One thing you have to notice is the centrality of the nature of a thing, which is to say its telos, or end. Fulfillment is, after all, defined by our nature; it

One thing you have to notice is the centrality of the nature of a thing, which is to say its telos, or end. Fulfillment is, after all, defined by our nature; it is a matter of proceeding from potential to actuality, as determined by our nature. What is good advances a person according to one's nature (in our case, human nature), what is bad acts against it. Telos, or finality, also gives morality its proper and objective ground: what is morally right or wrong follows, ultimately, from one's nature. Since we are humans, we are therefore persons, which is to say animals who can understand their actions and choose between apprehended alternatives, and therefore moral agents. We must therefore choose to act in accord with our nature as free and rational agents, which is to say according to right reason. Our rationality allows us to tackle the question of what it means to be human and to therefore determine what is good. A tragedy of the crudeness of materialism is that it obliterates telos, and in doing so, destroys the only possible objective ground for morality and the good. Married to philosophical liberalism, morality becomes a mystery cult rooted in desire that evades explanation. Yyou cannot square the existence of desires--which can be good or bad, in accord with reason, or deviant or depraved--with a purely materialist universe; even Descartes had to tack on the disembodied ghost of the Cartesian mind to account for all sorts of phenomena. So you end up with an irrational gnosticism as a result. But the fact of the matter is that even the most mundane varieties of efficient causality presuppose telos, as telos is not the same as conscious intent (which is a particular variety), but fundamentally, the ordering of a cause toward an effect. The only reason efficient causality is intelligible at all is because the relation between cause is ordered toward an effect by virtue of the nature of the thing, and not arbitrarily related. Striking a match predictably results in fire, not nothing, nor the appearance of the Titanic or whatever. We are seeing an increased, if modest interest in broadly Aristotelian thought (which some refer to as "Neo-Aristotelian"), however. As the materialist dinosaurs pass from this earth, fresh blood is willing to reexamine the nihilistic, dehumanizing, materialist dogmas of the last two or three centuries. It was never the case that materialism overthrew the prior intellectual tradition by discrediting it. Rather, it began with the perilous decision to "start from scratch". Putting aside the dubiousness of the notion, what we can expect from starting from scratch is a repetition of the same errors. There are eerie similarities between modern ideas and the pre-Socratic philosophers, for example, of which Aristotle was very much aware and to which he was responding.