teleophobia
teleophobia noun: reluctance or refusal to ascribe purpose to natural phenomena.
Noun
teleophobia (uncountable)
- Reluctance or refusal to ascribe purpose to natural phenomena.
- In the period from Spinoza to the end of the 19th century, the reading of design into nature received such devastating attacks from naturalists to non-naturalists alike that there developed an epistemological neurosis which Von Baer aptly termed “teleophobia.”[1952, D. Maurice Allan, “Towards a Natural Teleology”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume 49, number 13, →DOI
- […]the teleophobia of biologists and physicists should not be carried over to the human sciences.1960, “New Books”, in Philosophy, volume 35, number 133
teleophobia meaning in Tamil
teleophobia in Tamil
- சடங்கு வெருளி
Origin of teleophobia
From German Teleophobie in the late 19th century. The OED considers the word modern Latin, but the earliest appearance is in the writing of Karl Ernst von Baer in German in the 1860s. Whatever the immediate source it can be analyzed as teleo- + -phobia, from Ancient Greek τέλος (télos, “purpose”) + -φοβία (-phobía, “-phobia”).
Questions about teleophobia
- What does teleophobia mean?
- Teleophobia means reluctance or refusal to ascribe purpose to natural phenomena.
- What is teleophobia in Tamil?
- Teleophobia in Tamil is சடங்கு வெருளி. See Teleophobia meaning in Tamil.
- What part of speech is teleophobia?
- Teleophobia is a noun.
Words near teleophobia in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: teleophobia (page history and authors); teleophobia (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “teleophobia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/teleophobia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.