Spinoza does not clearly deny, here, that there are teleological causes of action.
In a recent article, Brian McLaughlin (2012) agrees that reason explanations are teleological, explaining an action in terms of a purpose, goal or aim for which it was performed.
Rather few contemporary philosophers could accept all of Reid's central claims agent causation, teleological accounts of action, and occasionalism not being the dominant views of our day.
What may seem on introspection, then, to be a wholly teleological cause of action, the end represented by an object of desire, is for Spinoza a peculiar manifestation in consciousness of striving, which in turn is an efficient cause of action.
Most causalists will allow that reason explanations of action are teleological but contend that teleological explanations in terms of goals — purposive explanations in other words — are themselves analyzable as causal explanations in which the agent's primary reason(s) for Fing are specified as guiding causes of the act of Fing.
A teleological contextualization of an action in the means-end nexus is indeed the precondition for a causal explanation that can be objectively ascertained.
For a start, the distinction helps frame a challenge to the traditional assumption that what separates so-called consequentialists and deontologists is that the former but not the latter are committed to the idea that all reasons for action are teleological.
So long as we hold onto the assumption that all reasons for action are teleological, Parfit's version of the distinction and Nagel's version of the distinction are at least extensionally equivalent in all possible worlds in spite of their rather different formulations of the distinction.
This, Stocker concludes, is a kind of motivation for action that a teleological conception of action cannot countenance, resulting in moral schizophrenia.
In Aristotle's (384 322 BCE) seminal biological writings, the external teleology of a designer-creator was replaced by an internal teleological purposiveness associated with the immanent action of an internal cause in living beings their informing soul (psuche)— which functioned as the formal, final and efficient cause of life (De anima II: 415b 10 30).
