Pryor, Adam. “Which Autogen? Whose Incompleteness? Considering the Ontological Conditions of Teleodynamics as Strong Emergence.” Theology and Science 14, no. 4 (2016): 441-448.
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In his famous text Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the incompatibility of practical reasoning in Hume and Aristotle stemmed from underlying differences in their conceptual schemes. In short, differing accounts of justice arise from different assumptions about giving a rational account of the world. Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature is a dense and winding text that, by its broadest implications, is making a claim about the existence of a distinctive rational account for examining parallelism in phenomena of wildly different scale and complexity. In this paper, I want to take a cue from Maclntyre. I will begin by briefly examining what the novel ways Incomplete Nature offers for rationally reconceptualizing phenomena in the world are, and then consider how such an account necessitates an incompatibility with particular ontological or metaphysical frameworks.