How to Use teleology in a Sentence

teleology

noun
  • What had happened was one story, the story of communism, the teleology of communism had turned out not to be true.
    — Isaac Chotiner, Slate Magazine, 7 Mar. 2017
  • The modern era, the long twentieth century, offered a kind of teleology of progress, a line on a chart going upward and to the right.
    — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, 7 Dec. 2023
  • Homer’s heroes lack the sense of national destiny, of teleology, that fills Virgil’s poem.
    — Willard Spiegelman, WSJ, 22 Sep. 2017
  • Committed to a teleology of progress, albeit open to the reality of historical irony, this liberalism lacks a visceral sense of the tragic.
    — Jamelle Bouie, Slate Magazine, 7 Feb. 2017
  • The Weberian analysis then offers no relief from that process, only a fatalism without a teleology.
    — George Blaustein, The New Republic, 2 July 2020
  • In the near future, Teresa is a middle-aged Massachusetts native without a career, a steady paycheck or a corporate teleology.
    — Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times, 12 Dec. 2023
  • Viruses display a kind of single-minded teleology—relentless replication—but are not, by most biological standards, living.
    — Dan Turello, New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2026
  • Yet this approach itself reinforces a particular nationalist teleology.
    — Fara Dabhoiwala, The New York Review of Books, 1 July 2021
  • Similarly, the transformative forward-thrust of time in Boyne’s narrative, which orders the novel’s very structure — each chapter break accounts for seven years in Cyril’s life — suggests a kind of progressive teleology.
    — Manuel Betancourt, Longreads, 29 Mar. 2018
  • Which is what, some believe, happened to Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian who tried (and largely succeeded) to fit the entire world into a synthesis of Christian revelation and Aristotelian teleology.
    — Andrew Sullivan, Daily Intelligencer, 22 Dec. 2017
  • An arresting image, the technological Singularity as the industrial revolution in terrifying maturity; a teleology of this moment from when coal was first dug and iron first processed.
    — Literary Hub, 21 Jan. 2026
  • The various models proposed for the mechanism of evolution, such as Lamarckian evolution, orthogenesis, and use-disuse, all implied some level of teleology, that there was a directionality inherent in the process.
    — Mano Singham, Scientific American, 5 Sep. 2021
  • His early preoccupation with initial cosmic conditions led Barrow to reinstate in physical science the ancient philosophical concept of teleology, which (in its various guises) takes into account final as well as initial states.
    — Paul Davies, Scientific American, 10 Oct. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'teleology.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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