different streams of research, by foregrounding and expanding on what they share: the idea of organisms as living agents and that of a continuity without identity between life and mind. We qualify this as a bottom-up transformative approach to rational agency, which grounds cognition in the intrinsically purposive nature of organisms, while emphasizing the distinction between biological agency and full-fledged mindedness.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 93, 47–56, 2022
This paper distinguishes two ways in which Kant's ideas concerning the relation between teleology... more This paper distinguishes two ways in which Kant's ideas concerning the relation between teleology and biological organization have been taken up in contemporary philosophy of biology and theoretical biology. The first sees his account as the first instance of the modern understanding of teleology as a heuristic tool aimed at producing mechanistic explanations of organismal form and function; the second sees in Kant's intrinsic purposiveness the seed of a radically new way of thinking about biological systems that should be developed by turning teleology into a legitimate concept of natural science. We name the two approaches heuristic and naturalistic, respectively. Our aim is to critically evaluate these approaches and suggest that the naturalistic option, which remains a minority position, deserves to be taken more seriously than it currently is in contemporary biological theory. While evolution by natural selection closes the case on intelligent design, it does not close the case on teleology in general. In fact, the current return of the organism and the recent calls for an agential perspective in evolutionary biology point out that we still have some thinking to do concerning this side of Kant's legacy.
Book chapters by Auguste Nahas
The Riddle of Organismal Agency: New Historical and Philosophical Reflections, 2024
The paper proposes a novel reading of Schelling's speculative physics in light of debates concern... more The paper proposes a novel reading of Schelling's speculative physics in light of debates concerning the notion of emergence in philosophy of science. We begin by highlighting Schelling's disruptive potential with regard to the contemporary philosophical landscape, currently polarized over a false dichotomy between reductionist Humeanism and liberal Kantianism. We then argue that a broadly Schellingian approach to nature is unwittingly being revived by a group of scholars promoting a non-mainstream process account of emergence based on the notion of constraint and grounded in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. Such an account, we argue, represents an effective theoretical platform to re-read Schelling's philosophy of nature today. This reading provides a picture of life and mind as emerging out of self-organizing processes that take place through the self-inhibition of nature's inherent tendency to disorder.
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Papers by Auguste Nahas
Book chapters by Auguste Nahas