Aristotelian ideas have in the past been applied with mixed fortunes to quantum mechanics. One of the most persistent criticisms is that Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality are burdened with a teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. Recently this criticism has been met with a model of the actualization of quantum potentialities in light of Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘spontaneous events’. This presumably restores the nowadays acceptable idea of efficient causation in place of Aristotle’s original doctrine of (...) the ‘four causes’. In this article I challenge the model by arguing that when properly scrutinized Aristotle’s final cause poses no problems for an Aristotelian reading of quantum mechanics. Final causes in fact provide a better ontology for quantum mechanics than spontaneous causation. The idea of ‘spontaneity’ is unanalyzable and therefore of little use in quantum mechanics. In addition, it is ontologically sterile in the context of quantum measurement, as shown by a historical and conceptual review of the role of efficient causation in experimental physics. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology claim that function talk is consistent with naturalism. Yet recent work in biology places new pressure on this claim. An increasing number of biologists propose that the existence of functions depends on the organisation of systems. While systems are part of the domain studied by physics, they are capable of interacting with this domain through organising principles. This is to say that a full account of biological function requires teleology. Does naturalism preclude reference to teleological causes? Or (...) are organised systems precisely a naturalised form of teleology? In this paper I suggest that the biology of organised systems reveals several contradictions in the main philosophical conceptions of naturalism. To integrate organised systems with naturalism’s basic assumptions—that there is no theory-independent view for metaphysics, and that nature is intelligible—I propose an idealist solution. (shrink)

An investigation of the views on space and time of the Russian polymath Pavel Florensky. After a brief account of his life, I study Florensky’s conception of time in The Meaning of Idealism, where he first confronts Einstein’s theory of special relativity, comparing it to Plato’s metaphor of the Cave and Goethe’s myth of the Mothers. Later, in his Analysis of spatiality and time, Florensky speaks of a person’s biography as a four-dimensional unity, in which the temporal coordinate is examined (...) in sections. In On the Imaginaries in Geometry, Florensky argues that the speed of light is not, as in Relativity, an absolute speed limit in the universe. When bodies approach and then surpass the speed of light, they are transformed into unextended, eternal Platonic forms. Beyond this point, time runs in reverse, effects precede their causes, and efficient causality is transformed into final or teleological causality, a concept on which Florensky elaborates in his Iconostasis. Florensky thus transformed the findings of Einsteinian relativity in order to make room for Plato’s intelligible Ideas, the Aristotelian distinction between a changing realm of earth and the immutable realm of the heavens, and the notion of teleology or final causation. His notion that man can approximate God’s vision of past, present and future all at once, as if from above, is reminiscent of Boethius’ ideas. (shrink)