Teleology Quotes
A curated collection of the best quotes about Teleology.
Top Quotes
“Cybernetics”
“Intelligent design”
“Evolution disposes of teleology.”
“Our culture is teleological—it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.”
“Wikipedia: Teleology”
“I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to."”
“What in the whole denotes a causal equilibrium process, appears for the part as a teleological event.”
“A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.”
“If teleological study of the world is philosophy, and if the Law commands such a study, then the Law commands philosophy.”
“Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.”
“As soon as I begin to want to make my thinking teleological in relation to something else, interest enters the game. As soon as it is there, the ethical is present...”
“...nature has no particular goal in view, and final causes are mere human figments. ...everything in nature proceeds from a sort of necessity, and with the utmost perfection.”
“Clearly, teleology has much in common with the design hypothesis. Both Aristotle and William Paley would say that the gods knew that they wanted you to see, so they designed eyes.”
“The universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological.”
“To his [ Plato's ] great disappointment, he found Anaxagoras adducing simple physical reasons, instead of the teleological reasons, which he had expected. Such a teacher could no longer allure him.”
“The atomists, unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.”
“Just when did teleological explanations, accounts in terms of use and the Good, become definitely abandoned in favour of the notion that true explanations, of man and his mind as well as of other things, must be in terms of their simplest parts?”
“Because the Systems Age is teleologically oriented, it is preoccupied with systems that are goal-seeking or purposeful, that is, systems that can display choice of either means or ends, or both. It is interested in purely mechanical systems only.”
“Teleology can, and has been, extended to suppose that man is designed not only so as to function biologically in a certain way but also to function ethically in a manner related to his biological nature. ...It is surprising how persistent this belief is.”