What Would Teleological Causation Be? 1 John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan As is well known, Aristotelian natural philosophy, and many other systems of natural philosophy since, have relied heavily on teleology and teleological causation. Somehow, the purpose or end of an object can be used to predict and explain what that object does: once you know that the end of an acorn is to become an oak, and a few things about what sorts of circumstances are conducive to the attainment of this end, you can predict a lot about the sprouting of the acorn and the subsequent behaviour of the piece of vegetation that results. Once you know that a rock seeks to move towards the centre of the Earth, you gain some insight into why it falls when released, and why it deforms the carpet or foot that it lands on. Once you know that the rabbit seeks to preserve itself, you can predict it will run from the fox. And so on. There are at least three features of Aristotle’s teleology, and more generally of an Aristotelian frame of mind about teleology, that may induce suspicion. One is that an end can serve as a “cause”: as well as the sort of causation we all recognize, efficient causation, there are other forms, one of which is teleological causation. 2 However, this can look less odd if we think of causes as things that figure in “because” answers to “why” questions. Whether or not self-preservation, or the rabbit’s continued existence, or something similar, causes the rabbit to run, the reply “because it seeks to continue in existence” certainly makes sense as an answer, or part of an answer, to a question about why it ran from the fox. (At present we are only claiming that it makes sense – we postpone the question of whether it is strictly speaking correct or particularly informative.) 1 Thanks, to Frank Arntzenius, Cian Dorr, Hilary Greaves, and Hud Hudson for helpful discussion, to a reader for valuable and detailed comments. Thanks to John Carroll, Stuart Brock, and the audience at the 2005 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference for comments and critique. Thanks to The Ammonius Insitute for research funding that helped John write this paper. Finally, thanks to Dean Zimmerman for providing the party that helped spark this paper. 2 We do not wish to enter the debate about whether Aristotle’s “four causes” are properly thought of as causes, or whether the four somethings-or-other are best understood as something else. That teleological “causation” was thought of as a kind of cause seems true of parts of the Aristotelian tradition, at least, whether or not it is a misunderstanding of Aristotle.