Learn English – Single word for ‘greater purpose’

loanwordssingle-word-requests

I have heard this word, but I just can't remember it. It is a 3 to 5 letter word, probably 2 syllabled, and begins with letter T.

I am not totally sure if it's an English word. The context I have heard it in "whether there is a greater purpose of life." Or something like "Does the universe have 'a greater purpose'."
It was in one of the videos of a YouTube channel called exurb1a (I am not telling you to look through all of his videos to find the word, although it is an interesting channel).

Sorry if the question is not exactly a single word request, because it's more like a word identification request but such tag doesn't exist :D.

Best Answer

Given that there are no answers to this question, and a comment has more or less already been accepted as the answer, I thought I'd record the answer for posterity with a little further explanation.

Dan Bron's suggestion teleology:

The explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. - OLD.

Refers to explaining phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve.

The word is grounded in two other words teleos and telos as explained on Vocabulary.com:

We can trace the origin of teleology to the Greeks: to teleos, meaning "complete," and its root telos, meaning "result." Then we add the suffix -logy, which means "logic," or "reason." The philosophy itself suggests that acts are done with a foregone purpose in mind — people do things knowing the result they wish to achieve. As Aristotle said, "Nature does nothing in vain." So far, there's no teleology to explain why you haven't left the couch for several hours.

Telos can also mean the ultimate object or aim:

An ultimate object or aim.

in the hedonistic life, people lose some moral purpose, a telos which provides the moral justification for the society. - OLD.

And in this instance as asserted by the questioner, was the word that the question attempted to reveal.

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