Abstract
A venerable narrative says that teleology died during the Scientific Revolution. McDonough (2020) recently objected that the principle of least action (PLA) shows teleology surviving into Enlightenment physics. Both narratives get the story wrong. The PLA’s history shows that what really happened is much more interesting. When a metaphysical principle became specifiable as a precise physical principle using increasingly sophisticated mathematics, it faced mathematical challenges to its viability, a new norm constraining metaphysics emerges and, far from surviving, teleology in physics is put to rest by novel means.
