Telos (; ) is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. The Greek word 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.
Telos (; ) is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. The Greek word 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.
== In Aristotle == Telos has been consistently used in the writings of Aristotle, in which the term, on several occasions, denotes 'goal'. It is considered synonymous to teleute ('end'), particularly in Aristotle's discourse about the plot-structure in Poetics. The philosopher went as far as to say that telos can encompass all forms of human activity. One can say, for instance, that the telos of warfare is victory, or the telos of business is the creation of wealth. Within this conceptualization, there are telos that are subordinate to other telos, as all activities have their own respective goals.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).