Primum secum dixit: ‘Iste bombus aliquid significant.  Nullus exstat bombus atque rebonbans significatu carens.  Si est bombus, est etiam bombans aliquis, et unica causa bombi bombantis, quod equidem sciam est haec: apis esse.’
        Postea iterum per longum cogitavit deinde dixit: ‘et unicus finis apium existentiae, quod equidem sciam, est mellificium.’
        Deinde exsurrexit et ‘unicus finis mellis conficiendi,’ dixit, ‘est a me sumi.’  Itaque ad summam arboris niti coepit.
         -- Winnie Ille Pu (trans. Alexander Lenard)

        First of all he said to himself: “That buzzing-noise means something.  You don’t get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without it meaning something.  If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee.”
        Then he thought another long time, and said: “And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.
        And then he got up, and said: “And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.”  So he began to climb the tree.
        -- A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Philosophers (1932)
Thomas Aquinas
St. Anselm
Duns Scotus

essences

esse

final causes

telos

teleology

Avicenna
Averroes

rationalism
empiricism

humanism

Renaissance

Jacob Burckhardt

scholasticism