This is the passage I read out in class today, for your further consideration. I think Sachs does a good job clarifying some of the most difficult concepts in Aristotle:
End, or Telos: "The completion toward which anything tends, and
for the sake of which it acts. In deliberate action it has the character of
purpose, but in natural activity it refers to wholeness. Aristotle does not say
that animals, plants, and the cosmos have
purposes but that they are purposes,
ends-in-themselves. Whether any of them is in another sense of the sake of
anything outside itself is always treated as problematic in the theoretical
works (Physics 194a, 34-36; Metaphysics 1072b, 1-3; De Anima 415b, 2-3), though Politics 1257a, 15-22, treats all other
species as being for the sake of humans. As a settled opinion found throughout
his writings, Aristotle’s “teleology” is nothing but his claim that all natural
beings are self-maintaining wholes."
From the Glossary of Sach's translation of the Physics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001, pp. 246-247).
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