The goal-directness of living things has been explained by natural selection, which tells us why living things have goals and what those goals are, by physiology and biochemistry which tells us how they achieve those goals and by genetics which tells us where those goals are stored and how they are transmitted from parent to child. Aristotle’s final, moving and formal causes – all the work that he attributed to the soul – have been absorbed by, and divided among, the branches of biology. The question, then, is this: did Aristotle, ignorant of this seamless hierarchy of explanation, succumb to
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