Telos
The Greek term for end, goal, or completed purpose — central to Aristotle's account of nature and ethics, and the target of much modern critique.
Telos is the Greek term for end, completion, or purpose. In Aristotle's natural philosophy, the telos of a thing is what its development is for — the acorn's telos is the oak, the human child's telos is the rational adult — and this final cause is one of the four causes through which things are properly explained. In ethics, the telos of human beings is eudaimonia, the activity of the rational soul in accordance with virtue across a complete life.
The modern scientific revolution treated teleological explanation in nature with deep suspicion. Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes argued that natural philosophy should explain phenomena through efficient causation alone, dispensing with final causes as obscurantist. The displacement of teleology was largely successful in physics and chemistry but more contested in biology and ethics. Recent virtue ethics — Anscombe, MacIntyre, Foot — has worked to recover a chastened Aristotelian teleology suited to contemporary philosophical conditions.
Aristotle's four causes — material, formal, efficient, and final — are introduced in Physics II.3 and Metaphysics V.2 as the four ways of answering the question why? a thing is what it is. The final cause, the telos, is the for-the-sake-of-which: the function or completed state toward which a thing develops. Final causes are most clearly displayed in the development of living things, where the mature form is the for-the-sake-of-which the embryo develops.
The modern revival of teleological vocabulary has been chastened. Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness argues that human beings are subject to the same kind of natural-historical evaluation as plants and animals — there are characteristic ways our species lives well, and the virtues are dispositions instrumental to this. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue argues that the loss of Aristotelian teleology has left modern moral discourse without a coherent framework for evaluating practices. Both projects are more cautious than Aristotle about cosmic teleology while preserving its ethical use.
How philosophers have framed telos
| Philosopher | Position |
|---|---|
| Aristotle | Final cause: the for-the-sake-of-which a thing develops; one of the four causes. |
| Thomas Aquinas | Christianized: the telos of creatures is participation in God's order. |
| Francis Bacon | Natural philosophy should dispense with final causes in favor of efficient causation. |
| Alasdair MacIntyre | Loss of Aristotelian teleology has left modern moral discourse incoherent. |
| Philippa Foot | Naturalized: characteristic ways the human species lives well ground evaluation. |
Representative quotes
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Aristotle
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“All men by nature desire to know.”
Metaphysics Book I, 980a.21 : Opening paragraph of Metaphysics | Variant: All men by nature desire knowledge. | The first sentence is in the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:10
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Thomas Aquinas
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“Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.”
Tria sunt homini necessaria ad salutem: scilicit scientia credendorum, scientia desiderandorum, et scientia operandorum.
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Francis Bacon
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“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
Of Beauty https://www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-43.html
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Alasdair MacIntyre
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“Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror”
Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue , 1913-1922 (ed. 2007)
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Philippa Foot
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“The whole of moral philosophy, as it is now widely taught, rests on a contrast between statements of fact and evaluations. … If a man is given good evidence for a factual conclusion he cannot just refuse to accept the conclusion on the ground that in his scheme of things this evidence is not evidence at all. With evaluations, however, it is different. An evaluation is not connected logically with the factual statements on which it is based.”
Wikiquote
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