2025.03.13 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Matthew Tugby Teleology, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 75pp., $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781009257398.
Reviewed by Alexander Bird, University of Cambridge
In this short, but wide ranging and readable book, Matthew Tugby addresses teleology and the related notions of function and goal-directedness. He commences by contrasting Nagel’s reductionist approach to teleology with Aristotle’s acceptance of irreducibly teleological properties in the world. Associated with the latter camp, says Tugby, are modern power theorists, whose view of the fundamental natures of properties is teleological.
The second section provides a very nice survey of the major views of function and their problems. The broad outline of this section is that etiological/selectionist accounts of function characterize an important subclass of functions, but not all functions. On the other hand, the causal role approach of Robert Cummins (1975) and others tends to be over-inclusive. Better than both is the goal-directedness theory…
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