Causes, proximate and ultimate
Biology and Philosophy 5 (4):401-415 (1990)
| Abstract | Within evolutionary biology a distinction is frequently made between proximate and ultimate causes. One apparently plausible interpretation of this dichotomy is that proximate causes concern processes occurring during the life of an organism while ultimate causes refer to those processes (particularly natural selection) that shaped its genome. But ultimate causes are not sought through historical investigations of an organisms lineage. Rather, explanations referring to ultimate causes typically emerge from functional analyses. But these functional analyses do not identify causes of any kind, much less ultimate ones. So-called ultimate explanations are not about causes in any sense resembling those of proximate explanations. The attitude, implicit in the term ultimate cause, that these functional analyses are somehow superordinate to those involving proximate causes is unfounded. Ultimate causes are neither ultimate nor causes. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJonathan Schaffer (2010). Monism: The Priority of the Whole. Philosophical Review 119 (1):31-76.
Ishtiyaque Haji & Stefaan E. Cuypers (2011). Ultimate Educational Aims, Overridingness, and Personal Well-Being. Studies in Philosophy and Education 30 (6):543-556.
Michael V. Antony (forthcoming). Can We Acquire Knowledge of Ultimate Reality? In Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Other Ultimate Realities. Springer.
Brian Skyrms (1985). Ultimate and Proximate Consequences in Causal Decision Theory. Philosophy of Science 52 (4):608-611.
Richard Schuster (2003). Why Not Go All the Way. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (2):173-174.
Ernst Mayr (1993). Proximate and Ultimate Causations. Biology and Philosophy 8 (1):93-94.
Arno Wouters (1995). Viability Explanation. Biology and Philosophy 10 (4):435-457.
John Beatty (1994). The Proximate/Ultimate Distinction in the Multiple Careers of Ernst Mayr. Biology and Philosophy 9 (3):333-356.
André Ariew (2003). Ernst Mayr's 'Ultimate/Proximate' Distinction Reconsidered and Reconstructed. Biology and Philosophy 18 (4).
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads22 ( #57,056 of 556,837 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,847 of 556,837 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
