Concept
Telos
Overview
Telos (; Ancient Greek: τέλος, romanized: télos, lit. 'end, purpose, goal') is a term used by Greek philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. The Greek word telos is the root of the modern term "teleology", the study of purposiveness or of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. Teleology is central in Aristotle's work on plant and animal biology, and in his analysis of human ethics, through his theory of the four causes. Aristotle's notion that everything has a telos also gave rise to epistemology.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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They noted, then, the final term or culminating point ([Greek: telos, akmê]) and set it up as the essential moment: this moment, that language has retained in order to express the whole of the fact, sufficed also for science to characterize it. In the physics of Aristotle, it is by the concepts "high" and "low," spontaneous displacement and forced displacement, own place and strange place, that the movement of a…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Telos is; names Telos.
Thus, Aristotle says that plants exist for animals; and similarly he shows of other parts of the Universe for what purpose they exist. This is still more obvious in the case of the organs of animals. The existence of such a final cause in the various parts of Nature has compelled philosophers to assume the existence of a primal cause apart from Nature; it is called by Aristotle the intellectual or divine cause, and…
Moses Maimonides, The guide for the perplexed
States what Telos is.
The nature is not formed from without as men make a table; this is also made with understanding, but through an understanding outside of this wood. This external form, which is called the understanding, immediately occurs to us in speaking of the understanding; but here the universal is meant, that which is the immanent nature of the object itself. The _νοῦς_ is thus not a thinking existence from without which…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Telos is.
Philosophers who discussed Telos
Related ideas
- Harvard University Press
- Wealth
- Cybernetics
- Donald Davidson (philosopher)
- Aristotle
- Writing
- Martin Heidegger
- Class struggle
- Marxist philosophy
- Intention
- Four causes
- Action theory (philosophy)
- Nicomachean Ethics
- Loeb Classical Library
- Art
- Teleology
- Biology
- Epistemology
- First principle
- Encyclopædia Britannica
Place in the tradition
Part of Consequentialism.