telos

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Related to teloi: congeniality

tel·os

(tĕl′ŏs, tē′lŏs)

The end of a goal-oriented process.

[Greek; see k^wel- in Indo-European roots.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

telos

(ˈtɛlɒs)

an ultimate purpose or end

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

te•los

(ˈtɛl ɒs, ˈti lɒs)

n., pl. te•le (ˈtɛl i, ˈti li)

the end term of a goal-directed process, esp. the Aristotelian final cause.

[1900–05; < Greek télos; compare teleo-]

References in periodicals archive ?

Consequently, human thriving can only be evaluated in terms of what a given human is supposed to be (i.e., that human's purposes, or teloi).

What's the "positive" in positive psychology? Teleological considerations based on creation and imago doctrines

Teleology is front and center in both Hauerwas's thought and MacIntyre's, yet it is important to note that MacIntyre's First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1990) significantly complicates the way appeals to both archai and teloi are made within an ongoing inquiry: "[I]t is a mark of all established genuinely Aristotelian modes of enquiry that they too are open to defeat; that is, what had been taken to be adequate formulations of a set of necessary, apodictic judgments, functioning as first principles, may always turn out to be false, in the light afforded by the failure of its own Aristotelian standards of what had been hitherto taken to be a warranted body of theory" (39-40).

Radical democracy, radical ecclesiology

Widely-differing virtues are the result of widely-differing descriptions of the ideal human (MacIntyre, 1988, 1990), and any approach to eudaimonia is inadequate without deliberately addressing these differing teloi (Hauerwas & Pinches, 1997).