I read Personal Knowledge back in college, and was impressed at how he'd managed to reintroduce the Aristotelian concept of telos back into science via the disc

I read Personal Knowledge back in college, and was impressed at how he'd managed to reintroduce the Aristotelian concept of telos back into science via the disciplines of biology and technology. That is, biology and technology are disciplines which study processes, and a process cannot be understood without a concept of goal or purpose. For example, a liver is defined by a particular process of filtering blood, moreso than by its material components. That's why we can talk about artificial livers (or other organs) as still being a liver even if it is made from completely different material components than a natural liver.