Yale Teleology Conference

Tuesday |May 5, 2026

9:00: Coffee and pastries

9:20: Opening remarks 

9:30: Jeffrey McDonough (Harvard), Leibniz on Monadic Teleology and Optimal Form

11:00: Break

11:10: Karl Schafer (UT Austin), The Inescapability of Teleology

12:40: Lunch (catered)

1:30: Panel 1:  
Aurora Yu (UNC), Aristotle’s Global Teleology
Vittorio Alves (KU Leuven), Minimal Teleology: Schelling’s Kantian Argument
for the Constitutive Purposiveness of Nature
Gunnar Babcock (Cornell) and Dan McShea (Duke), Abiotic Teleology

3:30: Break

3:40: Mark Schiefsky (Harvard), Galen's “Unnatural” Teleology 

5:10: Dinner (details to follow)

Wednesday |May 6, 2026

9:00: Coffee and pastries

9:30: Jessica Gelber (Toronto), What is Hypothetical Necessity? 

11:00: Break

11:10: Jim Kreines (Claremont McKenna), Weirdly Good Teleology: Beyond Intuition and Scientific Debunking

12:40: Lunch (catered)

1:30:Panel 2: 

Isabel Sharp (Chicago), Goodness as Mere Rationality in Foot’s Natural Goodness; Ari Deller (Cambridge), A Teleological Critique of ‘Can AIs be X?’ Scholarship; Eleonore Neufeld (UMass Amherst), Against Teleological Essentialism

3:30: Break

3:45: Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers) and David Rose (Stanford), Folk Teleology:
The Direct and the Diagnostic Views

5:15: Closing remarks

5:30: Dinner (catered)