Definition of "teleophobia"
teleophobia
noun
uncountable
(philosophy) Reluctance or refusal to ascribe purpose to natural phenomena.
Quotations
(please add the primary text of this quotation)v. Baer is evidently right: the current view is afflicted with teleophobia. It seems to me that he is also right in finding the reason for it, not in nature, but in the natural scientist's fear of a false teleology. Teleophobia is the reaction against the old teleology of design, which repudiated and wished to replace a causal explanation.
1912, Friedrich Paulsen, translated by Frank Thilly, Einleitung in die Philosophie [Introduction to Philosophy]
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