Is There a Place For Entelecheia in Modern Physics?

While Aristotle coined two words, energeia and entelecheia in his description of change. The two concepts have ontological coverage and they may be used for any kind of particular change, including physical motion. Modern physics adopted energy as one of its basic concepts, built on a modified form of Aristotle’s energeia. It is expected that entelecheia should have a counterpart in modern physics but few investigations were done. The teleological character of Aristotle’s ontology makes difficult to build an exhaustive one-to-one correspondence between Aristotle’s perception of motion and motion as we understand it now. However, such a correspondence may be easily emphasized in case of controlled motions, which are teleological by nature. We restrict the theory here to such motions and consider a simple mechanical system for which we identify a quantity, called entelechy, which obeys the two properties of Aristotle’s entelecheia, i.e. (a) it is “holding its completion in itself” and (b) it converges towards kinetic energy, which is the modern equivalent of energeia. The shape of the system may be controlled in different ways, characterized by different entelechies and different amounts of work, in good agreement with common perception.