Citing Bryce, Land claims that teleology might best be interpreted in terms of equilibrium. Or, as he writes, "Equilibrium is exactly a telos." Note that there are 44 comments to his entry.
With Land I couldn't agree more.
It seems that the "allergy" to medieval or Scholastic, and largely Aristotelian, modes of thought propagated by early Enlightenment philosophy has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Essentially Land astutely observes that, yes, "equilibrium is the telos of those particular dynamic complex systems governed by homeostasis...Such systems are, indeed, in profound accordance with classical Aristotelian physical teleology, and its tendency is to a state of rest. This ancient physics, derided by the Enlightenment mechanists in the name of the conservation of momentum, is redeemed through abstraction into the modern conception of equilibrium. 'Rest' is not immobility, but entropy maximization."
I've written about this before, HERE, and HERE.
