teleology

1. (philosophy) The study of the purpose or design of natural occurrences.Examples: "The received intellectual tradition has it that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, revolutionary philosophers began to curtail and reject the teleology of the medieval and scholastic Aristotelians, abandoning final causes in favor of a purely mechanistic model of the Universe."countableuncountable

2. (by extension) An instance of such a design or purpose, usually in natural phenomena.Examples: "In short, what every student of biology knows – that within nature there is a teleology having to do with the survival of the species which underpins the distinction between the two sexes and produces between them a natural affinity for one another – no surgeon who knows what is good for him may now say."broadlycountableuncountable