Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Contra Noah Millman, who recently claimed , "we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis" (God knows what he meant here!), teleology pervades modern biology, and there is absolutely no sign it can be gotten rid of. Take this report of recent sloth research in the NY Times : I find at least the following uses of teleology in explaining what the sloths are up to, with the key teleological words highlighted: "[the three-toed sloth] has carved out a remarkably ingenious mode of life in the treetops" (Something is ingenious in that it achieves an end very economically.) " Why then does the sloth take such a risk every week?" (For what end ?) "They started by trying to understand what would compel the sloth to brave the dangers of a weekly visit to ground zero." (To what end would it do so?) "Rather, they assumed, it was to favor a critical component of the sloth’s ecosystem, the pyra...

In the classical and Christian epochs, few people would have worried about exactly how a government was constructed from parts or what operating procedures those parts followed when it came to deciding whether a particular government was justified. Instead, it was justified because it brought about a good end: generally speaking, because it was the most concrete expression of and ultimate protector of the civic order that underlay its existence. The details of how the government had been composed -- out of the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements combined, or only one or two of those -- and how it operated -- by voting and of what sort, according to what sort of constitution, and so on -- were of interest not as ways to justify the existence of the government, but as methods that could be evaluated according to the extent to which they did or didn't help a government achieve its end. But with the overthrow of Aristotelian philosophy, the baby was tossed out with th...